Config code(Third Aux button for dual blade) so both blades have individual effects with clash/blast

Hacks
22

Ok… but that’s what preprocessor directives are for.

But I’m not supposing you make these features available in other prompts, I’m suggesting these features be built into ProffieOS to be easily available, should a prop wish to implement it.

Right, ofc not, what I’m talking about wouldn’t involve changing anything about the other props at all.

Exactly, but it’s not possible to bring it all the way back to 5.9 because of your new features, so why not keep a prop that just doesn’t have those features so you can keep it that way? Isn’t that the reason for the option to select different prop files? I’m not trying to suggest you create some complicated system to be able to completely switch everything around… just create another prop to simplify it.

I know there’s some animosity because of my tool, but I’d love to talk to you about it because in these new versions I really want to make it a tool that’s easy for people like you (prop creators) to use and add your features to, maybe via a simple text configuration file. I want to work with you to create a better ProffieOS experience, not against you.

What am I guessing about? We’ve already established there’s some things your prop simply cannot do. It shouldn’t have to do everything, I’m offering suggestions on how to build a better system overall.

But why not work to make ProffieOS better overall? Or don’t market your tools as ProffieOS tools when they’re really fett prop tools.

ProffieOS is a great bit of software… I want it to be more user-friendly, but if someone really wants a board that just has a single configuration with options to change things, they’ll go CFX… for that user it’s a way better option, so within the scope of ProffieOS’ market, I want it to be as user-friendly as possible while being very careful to be sure that the customization that makes it so powerful isn’t restricted or discouraged.

With regards to my tool: the goal, which is not yet fully realized (and, again, I’d love to talk to you and other prop makers and probably fredrik at some point to figure out how best to do all this…), is to build something that’s easy to use on both sides of the coin; easy for both the ProffieOS prop creators and for end users.

For example, let’s say you add a new feature and/or change your buttons, I want to make it so that it’s as easy as editing a text file that ProffieConfig will load (so you could ship new versions independent of ProffieConfig) that could add new toggles for features, and the option to specify how buttons will work based on what features are enabled. To that end my goal is to help, because I really think that something like that would help to make ProffieOS easier and encourage developers to contribute, in conjunction with maintaining the OS to be easy to contribute to.

23

I already did the work in my prop, if someone else wants to move it outside and figure out how to do it without creating conflicts in other props go for it.

My prop and my tools are all designed to work together and support ideas I’ve developed. Many of the OS7 features I’m building into the library can’t work in other props unless they do a bunch of updating, since a very large percentage of users use my library I only support my prop in the config tool because trying to troubleshoot my styles in other props is not realistic.

Like what? Nobody’s told me what it is that’s so important. Also, if you’re not using anything from OS7 why not just upload 5.9? Every user I encounter WANTS the new features and implementing the new features required changes, hence the updates to the prop. Wherever possible I left the controls intact, there’s a handful of things that simply had to change and the changes weren’t so drastic as to make the prop inoperable. If someone’s totally stuck in the past and refuses to learn one or 2 new controls they should probably just stick with the old version.

I don’t have animosity I haven’t looked at it TBH. I asked about support for my features because I don’t want more troubleshooting to pop up. My tools support everything I’ve built to minimize issues and questions.

I don’t have time to collaborate on other’s work I have enough on my plate, but if you have questions feel free to ask.

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I don’t think demeaning users is a good approach :confused:

To give you a direct answer to this:
New OSs shouldn’t remove features… they should add features. I think you’re missing the idea that less is more in many cases, and not having the 5.9 prop available in the latest version (and thus having users need to go and search for it) is removing features from the OS. It’s not any more work to keep it in, so why wouldn’t you?

That’s just my point though… if nothing else, at the very least would it not be a good idea, moving forward, to build this stuff into the OS and not the prop file?

So… in an open source project, where it is, by it’s nature, a collaborative effort, you’re giving a massive middle finger to collaboration?

