I’d like to encourage everyone to take a moment to sign this petition on blocking the National Defense Authorization Act.  The act itself is not malicious, but there are pieces which are horribly insidious.  The largest discontent stems from the clause which authorizes the indefinite detention of US citizens without trial or right to legal representation.  This is a subtle landmine of a footnote on a budget bill.  It’s also the best use of WeThePeople I’ve seen recently — it invokes powers directly available to the president and does so in an immediate and observable way.

I’ve tried to put in words my contempt for Perforce a few times.  I believe now that were I to manifest fully the immensity of my hatred for this piece of software it would blanket the earth in a sea of ash and decay.  It would start with the sound of weeping and lamentation, like a child crying against the ambient noise of a playground.  The plague wind of silence would spread, lifting the hopeful and animated spirits from their frames and casting them into the darkness. Joy now ended, the screaming would grow from this deathly silence, filling the skeletal void with a boiling noise of apocalypse.  Tumultuous and unending, the world would burn and the fields would turn to salt in the wake of this horror incarnate.

With that said, here are some of my real gripes with Perforce:

1. Setting the active client in the command line is troublesome.  I struggled today to realize that `p4 set P4CLIENT=myclient_engbuild` was not working because P4CLIENT should not be capitalized.  It is printed as P4CLIENT in all the documentation, but you have to use p4client if you want it to accept changes.
2. If you leave out the equals on `p4 set client myclient_engbuild`, you will set an environment variable called ‘client’, then wonder why all your commits and changes are not happening where you expected.
3. If you need to edit your changelist in the GUI client on Windows 7, good luck.  You can add files and remove them, but not add a description.  It’s faster to just completely delete your change list and redo all your changes.
4. You cannot delete your changelist until you delete all of the changes on it.  The option doesn’t even appear until the changelist is empty.  It is not made obvious why one cannot delete a changelist, or it is possible.  However, one can search Google and find the required information.
5. Once you get to a few million files across different projects, UI latency becomes intolerable.  On my Q6600 desktop with 4 gigs of ram, I need to wait between four and ten minutes (std dev 2 min) after EVERY MOUSE CLICK.  In defense of Perforce, I suspect it’s the case that their software is fine, but my organization has a terrible codebase structure.  Is it reasonable for a lot of code to bog down a subversion server?

Having vented that, I’m sure there are reasonable solutions to all of these problems.  Unfortunately, the solutions are not obvious, and the problems are recurring.  I’d like to think I’ve given Perforce a fair shot, but it still falls terribly short when compared to every other piece of source control software I’ve used.

A while back I wrote a tool called TED, the tileset editor.  It was a companion for the marvelous TileD.  Aside from Pixothello, there really weren’t any good tileset editors.  One can work in Photoshop, absolutely, but it’s designed for a more general purpose.  It might be time to dust off the code and start fiddling again to make it more usable and, of importance, easier for someone else to step in and diddle with the code.

Here is a link to the source as it stands: https://bitbucket.org/JosephCatrambone/tileseteditor

Things to be done:

1. A decent color palette.
2. Fix an annoying bug where the preview of the pointer tool doesn’t line up with the target.
3. Add a big preview of the tile in use.  I think this is handle by the zoom feature, but there’s a problem:
4. Zoom and pan are buggy.  Moving around the tileset is unpleasant and can cause certain tools to misbehave.

Reddit has been kind enough to provide feedback and recommend changes.  The thread is here: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/l5djm/i_wrote_an_opensource_tileset_editor_more_links/

Finally, here’s a preview of an older revision.  I made some changes and, not realizing it, broke some things.  The next release will probably be 99% bugfixes.  I’ll suspend work on DRMan until this is in a decent state.