PKBeam
Expand the scope of the Undo/Redo function to include difficulty creation
Hi,
just a little heads-up about the UI design choice to not include adding / removing difficulty levels to the Undo / Redo feature.
(sarcasm) Thank you so much for not even including a warning and just deleting the 6 hours of work that went into beatmapping my first ragnarock song.. only to be ripped of it all by an untimely autosave (or my muscle memory pressing CTRL+S after thinking I just triggered Undo via CTRL+Z). That is, after adding/removing a difficulty level to the song removed all notes in the editor. (/sarcasm)
=Feature request=
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(Short cut) A modal warning-message would be nice.. something like: "Please check your beatmap data before saving. Yes / No / Cancel" But only if difficulty levels were added or removed by the user since the last save of the beatmapping project. The message coud possibly reflect on the current precarious nature of the adding/removing difficulty levels - feature.
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Or (probably lots of work) implement undo/redo for all elements, including adding/removing difficulty levels? I dunno. It really came as a surprise to me.. everything is gone and it sucks right now.
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Or (a more lightweight solution) simply create up to xx backup files whenever the beat.dat - file (whatever its name) is being overwritten during a save.. ie. by renaming beat.dat to beat-yyyymmdd-HHMMSSnnnn.dat xx -> Maximum number of backups, configurable in the settings beat-yyyymmdd-HHMMSSnnnn.dat -> Backup filename timeformat configurable in the settings
Other than my current situation, everything is great. Thanks for providing this nice piece of software. Beatmapping is actually fun doing it with Edda.
Now, back to mapping that song, before I forget about the patterns I chose originally. :-)
Cheers, Frederic
Firstly, please don't use a passive-aggressive or sarcastic tone when creating an issue.
Nobody is paid to maintain this project. Everyone who has contributed has done so from their own free time, between other life commitments such as work. You are doing the entire Ragnarock community a disservice by being rude and condescending to them.
Make an issue that clearly and succinctly states the problem. That makes it easier for contributors to read and in turn increases the chance of a fix or improvement arriving back to you.
As for the content of the post:
The scope of the Undo/Redo feature is not a UI decision. The feature was added for the purpose of note editing. Whether or not we want to extend that to other actions is up for discussion.
It's not clear from your post how you lost the map data.
after adding/removing a difficulty level to the song removed all notes in the editor
When you add a new difficulty, the editor is cleared of notes because it switches over to the newly created difficulty, which is empty. Any existing notes from the previously selected difficulty are still saved and will be shown on the editor grid when said difficulty is selected again.
Please describe clearly the sequence of events that occurred that caused the loss of data.
Finally, Edda has an automatic backup feature. If you performed a manual save at any time while mapping then there should be persistent backups. See the manual for more info. If this isn't working then a separate issue needs to be created for it.
You're absolutely right. I was angry and took it out on you unfairly.
I offer you my sincere apology for that. My tone was unacceptable, and I regret it.
Being a maintainer for other projects myself, I can relate to your pain, but totally missed the mark in that instance. It was the wrong tone in the wrong forum and not meant to hurt.
About the other issue at hand: I could not replicate the problem exactly.
My best guess is the following timeline:
- Finished an already existing, half-finished notes pattern, that I was working on in difficulty set 1 (of 1 all in all).
- Added a new difficulty set (with copying over the notes).
- I got confused which difficulty set I was looking at, so I tried to remove the new "superflous" difficulty level by pressing "-".
- Somehow there still was another difficulty level, so I pressed "-" again.
- And there was still another difficulty level (the default empty set, I guess), so I pressed "-" again, but realized that this was just the default empty set.
- I pressed CTRL-Z several times to "undo" the changes, but nothing happened.
- I closed the pattern editor (without saving) and reopened it from harddrive, but the one diffículty level shown then was the empty set (easy.dat was at its minimum size, 1kb or so). Also, some kind of save to disk must have happened (auto-save or manual CTRL-S), or the pre-existing half-finished notes pattern would have still existed upon reload from disk at the end.
In summary it comes down to a layer 8 problem on my part, brought on by my confusion about the UI surrounding the difficulty level and possibly an untimely auto-save happening (and being blind to the obvious autosaves folder in the map directory)
On the backup feature: I truly had no idea it existed. I did check the manual pages in detail (in the sleepy haze of 2 days ago), yet somehow must have skipped over this giant headline unconsciously. As I did when looking at the map's frigging directory many times back then, too.........
I feel even dumber than usual now. The backups were exactly where you (and the manual) said they were.
Your renaming of the title of this issue is spot-on.
The only possible area of concern left besides what's written there I would describe like this: Ensure the user interface for choosing difficulty sets is more intuitive to the first-time user.
If at all!
Thanks again for this nice piece of software, and have a nice weekend!