Where's Dee? (Or, That Thing You Do)

Dee

Howdy, everyone--I realize I haven't posted in the past couple of days in any official capacity, and I want to give a bit of an update as to where we're at.

As of right now, just about everything is exactly where we want it to be. You're playing the beta and telling us what you think of the changes, and you're also reporting bugs that we're passing along to the developers to fix. That's awesome!

If you're wondering where I've been, I wish I could say I've been in the Bahamas sunning myself and drinking a tasty beverage, but the truth is I've been getting ready for this next week's task: helping the modders understand some of the new features in this update and how to use them. (I've also been working on the release notes. Shh--don't tell anyone about the super-secret preview I've embedded at the bottom of this post.)

@Amber_Scott just got back from GDC with stories of intrigue and assassination totally legitimate business ventures, and if you haven't seen her latest blog post, hit that button at the top of the site and head over to the Beamblog to check it out now.

It's going to be an exciting week, folks. I hope you're as excited as me.

EDIT: Also, anyone notice the new Advanced Editing features on the site? That's totally unrelated to v2.0 release, but still pretty neat, I think.

Grammarsalad

Awesome!

The text under the heading "enchanted weapon" is cut off mid sentence. I understand that this may be intentional to allow us to get a glimpse of the bard song changes, but I figured I'd point it out.

Ammar

What *does* happen with the Enchanted Weapon? Does it create the enchanted weapon directly in the weapon slot, like MMM? If so, can you target party members now?

Grammarsalad

Ammar wrote: »

What *does* happen with the Enchanted Weapon? Does it create the enchanted weapon directly in the weapon slot, like MMM? If so, can you target party members now?

I think, think, think that it changes the enchantment level (and thac0/dam bonus) of your actual equipped weapon.

No idea if it can target allies...

Garm

Dee wrote: »

(...)

It's going to be an exciting week, folks. I hope you're as excited as me.

(...)

Maybe I reading to much into this, but could this mean the 2.0 patch for BG1 and BG2 will be released this week?

Dee

Grammarsalad wrote: »

Awesome!

The text under the heading "enchanted weapon" is cut off mid sentence. I understand that this may be intentional to allow us to get a glimpse of the bard song changes, but I figured I'd point it out.

Good catch. Here's the full text:

Enchanted Weapon
The Enchanted Weapon spell, instead of creating a magical weapon that the caster can wield, now alters the target creature's currently equipped weapon to increase its effective enchantment level to +3. The spell’s description has been updated to reflect this change.

Franpa

Hey Dee, the enhancements to the forum, is the automatic prefixing of new lines with a dash when making a bullet point list a new feature? It's pretty handy.

Dee

Franpa wrote: »

Hey Dee, the enhancements to the forum, is the automatic prefixing of new lines with a dash when making a bullet point list a new feature? It's pretty handy.

I want to say yes, but I also don't know what you mean, so I'm going to say...maybe?

Silverstar

Realize you allready answered a question about the spell and the thread isn't even about it, but... is the new version of Enchanted Weapon a more reasonable thing you guys came up with or is it based on the original pen and paper version?

Anyway, good to hear things are going the right way. And you guys should treat yourself to some tasty beverages, Bahamas or not. I suggest Sprite™

Franpa

If you type a dash at the start of the line and then some text, pressing Enter will automatically prefix the next line with a dash. Pressing Enter twice in a row will exit the auto-bullet point mode.

BelegCuthalion

if you now type "- this and that <enter>" then a new "–" is inserted automagically.

Dee

- testing stuff
- oh my god you're right
- this is dangerous

Silverstar wrote: »

Realize you allready answered a question about the spell and the thread isn't even about it, but... is the new version of Enchanted Weapon a more reasonable thing you guys came up with or is it based on the original pen and paper version?

Anyway, good to hear things are going the right way. And you guys should treat yourself to some tasty beverages, Bahamas or not. I suggest Sprite™

Yes, it's based on Pen-and-Paper. You can actually see this version of the spell already in Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition.

Grammarsalad

Dee wrote: »

- testing stuff
- oh my god you're right
- this is dangerous

Silverstar wrote: »

Realize you allready answered a question about the spell and the thread isn't even about it, but... is the new version of Enchanted Weapon a more reasonable thing you guys came up with or is it based on the original pen and paper version?

Anyway, good to hear things are going the right way. And you guys should treat yourself to some tasty beverages, Bahamas or not. I suggest Sprite™

Yes, it's based on Pen-and-Paper. You can actually see this version of the spell already in Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition.

... How did I miss that?

Thels

Dee said:

EDIT: Also, anyone notice the new Advanced Editing features on the site? That's totally unrelated to v2.0 release, but still pretty neat, I think.

Ehh, I personally really dislike it! BBcode is really convenient for forum posts. Now we're stuck between HTML and WYSIWYG, both of which are clearly a step down from the much more convenient BBcode.

In the HTML editor, we can't just press enter to start a new paragraph. We have to use <br> tags... And WYSIWYG editors are just plain annoying if you want to format a post correctly.

