Walking into Nats for the grinders, I had no idea how much RTools would be used during the weekend. Initial thoughts were modest: I don't believe it was launched once on Thursday, instead running events completely via paper and judges holding the timers. Me just being panicky over anything going wrong at all, I was perfectly fine with this :)
Walking in Friday, I see the fruits of preparation working nearly perfectly. The main event has both a clock and timer running, and the tournament-based colors working flawlessly on the side events. Me being me, I'm watching every scroll and every timer for _anything_ going even close to wrong.
Friday night, I leave with some feature requests for the next day, and a couple bugs to look at. I also do all I can to make sure that the standings aren't shown again like they were at the end of Friday.* I did get out of the convention center a tad early, as I expected the changes to take 2-3 hours in coding and would've otherwise had 8 hours between leaving for the night and needing to be back. Somewhat fortuitously, the fixes ended up being done in less than an hour, and gave me a nice night of sleep.
Saturday: I was on the main floor, and it was uneventful. I did have one of the appeals which the HJ, Eric Shukan, liked talking about :) Interesting fact: On the main floor all three days, no appeals caused overturned calls. No issues, so a relaxing evening.
Sunday: So, somehow the exact same issue affects two events at the same time, and never happens in any of the dozens of other events. I also thought I lost my keys for about 7 hours, and the ended up being under the pants I wore for the first half of the day. (not the worst of my life, though close)
Now, the aftermath of this event will bring a ton of changes and fixes to future alpha builds, thanks to a lot of good usability feedback...
- All options to change background colors in windows are being removed. Let me know, though, if you have a use for this. This is just the easier of two options I have for adjusting this.
- Some people have been telling me that preregistered players were showing up in places they were not supposed to, and I thought that I fixed this for 1.1 and 2.0 alphas. Alphas 13+ will have the fixes that were made for pairings also get done for seating and standing displays.
- Windows that take advantage of some form of outstanding tables being displayed will now automatically update every 5-10 seconds.
- I will be working more expediently on getting rid of ambiguous behavior in the program whenever you press the "Cancel" button in a window.
- Timer windows will have some changes to the right-click menu to allow for you to customize the timer label, when it's part of the window. I may just default the label to be of a size that will fit-to-window, automatically changing the font size on it's own instead.
- There may be an option added to the pairings window to remove the point totals from pairings. This option would be for late rounds of larger tournaments when players are paired to random tables rather than by rank, to make it less trivial to simply find where the top players are seated.
- A bug appeared where the final player on the scrolling pairings was being cut off if that player also has a bye. I'm still looking into why this is; I have the tournament files in question to look at, but I have not yet been able to duplicate or localize this issue.
- Another bug has shown where the point totals on pairings are a round behind when the pairings go up. Again, I have the files in question but have not yet duplicated or localized the issue.
- The ticker is getting a couple issues fixed that popped up. First, when you change the message, it will no longer move the window back to the default placement. (top-left of the primary window) In addition, the font size adjustment wasn't working for some reason during Nats, and this has been fixed.
I also have my first feature plan for 2.1, (or possibly 2.0 if the development takes longer than I expect) which has also been a feature that I have somewhat been dreading to build, that being a unified settings/preferences window. Each tournament and window only has about 20 explicit settings, though this can jump to about 40 when you include implicit, settings.ini, and developer settings. The issue is that I tend to be a very hands-on builder for GUI windows, and settings windows are detailed jobs, with each area of text, each editable text area, and every other element on the window needing to be written, placed, and handled individually.
Alpha 13 will be the next release, which should be out late Tuesday or Wednesday. It'll have adjustments on issue numbers (going in order above) 1, 2, 3, 5, 9, and possibly 6. Also, there should be some expansions to the areas in which RTools is being used in the next few weeks, especially towards the west coast :)
*For those that haven't seen this, RTools, Reporter v3, and WER all will display different standing tiebreakers for events. I believe I have a good reverse-engineer on how both v3 and WER handle tiebreakers, but RTools uses neither method, instead opting to strictly follow the MTR to-the-letter. Having them scroll at Nats isn't a bad idea, as they're the documented tiebreakers, but the scrolling tiebreakers being different than the tiebreakers that a cut or prizes will be based on isn't a good idea.
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