From the release notes:

"The dantom server now stores undelivered pages for a short period of time (one hour). These pages get delivered when you hook up with the dantom via DS. For the time-being, we have disabled the email-forwarding of pages since this is a less obtrusive replacement. We will probably end up making it an option when you send the page, since it is more context-dependent than anything."

I'm not sure I understand this. (Also, I don't have a lot of people to trade pages with at the moment to test it so pardon my rambling.)

For the moment, those who checked to have pages in their email won't get them and those who don't want to be bothered will still be bothered by a bunch of pages if they come on within an hour?

Why is later making it so the sender has the choice a good fix? Isn't it supposed to be up to the person being paged?

ACWraith wrote:

I'm not sure I understand this. (Also, I don't have a lot of people to trade pages with at the moment to test it so pardon my rambling.)

I understand it.
When I first started using the pager feature, I didn't realize that there was no persistent connection to the hub, so my pager wasn't receiving replies through the firewall. I would page someone, hope for an answer in real time, and never get one. Later, I would check my e-mail to see that those people did in fact reply. Pages of that sort probably didn't need to be rerouted through e-mail; if they had a message telling them I couldn't receive the reply, they'd probably just e-mail me and tell me so.

So the idea is, sometimes you want your page to go through no matter what (so long as the user has forwarding enabled), and other times you just want to contact someone in real time and not wait for a reply later.

Lummox JR

Gughunter wrote:

The icon editor now gives you an option to break up large images (>32x32) when you import them. They will be broken up into individual tiles whose states are labeled by their offsets in the image (eg: "2,2").

I think Deadron might be very, very happy to hear this.

Me too! This has been an issue many times for Incursion, and working with the water icons was particularly a pain.

Incidently, Dantom, one other nice thing would be if you're in the movie editor and paste a large image to a tile, it would be broken up (going from left to right, then top down) and pasted into the subsequent animation frames. When I was working on my water icons, for example, I could've taken a 32x512 section of my 160x512 image, where the 32x512 was a single icon animated to 16 different states, opened the movie editor and pasted to the first tile. That would have saved me a lot of work.

Lummox JR

Foomer wrote:

Him and a lot of other water animators out there. It's sad when it takes less time to draw the water (and all its frames) than it does to paste it all into the icon editor :oP

Actually I was a little surprised at how fast I could build a DMI out of a 160x512 image. I did so twice, taking about... oh, maybe half an hour or so each time. (I did it twice because my first effort, while it looked more watery, was too stark in contrast with the rest of the game icons.) Still, to have compressed that much work into 3 minutes would have been quite nice.

Lummox JR

Foomer wrote:

Actually I was a little surprised at how fast I could build a DMI out of a 160x512 image.

Yeah, well, it doesn't take me very long to draw water icons! :oP I'm more concerned about the damage it might be doing to my hands (all that repetetive cut, switch window, paste, switch window, cut...) than how long it takes to get it done.

Do you actually click the window button on the bar at the bottom of the screen (Default Start bar thingy ^_^ -- cant remember the name though) or do you use the "Alt + Tab" short cut?

I find that the Alt + Tab short cut is less of a pressure for your index finger (I think its that one lol, I am pretty darn tired right now...not sure why as it is only 20:14 here right now hehe).

Lee

I could switch windows, copy, and paste with keyboard shortcuts easily enough. My biggest problem was dragging a selection area to copy from the original image. I first would select a portion of the image at 32x512, representing 16 states of a single icon, then took that image and selected 32x32 squares all the way down. The latter part was extremely tedious.

One thing that annoys me is that most paint programs no longer retain the keyboard shortcuts for simulating mouse interaction.

I don't know how many times I would have been more satisfied to manually guide the mouse pointer over a target spot using the arrow keys and then holding the Spacebar and tapping the arrow keys to make fine adjustments. The mouse is so imprecise.

Hear, hear!
I like mice just fine; they're great. But one slip of the hand during a click makes all the difference between hitting the right pixel and the wrong one. A good portion of the time I spent dragging rectangles I also spent verifying their coordinates and dimensions.

Honestly, I just use a grid.

Don't worry, it took me two years of icon-editing to realize the usefulness of the thing :oP

Lummox JR wrote:

Spuzzum wrote:

One thing that annoys me is that most paint programs no longer retain the keyboard shortcuts for simulating mouse interaction.

I don't know how many times I would have been more satisfied to manually guide the mouse pointer over a target spot using the arrow keys and then holding the Spacebar and tapping the arrow keys to make fine adjustments. The mouse is so imprecise.

Hear, hear!
I like mice just fine; they're great. But one slip of the hand during a click makes all the difference between hitting the right pixel and the wrong one. A good portion of the time I spent dragging rectangles I also spent verifying their coordinates and dimensions.

Lummox JR

hehehe one similarity between computer graphics and computer programming >:P

In both cases the most used keystroke is probably ctrl-z *LOL*

I use it all the time in class

El

ACWraith wrote:

For the moment, those who checked to have pages in their email won't get them and those who don't want to be bothered will still be bothered by a bunch of pages if they come on within an hour?

Why is later making it so the sender has the choice a good fix? Isn't it supposed to be up to the person being paged?

Well, the idea is to avoid email entirely. We get a lot of bounced pages (when people supplied an invalid email address), and they are almost exclusively of the "instant communcation" type-- people trying to get together for games and what-not. A lot of pages get lost to email because the pagee briefly goes offline (perhaps in the course of compiling/testing a game) or he/she is behind a firewall. Now those pages won't get lost-- they'll just be delayed in delivery until the pagee boots up DS. None of this goes to email, mind you.

Since most pages only have relevance at the time they are sent out, we're expiring them shortly after that time so that the pagee doesn't get deluged with meaningless information when they boot up DS the next day. We may add the option to either set the expiration date on a page or allow it to go through email (if the user has that option enabled), although I personally don't think either of these is too important. If a person really wants to contact someone else, they can just use email-- and if they don't have the address, there's probably a good reason for that!