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MaesterRowen

Aurora 0.7b - Feature Preview

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2 minutes ago, gavin_darkglider said:

webui hasnt been finished yet. 0.7b and nova can be released without it. the version of webui with aurora currently doesnt work, and it hasnt stopped the previous releases.

NOVA will be released along with aurora 0.7b or will it be at different times?

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This is great news and I can not wait to try NOVA - The Future of LiNK, which would be for me the most important novelty to try:jig:

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1 hour ago, lilia said:

This is great news and I can not wait to try NOVA - The Future of LiNK, which would be for me the most important novelty to try:jig:

At the moment it is basically the same. The only new feature is NetISO, which might not be included if 0.7b is released as it is, as Ro was taking about disabling it until the bugs are worked out. Link works the same, as this is just the beginning of things to come for nova.

NOVA will be released along with aurora 0.7b or will it be at different times?

Yes, it will be released along with 0.7b, but it is basically the same plugin with some backend fixes, and some rebranding for aurora. It will be exactly the same as the freestyle plugin you are currently using, as far as interacting with it, unless we put off the release for fixing NetISO, and finishing the WebUI. Other than that there are no noticable changes from a end user standpoint. LinkV2 is still in early development, so dont get your hopes up for any of the features that were promised in the Nova teaser thread.

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23 minutes ago, gavin_darkglider said:

At the moment it is basically the same. The only new feature is NetISO, which might not be included if 0.7b is released as it is, as Ro was taking about disabling it until the bugs are worked out. Link works the same, as this is just the beginning of things to come for nova.

Yes, it will be released along with 0.7b, but it is basically the same plugin with some backend fixes, and some rebranding for aurora. It will be exactly the same as the freestyle plugin you are currently using, as far as interacting with it, unless we put off the release for fixing NetISO, and finishing the WebUI. Other than that there are no noticable changes from a end user standpoint. LinkV2 is still in early development, so dont get your hopes up for any of the features that were promised in the Nova teaser thread.

can it come in the same pictures from when the project started years ago, I think who in 2015?

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No matter when the project is released,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,What is important is that this project is still alive  We know that the team has life and work conditions and can not devote full time to the project  As the saying goes ,,, good work long time 

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If the netiso stuff is removed, then it will be exactly the same look as the Freestyle plugin, with text in the popups changed to reflect aurora. if we wait on the release of 0.7b, to complete working out the bugs in netISO, and to finish the new webUI, it will have an option for NetISO under system link. As it sits, the option might be on the list, but disabled, but I doubt that, even if the code is included in the plugin, I would bet that the menu option will be removed completely, which will leave it like the freestyle plugin if you use my theme patches for text and icon for it, and the pop ups will reflect that you are running aurora when you choose aurora home. Other than that it will be the same for the end user as the Freestyle plugin. On the code end, there are a bunch of changes, as they updated alot of the features that are included in the plugin already, to fix some bugs, and to make it more compatible with the aurora code base. As for the NetISO stuff, there are a few bugs that need to be visited on both the server side, and the client side of things, and a bunch of stuff needs to be finished on the server side. That being said as a tester, I have thoroughly tested NetISO, and as it sits, it is pretty awesome, especially on loading time, but some of the bugs could render it unreliable for public consumption, such as if the network connection drops, especially if using wifi for a second, on either the pc or xbox side of things, then the server doesnt pick up on the disconnect, and the xbox wont reconnect. This causes games to crash, with unreadable disc errors. On the console side, if you have a disc in the physical drive, and are playing an iso file, then unmount the iso file, it will either crash the game, or launch the game on the disc. If someone hits the eject button on the console for the physical drive, the console thinks the mounted iso/svod is ejected and the game kicks you back to NXE in the case of SVODs, and aurora in the case of iso images. As a tester, I have tried all sorts of combinations of stupid things that users, children or adults might do, to find these bugs, and some of them could be devastating to the game you are playing, hince not quite ready for the public, since the Devs are looking for the most stable release possible. 

