Things are going faster than planned and I can now say with confidence that a beta for the testers will be available in 3 days or less and a full v1.0.0 release a few days after that.
I want to ask the public a few things so that I can make tweaks to the interface and functionality before making a release. This is a release for you guys to use, not just me, thus your opinions are far more valuable than what I think is the right design from both a UI and functionality standpoint.
Now, on to the questions.
1) How do you want to be prompted to setup various aspects of the editor on its first time being run?
Current design: As of the latest in-house alpha, the first time the editor is run a dialog pops up that is called "Setup Wizard". This dialog has three sections so far: Allow use of ConvertData, Default save format (only available to change if you have ConvertData usage enabled), and Default Game version (Vanilla/Entrenchment, changes templates and how ConvertData are used).
2) How do you want to be able to change preferences while using the editor?
Current design: As of the latest in-house alpha, the preferences are edited by launching the setup wizard through Edit->Preferences.
3) Do you want to be able to save individual files against the default format?
Current design: As of the latest in-house alpha, all files are saved according to the format you select (TXT/BIN) in the setup wizard. You cannot save individual files in a different format.
4) If Sins Editor becomes popular enough to be hosted on its own site, would you want it to automatically search for updates on startup? This would require an internet connection, of course.
Current design: There is no auto-update feature nor is there a plan for one, unless user requested.
5) Do you want Sins Editor to allow you to reload the file from the hard drive with a separate option (like "Refresh")?
Current design: As of the latest in-house alpha, files opened for the first time in an instance of Sins Editor are put into memory in their entirety in order to eliminate the bottleneck of accessing the harddrive each time you switch between files. There is no option to refresh the file data from the hard drive besides closing it and reopening it.
6) Do you want Sins Editor to provide a one-time warning about deleting/adding rows from/to a file?
Current design: As of the latest in-house alpha, you can delete/add rows from/to a file without any warning that doing so might cause a minidump if you do not know what you are doing.
As a side-note, here are the system requirements (only OS and .NET framework, since the rest is negligable)
Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista. (Both x64 and x86 (64/32 bit) are supported.)
.NET Framework v3.5
-Ian
