Starting Fresh

I was converting the Game-Tracker project to the .NET 2.0 framework to make use of the new project structure and better resource handling. Even though it's not necessary, I wanted to convert the forms so they had the seperate Designer classes and resources. Pretty much the only way to do that (that I know of) is to create a new form, and then copy the code over from the 1.1 form. So far so good. I create a new project, create a new MainForm and start carrying over code. In the process, I'm thinking about all the stuff I did wrong and don't like about Game-Tracker. First of all, I realize I don't like the name. Time for a new name. Also, I think about all the crap that I don't like about the source code. Since I was learning .NET/C#, I did a lot of experimenting and made a lot of mistakes, having to re-do parts of it. Parts of it were terribly confusing and difficult to work in. Hmm.

Time to scrap the old and start fresh! w00t! It's one of the benefits of being the only developer on a free project that you do in your own time that has never been released. :-) That freed me up to think about what I didn't like about Game-Tracker and either remove it or fix it. One thing was that the UI was plain and somewhat cluttered - one of the first things I didn't like about the GameSpy UI. I really like a clean UI and an app that does one thing well. What I would like this app to do well, is monitor and find public Internet game servers. And, like everyone else, I want a slick, nice-looking UI.

I think the game protocol plugins are still good, as are a number of the non-UI components. The game template and networking code is ok. I still needed to optimize the networking code a bit, so that when querying a lot of servers the data gets pulled off the socket as quickly as possible. I can also carry over the multicast chat utility, which already works great on a lan. I plan to extend this to a true "friends" type feature. So, quite a bit is reusable and "good", in my opinion. (I still have my doubts about using a blocking socket call in the plugins, but I'll talk about that in a different post)



I created a new project in VS2005, created the main window and started with a simple ToolStrip at the top and StatusStrip at the bottom. I won't be using the .NET 1.1 Menus or StatusBars at all. The new ToolStrip components are much more flexible, and just look a lot nicer. As a plus, the ToolStrip components use a bit of the .NET 3.0 component structure with their "Renderer" property, so it seems like a good choice moving forward. I also started a custom control to handle the display of the game icons installed on the users' system. I have a rough idea of how I'd like it to loook, but we'll see how it turns out. Here's a screenshot of what I have so far. Not very interesting, but with a little imagination, I think you'll see what I'm striving for.



The red squares at the top will be where the game icons are. When the app starts up for the first time, it reads the templates I've defined for the games that it has support for, scans the user's system looking for the games, extracts the appropriate icon and will display them in that control at the top. That's the idea any way. I have to admit, I've never had the "gift of great UI", so any suggestions/feedback will be listened to. I know that pretty much everyone is better at it than me! :-)