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Thread: Current Development Status and Future Plans. Your Feedback Requested

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    Current Development Status and Future Plans. Your Feedback Requested

    At BlueAdept's suggestion, I'd like to detail where I think we are with regard to ShowEQ development, my near term plans, and my vision for future development. I also want to solicit feedback from everyone to get their opinions of how things are, and where you think they should go from here.

    Current Status:

    The release of the first ShowEQ 6 release candidate marks what I would consider "code complete" for the Qt3 to Qt4 migration. Any changes in the near future will be limited to bug fixes to "shore things up" before the official release. Bugs reported in ShowEQ 6 that are not present in ShowEQ 5 will mostly likely be fixed before the final release (though there could be exceptions). Bugs that are in both ShowEQ 6 and ShowEQ 5 may be fixed now or may be put off until after the final release, depending on the bug. As bugs are found and fixed, we'll produce additional release candidates for general use/testing. Your testing and feedback here is crucial.

    Plan for ShowEQ 6 official release

    Once we feel things are ready and outstanding bugs have been addressed, we'll promote ShowEQ 6 to be the primary release. I'm currently expecting this to be around the first of the year (give or take), but this could change depending on the quantity/severity of bugs that are reported, how the CoV release impacts ShowEQ, etc. Once 6.x is promoted to be the primary release, 5.x will be deprecated. Afterwards, we'll continue to update 5.x with new opcodes/structs for a short period of time (maybe a few months), but there are no other changes/fixes planned for 5.x. As such, please plan to upgrade to 6.x before support for 5.x is completely stopped. (There will be one or more posts about it before it actually happens)


    The road to ShowEQ 7 (and beyond)

    Once ShowEQ 6 is released, I'll start working toward ShowEQ 7. This will move us from Qt4 (which is end-of-life) to Qt5. Qt5 will allow us greater flexibility with things like themes and interface customization (hello dark theme!), and should also add support for running on distros that use Wayland instead of X11.

    In addition to 7.x moving to Qt5, I have a number of features and fixes I'd like to implement. These may not all make it into 7.0 (in fact, I expect that many won't), but then there's always the possibility of 7.x point releases or even 8.x...

    (in no particular order)


    1. Autodetect the network interface if it's not specified (or if the specified interface doesn't exist) Done in 6.1.0
    2. Overhaul interface styles/themes, including more customization options Done in 6.3.0
    3. Where possible, fix functionality that used to work but doesn't any more
    4. The ability to show/hide certain things from the map display (at minimum, corpses. But it might useful to be able to specify an arbitrary filter similar to the search/alert filters) Edit: Apparently, this is already possible and I missed it... The "filtered" type in filters/zonefilters will hides things rather than highlight them. Still, it might be nice to have menu toggles for pc/npc corpses
    5. Multi-layer map support (to remove the need to squash multi-layer maps into a single layer). Done in 6.3.0
    6. Implement per-zone preferences (for things that can change from zone to zone, like depth filter head/floor settings)
    7. Add handling for some additional opcodes I've figured out, and maybe figure out a few more
    8. Internal code cleanup to leverage things that exist in Qt4/Qt5 but didn't exist when ShowEQ was written
    9. Improve the UI for adding/editing filters

    There are also some old TODOs (which I think were originally from Zaphod) that I think would be worth implementing if I can pull them off (#10 in particular is not going to be easy).
    10. Specify structs like we do opcodes (via XML) to make it possible to update without recompiling
    11. Assuming 10 can be implemented, add the (opt-in) capability to automatically download the opcode/struct updates from SEQ site
    12. Split the UI part from the capture part, so everything doesn't have to be run as root, and to possibly allow capture on one machine with the UI running natively on another

    13 (added due to my previous edit) Better help/docs on what ShowEQ is capable of and how to do various things.

    Your feedback is wanted!

    What do you think about the above? Love it? Hate it? Which parts? Have additional ideas? Have examples of things that used to work but need fixing?

    Let me know! I'll use your feedback to adjust my TODO list and to help prioritize what I work on.
    Last edited by cn187; 03-20-2024 at 07:43 AM.

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