Clocking
Parsek’s clock is now functional, cleaned up, and integrated with the program’s status bar. There’s still an odd bug I’m trying to resolve that occurs when I spawn a dialog box which somehow resets the clock when it (the dialog) is dismissed. Strange problem but otherwise, the clock is working fine. It is also accurate when compared to tpclient-wx. The status widget is also now functioning thanks to Lee and some fixes in the protocol library. Parsek can reads the server and game information and displays it in a simple widget. Below is a screenshot of the status and clock functionality. There’s still some issues that need to be fixed.
I’m also configuring the “game” selection widget which will spawn after connecting to a server. This will provide the user with a list of all available games on the server and allow the user to select which one to join. While most servers currently only run a single game “tp”, this will be an important feature for the future when servers are running multiple game instances. I have some ideas beyond the basic pulldown/list menu selection for the game chooser which I will try to elaborate on. The idea is to have an overview of each available game displayed and allow the user to scroll through them in a nice manner, similar to Cover Flow on iTunes/iPhone. For the time being however, it will be a simple dropdown menu! Keep it simple until it works! The account creation features of Parsek are also non-existent at the moment as well. I’ll be adding this shortly. In the mean time, I’m also working on the object display features, as I discussed in my last post. Still more to come there as I’m hoping to have that online ASAP as well.
An updated build has been posted to KDE SVN here. Please try it out. Right now many features are disable and it simply acts as a test of the log, the status widget, and the clock. Try building it and connecting to demo1.thousandparsec.net with guest/guest. Note that you have to actually click the Connect button in the connection dialog – the enter key hasn’t been configured yet!