Work has begun on LibCT version 2.1, after a while considering what improvements I wanted to make to LibCT I think I’ve come up with a decent enough list to warrant a new (minor) version of both the editor and the library, the current plans are:

EdCT

• Add the ability to double-click on the labels to bring up and edit dialogue
• Add a ‘delete’ button to the labels
• Add ‘Insert Variable’ button to Choice and Phase text entry

LibCT

• Re-factor connections
• Implement ConversationInstance to make using conversations easier

As they stand at the moment, all nodes have two connections, but only the Decision nodes actually use two (Conversation and Choice nodes have 1, and Phase nodes do not have any), the plan is to create a template-class which will take an integer parameter specifying how many connections there should be with functions to access and set the connections, then the nodes will inherit from that class. This will prevent the current waste of memory that is incurred by all nodes having an array of two connections.

At the moment, it if fairly easy to keep track of conversations (as the sample code shows) however, the implementation of a simple helper class ‘ConversationInstance’ can easily hide the remaining complications helping to reduce bugs and speed up implementations, it also reinforces the idea that conversations can be used in parallel.

I’ve no doubt that in the process of making these improvements I will come up with even more to throw in, you can keep track of my progress on the LibCT Roadmap.

At long last, and after a fair few late nights, version 2 of my talk-tree middleware is ready (it has it’s own site). This is a complete re-write, pretty sure there’s nearly no lines of code from the 1.0 version in there. The LibCT library didn’t take that long to do by itself, the main time-sink was the new EdCT, which not only had to be more stable than the old one (people found crashes fairly fast) but also have a-lot more features, apparently people really expect a-lot from their applications!

I’m really rather proud of this creation, but it’s still a bit rough around the edges, (issues I hope to fix in version 2.1, due in the not-too-distant future) it most likely the biggest project I’ve ever done on my own, in terms of lines of code and scope, and I learned a-lot doing it (the main reason for doing a total re-write was to implement the lessons learned from developing version 1.0). It’s been fun, for the most part, and hopefully someone, somewhere will find use for this.

So go check out the website and give it a shot, I’d love to know what you think