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7 minutes ago, gavin_darkglider said:

If the netiso stuff is removed, then it will be exactly the same look as the Freestyle plugin, with text in the popups changed to reflect aurora. if we wait on the release of 0.7b, to complete working out the bugs in netISO, and to finish the new webUI, it will have an option for NetISO under system link. As it sits, the option might be on the list, but disabled, but I doubt that, even if the code is included in the plugin, I would bet that the menu option will be removed completely, which will leave it like the freestyle plugin if you use my theme patches for text and icon for it, and the pop ups will reflect that you are running aurora when you choose aurora home. Other than that it will be the same for the end user as the Freestyle plugin. On the code end, there are a bunch of changes, as they updated alot of the features that are included in the plugin already, to fix some bugs, and to make it more compatible with the aurora code base. As for the NetISO stuff, there are a few bugs that need to be visited on both the server side, and the client side of things, and a bunch of stuff needs to be finished on the server side. That being said as a tester, I have thoroughly tested NetISO, and as it sits, it is pretty awesome, especially on loading time, but some of the bugs could render it unreliable for public consumption, such as if the network connection drops, especially if using wifi for a second, on either the pc or xbox side of things, then the server doesnt pick up on the disconnect, and the xbox wont reconnect. This causes games to crash, with unreadable disc errors. On the console side, if you have a disc in the physical drive, and are playing an iso file, then unmount the iso file, it will either crash the game, or launch the game on the disc. If someone hits the eject button on the console for the physical drive, the console thinks the mounted iso/svod is ejected and the game kicks you back to NXE in the case of SVODs, and aurora in the case of iso images. As a tester, I have tried all sorts of combinations of stupid things that users, children or adults might do, to find these bugs, and some of them could be devastating to the game you are playing, hince not quite ready for the public, since the Devs are looking for the most stable release possible. 

that option that had that opened chat support with Xbox Unity users is still or has it been removed?

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16 minutes ago, Fabricio Messias De Godoi said:

that option that had that opened chat support with Xbox Unity users is still or has it been removed?

That is all part of LinkV2, which is still in early development, so it hasnt even been added. What was seen in that teaser thread is some stuff that was being tested privately, The trainer stuff is not in the plugin yet either. So, while the test code exists, it is in a seperate project currently, that will later be merged into this version of Nova. The plugin is one of the most tricky things in Aurora, as it runs in a seperate memory space, and while those things may make it in, it is tricky because you can only access like 8MB of memory that is put aside by the kernel for the hud. The plugin then overwrites the memory space. This means that while we will try to add all of those features, and keep what is already there, it will take some very lean code, and even then, might not be possible to include everything, and keep it stable, and/or fast. we dont know until we write it, and test it, and optimize the shit out of it. And even after all of that, it might still not be enough to get everything that was teased in the plugin. This is a bit more complicated then writing Aurora, in the sense that we can take advantage of the game space memory with Aurora, as it is essentially a game as far as the xbox is concerned. The HUD on the other hand is a very clever hack, as microsoft never intended any application to be able to take advantage of the hud memory space. The only time that memory space is taken advantage of on a retail console is when playing original xbox games, as they needed every bit of memory they could get to pull that off due to achetecture changes, and even then, some original xbox games/homebrew dont really play all that well, or at all. So, my guess is, that in order to take advantage of the hud space there is some tricky assembly code that goes into it, as microsoft didnt write functions in the XDK to do that, which makes it way more complicated to write than any other type of app for the xbox. Dont get me wrong, a lot of games and apps take advantage of ASM, just because you can further optimize some things, if you know what you are doing, than the compiler can. Long story short expect an aurora themed version of the freestyle plugin we have been using for 5 years now, rebranded as nova, or you are going to be severely disappointed. If a greyed out netIso makes it in, then it will be maybe 1% better as far as end user features go, as that will be disabled, and useless, even if you were to enable it, by modifying the theme, it wouldnt be useful without the server for the PC, unless you want to do some network protocol analasys, and try to reverse engineer the server with only the client half of the communication. That would be one hell of a challenge at that, not impossible, but not a beginner project at all either. As I have said already, most of the changes are back end bug fixes, and changes to make it more compatible with the code base of aurora, and to get it ready to add some of these new features you want so much.   

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I am good with getting what is done out now. The changes look significant enough for it to be a major upgrade. The netISO would be really nice yo have though. If we can release .7 without netISO and NOT hold up dev on that front then I am all for it.

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34 minutes ago, Syco54645 said:

I am good with getting what is done out now. The changes look significant enough for it to be a major upgrade. The netISO would be really nice yo have though. If we can release .7 without netISO and NOT hold up dev on that front then I am all for it.

The bugs in aurora 0.7b outside of nova have been fixed for close to 5-6 months, and I will say we came across some interesting bugs. lol. We were trying to get the webUI fixed and themed for aurora, and bring a better option then connectX for games, that could be updated, and ran faster. Are those things needed no, but personally, I like the idea of netISO, even if it is for ripping iso images to the hdd, since you can mount it, and then run the game installer script. It would make life so much easier for me, in the sense that I wouldnt have to say go get this app to convert that from god to iso, then get this app to extract the iso, then ftp that to the console. It is put the image in a folder, scan the paths on the server, go to the xbox and mount it, then do it how you would with any disc game, or just play it as is. That is from a help desk capacity though, which is kind of what I do on this site. Dont get me wrong, it is great for playing games as well, but due to what it is, it doesnt add games to coverflow, or any of that, like connectX does, it sees it as if you put a disc in the console. I didnt test it with music isos, or dvd iso's, but the ISO loader on the server could probably do that easily with minimal code changes as well, if any at all. Should totally bring that up to Ro, cant believe that I just thought of that. lol.  

