CNExtend

CNExtend was built to be fragile in the sense that it would rather give you no data than bad data. When it’s parsing your nation view, it has very specific expectations about what it’s going to see. If it doesn’t see what it expects the default behavior is to just throw an error and stop. Even though this can cause it to annoyingly break for a few days, I’m still not convinced that there is a better alternative. I may put forward the pros and cons in a future post, but for now I’m just putting this update out there and taking steps to speed up fixes.

Also: I’ve completed the API and implementation of my network registration code and about 70% of the interface changes necessary to register with CNx. Registration will be a prerequisite to implementing a lot of interesting networked features which I hope to begin testing soon. The first application will most likely be one internal to Farkistan, and if that is successful general networked applications will become available. Of course, any capabilities which require contacting a server will be explicitly opt-in, and the extension will continue to be open-source for those who want to inspect what it’s doing.

Taking a second look at the layout editor, while it is definitely functional there are some sticking points which keep it from being truly great. When entering edit mode the height of the rows change so much that it’s visually disconcerting. I also don’t like how the “delete” buttons look, and it doesn’t warn you at all if you’re about to do something which will make you lose your progress while editing. The help text in the title of the editor tool window is unhelpful and distracting. If anyone has any suggestions or has had problems using it, please let me know so I can incorporate changes into its next revision.