You want everyone else to go through all your stuff and know how it works inside and out but when it comes to working with others your response is just “Can’t. Sorry.”

If you have so much on your plate why not slow down to make sure you’re building things well. Quality over quantity so to speak. What’s the big rush to throw more features out the door that, you yourself have acknowledged, very few users are even aware of?

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What features did I remove? To answer your question, I HAD to make a small handful changes to my prop to support features added in OS6 and 7 because we ran out of buttons/controls. I didn’t take anything away I had to change a couple of controls because they either conflicted additions and new features or they were hogging controls that could be more efficiently and logically laid out alongside all of the new capabilties.

You still haven’t specified which control is giving so many people problems. I spent a ton of time during OS7 development taking the feedback I had received in OS6 and addressing wherever possible. There were one or two requests that simply couldn’t work , otherwise I addressed everything users had brought up. If you have a specific thing I can explain the rationale and reason as well as the alternative I enabled.

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you’re trying to convey a thought and not sound like a complete d*ck.

Let’s start here, I do this all for fun as a hobby, I’M NOT A PROGRAMMER by trade, I taught myself HTML, JS and a tiny bit of C++ to contribute to OS.

I’ve dedicated several years trying to bring more and more to the community. I build web tools, styles, features, my prop, my library, etc. all for the community to use and enjoy. In some cases, I’ve had ideas that profezzorn wasn’t fully on board with but he still helped and allowed me to add and in OS7 many of them were a bit experimental, so we put them into my prop so they didn’t interfere with anyone else’s props and so users who didn’t want weren’t forced to use up memory.

On top of all of the development I also dedicate a lot my time to help out users, troubleshoot, fix issues and overall support the things I’ve created. I built tools around common questions I received to make it easier for people and less on me to get things working. But in the case of a lot of these experimental things, they were concepts in my head that I have to translate to a format that even the most novice user can get and implement, as such, the little free time I have I’m working on updating my tools to support my ideas.

So now, you come along and you don’t like how I did things and you want them your way or you want me to make things easier for you? I’ve made stuff as simple as I could for ALL users and where things are more complicated I’ve built tools to support my ideas. I’ve already put in the time (my own time) to think up, develop, test, share and support my contributions I’m not looking to do it all again, what i developed works for most everyone else. Sorry it’s not how “you” want it. I think if you poll the community more users have benefitted from my contributions than have had trouble and when I find out there’s something that needs fixing I address it as best I can. But I design stuff for myself, then I share it with the community.

26

And I’m a high school student… ofc we’re not here because this is our job… it’s a hobby. Everything that’s given to any project of this nature comes from a place of passion, and ofc it’s our own time.

I’m not wanting you to redo everything “my way.” I’m simply expressing a concern I had. I also don’t want you to make things easier for me… I’m not sure where that came from.

If what you’re saying is true, that you want to simplify things for users, then I don’t think our goals conflict at all. Ultimately, at this point I’m asking you because I’m trying to help. It feels a bit… I don’t know the right word… to be dismissive of someone who’s goal is to help. I only ask that just in the same way there’s things I don’t understand about what you’ve done, you have to understand there’s things in what I’m suggesting and what I’ve done with my tool that I’m sure you don’t understand.

If I can build my tool so that it’s extensible for someone like you, that’d take more off your plate, right? That’s my goal, but I can’t do that without help/input from you. My tool can do things yours can’t, your tool can do things mine can’t, I’d like to make it easy for you to build things into my tool, since it’ll integrate things in a way I think will be nicer for users. If you disagree, I’d like to know why so I can work on it.

I’ll clear the air real quick because there’s, without a doubt, some hostility right now between us… that’s not productive from either side of this, so I’ll do my best to drop it. I’d like for you to, if you want/need, similarly clear the air and leave your thoughts on what I’ve said, but then I want you to consider what I’m proposing, which doesn’t involve changing what you’ve done in ProffieOS… that was all just conjecture, don’t take it the wrong way.

