Elbereth Zone

Long time no news!

I was very busy with our new born baby, he came 1 month and a half earlier than expected and it was very time consuming to go to the hospital neonatal care 2 or 3 times a day. He is now out and everybody is fine.

Now on the development front I did nothing (I bought and played a lot of games) since last release. I finally did what I was thinking of since a year or so: I bought a licence for Delphi XE2 Starter which is the most modern version of Delphi (I was using Delphi 7 Personal [which is the last free non-cripled version of Delphi], that's 9 major versions!) and it includes a 64bit compiler and Mac OSX/iOS support. I tried importing Dragon UnPACKer source into XE2, it works (sort of) after fixing some stuff. But it will still need work to get it perfectly ironed out. The bad news is that future version will most likely don't compile in Delphi 7 anymore. But that compiler is really too outdated to be used in current OSes and Lazarus/FPC while a pretty good alternative is just too much work to port Dragon UnPACKer to it.

The other thing I will be working on is another request from Paul regarding Ghostbusters texture convertion which I would like to implement. Dunno when that will be ready neither...

I have been working quietly and intermittently on Dragon UnPACKer. Mainly bug fixes and a new conversion plugin to use external programs for convertions.

I recently fixed a big bug on HyperRipper (broken Ogg and TGA support) so I am planning on releasing v5.6.2 this weekend.

If I finally motivate myself to finish the configuration interface of that new conversion plugin it will be included with the upcoming v5.6.2. If not it will be delayed for a further version. For those wanting to test it, it is available in the nightly builds.

I could not fix everything for last weekend so this new 5.6.1 version was delayed, but I think I finally nailed the last bug (still waiting for confirmation from Paul of http://www.spookcentral.tk)  so hopefully current build 262 (SVN 601) will be released as final today or tomorrow. I just need to change the doc (install scripts are ready).

Just noticed some important things do not work in Dragon UnPACKer v5.6.0 (they did work in 5.5.1 Beta), like the sorting in the lstContent... I will release 5.6.1 with fixes asap (end of the week if possible).

I started coding for v6.x branch. I started from scratch (as stated 2 articles ago) using Lazarus/FPC as a base and this time opening everything as much as possible (at start the 5.x branch was closed-source, some decisions do not make sense, like the obscure "compiled" look file containing icons).

As a proof of concept I also tried to go object-oriented plugins, it seems to work fine so I will stick with that for the moment.

The source of this new Dragon UnPACKer can be downloaded from SVN using DragonUnPACKerLazarus module name instead of DragonUnPACKer. Please note it is nowhere near usability point, I just have the basic interface and themes working, plus the ultra basic PoC of object-oriented plugins.

On the 5.x branch, nothing really new, but following a bug report I noticed some flaws in Dragon Update Server and Duppi. Because of how Sourceforge download files, it wasn't working anymore (downloaded files were "corrupted", actually HTML files redirecting to the download). I decided to drop SourceForge as main download site as a workaround. But I also decided to introduce some modifications to both DUS and Duppi.

For some time now DUS have a list of available servers to download from, but this is not used by Duppi which only uses the first available one. I am modifying Duppi so that it uses the servers in order until the download is completed successfully. For this I added a SHA-1 hash for each D5P file in DUS and the file size (in bytes). In SVN Revision 505 Duppi already does this for Duppi updates, so not very useful for you at the moment. I will be changing all downloads to work like that. DUS v3.2.0 with the modifications is live for more than a week now and Duppi v3.3.0 should be available next week (time permitting).

In short: I was finally able to add nightly builds to Dragon UnPACKer.

Long version: I always wanted to add automatic nightly builds to Dragon UnPACKer, this way everytime I commit code to CVS the binary version would be automatically available to users (if they ever wanted to test).

The problem was that I wanted to do that from my Debian (Linux) dedicated server and Dragon UnPACKer uses Borland Delphi which is a native Windows IDE & compiler.

I knew the solution was to use the command line compiler (DCC32.EXE) from Borland Delphi 7 along with Wine (allows running Windows applications under Linux). But using the clc is more complicated than using the IDE directly to compile. Anyway yesterday I spent a couple of hours to configure everything and voila!

Using cron, every night at 00:30 (GMT+1) a CVS checkout is executed from the HEAD branch (latest one). A small program I made in php checks if any file was modified since last compilation. If there was a modification, the build is executed (the core executable, the plugins, duppi and dlngc are built & compiled, the languages files are generated). The resulting files are compressed by using p7zip (the Linux version of 7zip) and uploaded (along with the build log file) to the download server (which is mirrored every 30min to 2 others servers).

Feel free to try the last nightly build which comes with many speed-ups and bug fixes for the HyperRipper. The nightly of yesterday (20100421) should also be pretty stable (even better than the last unstable...). I would be glad to hear from tests done with this version as it is the first time I use the clc for Dragon UnPACKer.

Download from Dragon UnPACKer Development > Downloads > Nightly Builds.

In the past months, I have been busy with many stuff not Dragon UnPACKer related (1 month holidays in Peru, finishing Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock 2).

But I also played a bit with Freepascal & Lazarus. I must say, the more I get into it, the more I am disappointed. I was starting to make progress but now the compilation just fails with error message on my Error.pas class (maybe that's the problem, I used a reserved name...).

To be honest I only tried with a snapshot of FPC/Lazarus (0.9.29 with 2.4.1 FPC) both beta products. I will have a look with 0.9.28 and 2.4.0, but I don't hope much...

On the bright side, Virtual TreeView (latest version), which is the main component used by Dragon UnPACKer is now fully adapted to FPC/Lazarus.

I am thinking that I should stick with Delphi 7 for 5.x branch and maybe re-start under Lazarus for v6.x. The good thing is the plugin will not need rewriting (I know it compile & works already with FPC/Lazarus). I will try to fix the broken HyperRipper in 5.5.2. Honestly I think starting from scratch for the UI will just be easier and faster...

Some overdue news regarding Dragon UnPACKer...

Sorry for my lack of communication but I am very busy with the configuration of the new intranet server of my company. The go live is this weekend, so I might have more time afterwards.

Still I worked a little bit on Dragon UnPACKer, mainly trying to migrate the core program to Lazarus. It proved to be more complicated than I anticipated. Many features just don't exist in Lazarus (or are just quite different). I think some Windows 7 features I introduced will be lacking in the next version.  

I think I will also switch Dragon UnPACKer from registry use to file based configuration (per user).

In the last couple of days I worked again on Dragon UnPACKer, fixed some cosmetic bugs, added Windows Vista/7 progress indicator in taskbar support and most importantly fixed the HyperRipper. I will release a v5.5.1 Beta soon with the fixes & features. In the meanwhile if you plan on using the HyperRipper don't use 5.5.0 Beta (BMFind is wrong therefore most file formats are not found).

I am in the process of re-installing my computer on my new Intel Postville X25-M 160GB (34nm SSD). Delphi is installed and running, but I haven't installed any third party library yet. I want to take this occasion to check if I cannot replace some obsolete libraries (cxCPU for example, it just don't retrieve correct information now).