I don't mind these options existing, but it would be real nice if there was an option to keep using the BBcode.

Franpa

Yes, have you looked at the syntax for quotes of messages that use paragraphs? It's horrendous now. With BBCODE it was human readable, now they start with multiple lines of nonsensical syntax and the paragraph spacing is gone making it all a giant blob of text.

With BBCode you use

[quote="username"]message[/quote]

and the paragraph formatting would be retained when looking at the source code of the message. With HTML syntax we have posts starting with:

<blockquote class="Quote">
  <div><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Silverstar</a> said:</div>
  <div>message
</blockquote>
<br>

which is dreadful, hard to understand and line breaks are defined by <br> instead of an empty line.

BelegCuthalion

are you seriously looking into the code view for this?

I mean ... yes, bbcode has it's benefits when there is actually *no* wysiwyg-editor available. in such a case, you can do some formatting and still keep it readable while you write your message.

but with a wysiwyg-editor, working with formatting code isn't really what it's intended to be. I'd even say that html view button should not be there in a public forum, but instead just have a "clean all formatting" button (which is available in these editor implementation in configuration). If you really really mess up with formats, you have a way out to reset with such a button. This should eliminate the need for a code view.

(I'm a frontend programmer and am very well aware of complexity, usability and readability of markup languages, but i'm not a die-hard pure-code-and-text-is-the-only-way enthusiast. we have visual editors for some good reason.)

But we are getting quite out of scope here ... one thing to contribute:
the quote formatting within the editor window lacks some style yet ... this can be declared as bug.

Thels

WYSIWYG editors aren't the be all, end all of things. If you just type your own post with text and little else, sure, it'll work. But if you're quoting someone else, but don't want their entire post quoted, it's really not useful at all.

When I tried to quote Dee in my previous posts, I got entire pictures in my input box. I don't find that convenient at all!

Having WYSIWYG support is nice, but it could be next to BBcode, rathern than next to HTMLcode. Plenty of fora that handle that just fine!

Franpa

BelegCuthalion said:

are you seriously looking into the code view for this?

I mean ... yes, bbcode has it's benefits when there is actually *no* wysiwyg-editor available. in such a case, you can do some formatting and still keep it readable while you write your message.

but with a wysiwyg-editor, working with formatting code isn't really what it's intended to be. I'd even say that html view button should not be there in a public forum, but instead just have a "clean all formatting" button (which is available in these editor implementation in configuration). If you really really mess up with formats, you have a way out to reset with such a button. This should eliminate the need for a code view.

(I'm a frontend programmer and am very well aware of complexity, usability and readability of markup languages, but i'm not a die-hard pure-code-and-text-is-the-only-way enthusiast. we have visual editors for some good reason.)

But we are getting quite out of scope here ... one thing to contribute:
the quote formatting within the editor window lacks some style yet ... this can be declared as bug.

How do you easily separate multiple pieces of a single post in to multiple quotes in order to provide responses to specific things that were mentioned, without using the Code view? How do I add a URL with the URL appearing as a word that is part of a sentence instead of looking like a URL?

I've spent enough time frustrated with WYSIWYG editors that screw up the formatting code, often resulting in situations where it is difficult to remove italics/bold/underline/strike through/bold when typing a post. Like I will italicize a word and then when I press space to continue typing the rest of the sentence the italicize will still be enabled. In Code view I can precisely define where to apply the italics formatting and continue typing my post without any bullshit. I've had WYSIWYG editors that, when adding a URL, will continue to make my text part of the URL when I continue to type (Often happens when navigating to the end  of a URL and pressing Space).

There's other minutiae issues I have with WYSIWYG editors. I've had them add pointless markup or code that makes it difficult to apply formatting or for them to fail to properly remove markup code.

Overall, I prefer not dealing with the Ease of Use interface because the vast majority of forums have SOME kind of issue with it. The other issue I have with it is HTML syntax isn't anywhere near as intuitive as BBCODE, though HTML syntax might be more functional (The only thing I like about HTML is the closing bracket for code is shortened, like <a href> </a>).

Dee

I've started a poll on the different formatting options here.

Franpa

One other thing I forgot to mention, which is easy to reproduce on many forums: If I type a URL and make a typo in the URL, the WYSIWYG editor does not allow me to fix the mistake without deleting the entire URL and retyping it from scratch. If I try to fix just the typo I will only fix the face of the URL, the actual URL I will be directed to when clicking the text will still contain the typo.

Silverstar

Dee said:

EDIT: Also, anyone notice the new Advanced Editing features on the site? That's totally unrelated to v2.0 release, but still pretty neat, I think.

Seems people noticed a bit too well really.

o.o

Dee

@Franpa - if you highlight a section of text and click the hyperlink button, the URL you enter will be used as the hyperlink but the displayed text will be the text you highlighted. To change the URL, just highlight that same section of text and click the hyperlink button again; you'll be able to update the URL.

And at this point I'd really rather any further discussion about the post-editing changes be posted in the link I provided above.