27

I’m going to step in here and say there has been some heated words in this thread. If that continues I will need to moderate. No personal attacks please.

It seems like this argument comes down to people having opinion about how Fett263 does things, so let me clarify something. Fett263, and everybody who contributes to ProffieOS is under no obligation listen to anybody else’s opinion about how things should be done. (Except mine I guess) People who contribute to ProffieOS are allowed to do things “their way”, as long as their way doesn’t get in the way of what other people wants to do.

Now, Fett263 has put in a significant amount of work to create a more advanced prop, with styles, support sites and videos to go with it. He did it his way (and with a TON of ways to customize), but if you don’t like it, you don’t have to use his prop.

Now, the question is, what is ProffieOS 7 without the Fett263 prop? Well, the answer to that can be seen in the changelogs. Some features are only in the Fett263 prop, some are in the framework, and many are a little bit of both. I try to make sure that things are implemented in away that makes sense, and is reusable, but doing it that way is a LOT of extra work, and is sometimes extremely difficult. If I can think of a better way to implement something, I make sure that it’s done that way. If I cannot, then it gets implemented any way that works. Edit mode, the whole menu system and a bunch more stuff was not practical to put into the base OS at the time, so it’s not there. I am working on making an abstraction layer for menus though, which should make it easier to implement menus in other props if desired. Hopefully Fett263 will also be up for converting his prop to use the new menu abstractions when finished. (But, as I said earlier; no obligations.)

And just to clarify how the process usually works, it goes something like this: Fett263 comes to me and says “I’d like to make a style that starts my coffe maker”, I go “what??”. Then he explains how he would like it to work, and after I get over the initial shock, I try to think of ways it could be implemented that doesn’t completely break everything. If I come up with something, then I implement it, and then Fett263 uses it. I document the feature and Fett263 adds it to his style library. Anybody can use the feature, but Fett263 made it easy. This is how we got bendable time, Remap<>, TrDoEffect, and a long list of other stuff.

Now, other people can and do do the same thing, Fett263 is not the only source of ideas around here.

3 Likes
28

I was saving that for OS9, OS8 is the TV remote option. :wink:

No hostility, although calling all of the time, effort and work I put into my prop a “hack” isn’t a good way to endear yourself to someone, just saying…

I get you built a tool and are proud of it (which you should be) but I’ve been building tools and videos and documentation to help support the ideas I brought to the OS since OS2.6CC. I already planned out all of my tools for all users and I made them all to work together to help users get the most out of the OS. I already put the time into my tools and am continuing to update them, I’m not looking to duplicate or redo my efforts in someone else’s tool.

Back to the original topic, if you can specify what about my prop isn’t working or users don’t like I can probably elaborate a bit. As I’ve said, ad nauseum, I made my prop super customizable already based on the feedback I got from OS6, some of the controls I introduced in OS6 didn’t go over as I thought, so I made a bunch of new defines and other changes to address everything that I could in OS7.

There’s a tiny handful of things some users wanted that either majorly conflicted with other important controls/features or that would severely limit what the prop could do (we do have a finite amount of controls to do almost infinite things with). I take user feedback into account whenever possible, but I also weigh if it’s something one person wants versus something many people could use. I also know I spent a ton of time mapping out how everything could work together while keeping it intuitive for the masses.

I also proactively looked into controls in sa22c’s prop and bc’s prop and migrated them into mine via defines because I knew those props wouldn’t be able to support the new features and I didn’t want to isolate users who were using other props, I wanted my prop to be as “all encompassing” as possible. But there are limits, in which case, there’s a small handful of controls that are different. If those are gating items for a particular user they have the option to learn the new control (I provide support, custom print outs, etc to help) or learn to code their own prop (which is what I did). I feel like some people think making a prop is “easy”, it’s one of the hardest things to do, you have to account for how everything inter-relates and make sure one control doesn’t interfere with something else and it requires a ton of planning and testing. Then when you add defines and customization into the mix it compounds the complexity exponentially. And the more features I added the more complex things got, so finding the balance was already a ton of work.

