dragoness_e | MapperGUI 2.99b

For those of you that have totally forgotten this project, it's the DAOC mapping utility that I took over maintenance a long time ago, decided to overhaul, and fell off the Earth after Hurricane Katrina. I'm finally back to work on it; it was so close to release 3 years ago that it's heart-breaking; I'm sorry I never did put it out.

The user interface looks nice, completely re-written using wxPython widgets. A number of picky things have been made more user friendly; see previous posts with the 'mappergui' tag. I have it currently running on Windows XP using Python 2.5.1 and WxWidgets 2.8.something-or-other. I cleaned up the unicode encoding issue (that made the older beta code crash) and found the positioning bug in the notebook tabs (that made them all get shoved half-way down the page), and fixed the long-standing "crashes if the mapper path has spaces in it" bug. I also added a lot more help files, though they are not yet complete.

What I haven't addressed yet is the fact that I can't draw structures or new trees since Catacombs came out with the NIF5 (I think?) format. If someone out there has code that will parse the new model file format used by DAOC these days, that would be a great help. Until then, the maps will be rather plain. There's also a color glitch

I fixed the slow Python DXT1/DDS decoder to be usable if you don't have the ability to compile a native-language extension to create a _dxt1.dll or _dxt1.so for your system. Note to Python programmers: don't concatenate strings extensively; it's slow and inefficient and memory-wasting because Python strings are fixed and Python has to allocate and copy all those strings you are concatenating. Use lists of characters for repeatedly appending characters, then join() them all together into a string when you are done. Much faster.

I plan to overhaul Rath Nathrach to get rid of the obsolete UI mods and update the DAOC MapperGUI pages. That may happen sooner or later, depending on my work schedule. In the meantime, the latest code is available read-only at my Subversion repository: