Building Utility: list of needed work, ideas, and problems

[wormingdead]

Hopefully, this will be a good place for discussing the Building Utility. Should this type of thing be on the forums?

Work Still Needed

• License, credit information placed in files:
  • I'm not sure how this project handles it. Is this unnecessary because of other files elsewhere?
• Fix help formatting

Needs Critique & Discussion

• Second pass of documentation, comments:
  • I kinda wrote this in a vacuum, and I need to make sure others users/developers can understand it.
• Output file creation:
  • Currently dumb output file naming is adding the prefix "output_". The other extreme is to ask the user for each name which will basically double the length of the cli command. Which is worse?
• Template usefulness/usability feedback

Future

• Template expansion:
  • Allow template to filter info based on contents of cell:
    • See Examples/output_office_template.json. It contains furniture and terrain symbols not used by individual cells.
• Actual tests:
  • This is in future because tests will by necessity nail down the template format.

Pull Requests

• #8689
• #8701
• #8711

Questions

• Are there other inputs that work with this utility? That almost work?
• Does this overlap in any way with the json audit tool?
  • #8693 (comment)
• Does anyone use this? Am I wasting my time? (I don't mean to sound rude.)

Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks

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[KA101]

DDA is bound by the Whales release license, CC-BY-SA. To the extent the utility is a derivative of DDA or Cataclysm code, it's also CC-BY-SA, thanks to the SA part. (ShareAlike, you can't make it more or less restrictive. BY is attribution: we leave your name attached to what you did.)

[wormingdead]

So, does that mean I need to put acidia's and my name in deconstruct.py somewhere?

[KA101]

You can, but there's no requirement. The rule is that you can't remove or otherwise interfere with someone's attribution; if xe doesn't add it, there's no mandatory duty to do so.

[kevingranade]

For a wide-ranging discussion like this the forums might have better
support.
Since it's pretty technical though it might be reasonable to have it here,
it's a bit of an edge case.

[wormingdead]

Well, looks like I messed up then: 51a0c11. The comment was originally removed because it was almost entirely about old usage, but I'll try to be more careful next time. I'll wait until feedback on the current pull request (#8689) before adding acidia back in.

@kevingranade One of the reasons I leaned toward making an issue is that I don't have a forum account. That is stupid. I went and made an account.

[wormingdead]

Okay, I added acidia back into the file: #8701. This should be enough to check it off the list, correct?

[jeremyosborne]

Does this overlap in any way with the json audit tool?

Nah, not in the least. Your tool is way more useful.

The so called json_audit is a set of scripts that allow me to treat all of the JSON files in cataclysm as a single list. It's pretty unexciting, but I plan to keep adding to it little by little as I need a tool here and there. I shared it because (1) I got tired of writing one off scripts, (2) I got tired of using graphical editors that were slow and cumbersome across multiple files, (3) I like python and I don't get to use it very often so I find excuses to use it.

the json_audit schtuff isn't ever going to be a map tool. I just got done looking at this and I think this is really cool. Not wasting your time. Since I'm pretty bad at C++ I'm trying to contribute more on the data side, so I'd like more tools like this.

[wormingdead]

Thanks for the reply, Jeremy. Good to know I'm not stepping on any toes, although I was kind of hoping to find some synergy. Ah well.

I was able to fix the formatting for the help: #8711. With that, I think I just need to get feedback from others. I think I probably should make a forum post about it, I just need to figure out how to word it.

[mugling]

This looks fairly stalled for now...