So if you have specifics on why you’re so opposed to using my prop I’ll have another look at it, or explain the reasoning and alternatives (there’s a lot of custom combinations for controls in the prop now). But without specifics I can’t really give guidance and I can’t look at anything. All of the feedback on my prop I was aware of in OS6 was already addressed in OS7.

In addition, already spent months planning out and building the Config Tool to make it easier for users to understand the laundry list of defines and options in OS7 (as well as to cut out all of the common syntax errors I saw users run into when they edit their config). I knew that adding so much customization and new defines would make it harder for users to figure things out so I built out the Config Tool to make it much easier to select things and build a config.

I also made it so the tool produces customized printable Button/Control Lists and other documentation because in a lot of cases users don’t know all of the controls and end up fumbling through things. And since the controls in my prop can vary dramatically now with all of the defines, it’s a key piece. There’s also a lot of controls that are now style based and that require additional support and set up in the font so I spent months writing the logic into the library to keep track and provide all necessary information on implementation, editing and controlling the new features. This information is also very important for users to be able to use their saber so this information is necessary in the config and it can also be printed from my config tool via the “Preset/Style Options List”. And since the supported sounds also vary by define and styles the config tool also produces a “Supported Sounds List” so users can properly set up their fonts for the new features.

Finally, my config tool has a bunch of optimization techniques built into it to work hand-in-hand with optimization capabilities in my library, since many users want to fit more and more into their sabers. The config tool makes setting up using functions, style arguments and copying presets to maximize memory all very easy and intuitive and it allows them to save up to 6 configs to come back to anytime for updates or edits. It’s also designed to move into future OS versions and support new features as they release.

So when users are trying to get the most out of the OS, I direct them to my tools because I already had planned out everything and understood what was coming down the pipe during development of OS7. All of the tools I built are designed to work together > “How to Update” > “Style Library” > “Config Tool” > “Fett263 Prop” pages are all a package to make things as easy as possible for all users regardless of knowledge to be able use what I build and it all took a lot of my time to build, so I don’t see the need nor have the time to do it all over again because someone else wants to have their own way of doing things.

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Well, there was from my end, so I apologize for coming at this more fired-up than I should have.

I hope I’ve not been too off-putting, as I hope to work with you in the future. (At some point it’s my goal to swing around to the actual ProffieOS code and see what I can help with)

I might talk to you at some point about my perspective on your prop file, but that really would be my voice alone, and I’m aware it’d be relatively inconsequential. From what I’ve seen, if people don’t like the OS 7 prop, guiding them on how to use the OS5 one is good enough for them, since they tend to not want the new features anyways.

Absolutely. I don’t want the impression I leave to be that I don’t think you’ve done enough work. Your tools and prop were what I used when I first joined the hobby! :laughing:

My personal gripe with your prop is just that I don’t care for all the extra features. I like it simple, but for that I’ll stay on another prop, that’s not an issue to fix with your prop.

Anywho, this topic has been thoroughly derailed at this point… so my work here is done. (That was sarcasm… to be clear :sweat_smile:)

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That’s not actually helpful if I’m not seeing what they don’t like. As I said I made changes from all the feedback “I” got in OS6 to make changes in OS7. If I don’t get the feedback or information nothing changes. I can’t always accommodate what users want, but if I’m aware of it I can at least consider. From my perspective, guiding users to OS5’s prop is a “disservice” to the users you are trying to help. I find users always end up wanting newer features or capabilities. If you’re having them use an outdated prop you’re cutting the legs out from under them when the time comes that they want something new. You’re also making it so they can’t use my OS7 library. As I noted, I planned everything out for OS7 to work together. While you may think you were helping you’re actually making the upgrading to OS7 and future versions harder for them. My recommendation is that you send users or feedback here where I can actually see it and guide them. Using OS5’s prop in OS7 doesn’t “help” anyone, it’s like a “ball and chain”, not a solution.

Which, I can’t help without specifics? I made a bunch of customization to disable features users didn’t like or or want. I took the feedback I got from OS6 and applied it to OS7. If you give me specifics I can direct you to the combination of defines that will get you back to near OS5. Most of the features either are enabled with a define, enabled in font set up or can be disabled with defines and several are controlled entirely by the style. If you give specifics on what you consider simple I can give you the information to get there.

Apology accepted, I get you’re trying to help but as I noted in your original question/announcement of your tool, from my perspective you’re reinventing a wheel that I already put a lot of time and thought into. My tools are planned out with support for everything I worked on in OS7, it’s all designed to work together. The only thing I don’t do is the upload step, because despite what a non-user may think, I don’t think it’s that hard to use Arduino. Every user who felt it was so daunting to upload that I have helped or that I directed to my “How to Upload” site was able to do it and learn it. And once you upload once or twice it’s just straightforward. So I don’t really see a need to invest time in building something that uploads for the user, I believe it’s better and easier to teach them how to upload.
Also, when we teach someone how to upload they become an “expert” and can go on to help other new users. Your tool, in my opinion, is a “crutch” it’s handicapping those who use it, “teach a man to fish…”. It also reinforces the false feeling that it’s so “hard” to user Proffieboard. I would prefer to spend a little extra time on the front end to teach a user how to do the upload than pour a bunch of time in creating a “generation” of users in the community who can’t. The reason this community has grown and is so welcoming and helpful is we all started off not knowing anything (except profezzorn) and we learned from those who knew and then we turn around and helped those who needed to learn.
My tools help but they keep the process in front of the user. My library and prop contain really advanced styles, concepts and ideas that I came up with but I made them as customizable as I can with “guard rails” to keep everything working. As new features have been added I’ve made the library more and more customizable to help users take advantage of things without HAVING to understand all of it, but the style code contains the pieces of how they’re done so more advanced users can go in and follow the “bread crumbs”. I’m sharing ideas I’ve developed and concepts that I put a lot of time and effort into and making them both easy for the new user to implement but also a “roadmap” for users who want to delve deeper into the “rabbit hole”. The library is also laid out so you can see the individual effects and layers of style code, you’re learning the basics of what makes up a full style without having to write all of the code and know all of the specific syntax BUT you can take it into the Style Editor and break it apart and learn more if you’re so inclined.
In my config tool, you see the config sections, you see how you’re able to customize via defines, you see how the presets are laid out and what makes them up and how they relate to the number of blades, you see how using functions work, how style arguments work, it handles the syntax but it keeps the important pieces in front of the user. And after you did everything you see the full config, you get your config file and save it to the OS and add it to ProffieOS.ino, you follow the directions on how to upload and you learn.
I’ve made my tools to “hold a user’s hand” as they go through the process, I don’t take the wheel away from them and do it for them. Nobody learns when you do things for them, they learn when they do it.
All of my tools do everything I believe can help all users get the most out of the OS and easily move into OS7, what you’re doing with modding to OS5 and not teaching users the simple act of uploading is counter to what I have and continue to work on and in some cases breaks things I’ve been planning and working on for a long time.
BUT, I’m not telling you how to do things you’re working on, as profezzorn said nobody who contributes is obligated to take other people’s input or change how they’re doing things, I’m just telling you my approach and perspective so you understand. I’m sure there’s users who appreciate not learning to upload, in the short term that may be nice for them. My experience and perspective thinks long term it’s better to learn the upload process both for the user and the community and beyond the upload process I already handle everything else in my tools aligned with all of the features that are currently available as well as those that are still on the way.

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You mean this?

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