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1 hour ago, Blackjack said:

Certainly WebUI. Thank You.

Are you voting to put off aurora 0.7b until netiso and webui are finished and tested, or are you voting to put that off until 0.8b, and get the initial update for nova, and what is completed in aurora 0.7b? The webUI hasnt even made it to the testers yet, so who knows when that will be finished up, and waiting for it could put off the release of aurora 0.7b for quite a while. It really doesnt matter to me, as I already have what they are going to release, if the community decides it wants to put off some of the bigger features for a christmas time release.

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When I read this posts, it remembers me a bit of the "Vista-Story" ;-)

So much new features that it seems to be never done.

Maybe it would realy be better to releas a stable "basic-version" with less features and to bring every new feature with an own new release. I also think this smaler releases would be easier to debug!

But also maybe I  am too much a linux-penguin... :-D

 

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3 hours ago, gavin_darkglider said:

Are you voting to put off aurora 0.7b until netiso and webui are finished and tested, or are you voting to put that off until 0.8b, and get the initial update for nova, and what is completed in aurora 0.7b? The webUI hasnt even made it to the testers yet, so who knows when that will be finished up, and waiting for it could put off the release of aurora 0.7b for quite a while. It really doesnt matter to me, as I already have what they are going to release, if the community decides it wants to put off some of the bigger features for a christmas time release.

We sincerely prefer to have a release like this, webui and NETiso could see in 0.8, we already wait too long and we are looking forward to what has already been done, so if you are thinking about postponing I say no! hahaha, we expect these new features at 0.8

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11 hours ago, BoxBob said:

When I read this posts, it remembers me a bit of the "Vista-Story" ;-)

So much new features that it seems to be never done.

Maybe it would realy be better to releas a stable "basic-version" with less features and to bring every new feature with an own new release. I also think this smaler releases would be easier to debug!

But also maybe I  am too much a linux-penguin... :-D

 

This is nothing like the vista story..... As far as being too much of a linux penguin, that is funny. Take it from someone who has been running linux since 2004. You want to talk about linux being better on the release schedule, here is a perfect example of a couple of apps that took years for updates even being opensource. This list includes Compiz 0.8 series(0.9 was done by ubuntu devs for unity, but didnt work outside of that enviornment), so from 2008 to 2016, there really werent any updates there. Audacious just put out a new update, but previously the last update came out in 2013. DansGuardian's last update came out in 2009, though it was succeeded by e2guardian. I could keep going, but your argument is funny at best. The other thing about a rolling release that you might not realize, is sometimes it breaks other things, especially in linux, as if a library gets updated, but an app that uses that library doesnt, sometime you cant recompile that app to work with the new library. Take it from some one who runs a pure gentoo system with the experimental packages. I have had to manually patch a lot of apps to get them to compile with a new version of the same library. A perfect example of this is if you try to build IORTCW, or IOQUAKE3, using system libs, and not the libs included with it, stupid stuff like the ZLIB unzip functions moved to different headers, the SDL library changes cause some interesting mouse issues, etc. Now, after alot of time going through code, googling for fixes, etc, I have managed to hack, in a very dirty way, some fixes for some of this stuff. 

As for the new major features, you are talking about(NetISO, and WebUI) didnt take half as long to debug as the DVD Panel, Avatar stuff, Dashlaunch, save game manager, etc included in 0.7b. Honestly, As far as aurora goes, we had a stable version of 0.7b when this thread started. A few bugs have been fixed since then, but for the most part it has been done. The NetISO stuff, and webUI would probably be done already, but we have lives.The person working on the WebUI just had a baby a couple of months back, so between the day job there, and the baby, they dont have a bunch of time to rewrite the webUI, as for the NetISO stuff, being one of the main testers on that, and having reported more bugs there than pretty much anyone else there, I can say that there are some tricky problems such as hooking the SMC to stop the kernel from receiving the eject signal, but still allowing the drive to eject while an iso/svod image is mounted. Or fixing/finishing the server side software. I could keep going. The idea behind adding these features was to give users some new things with Nova, and get back the rest of the functionality of the freestyle plugin that was lost when it was integrated into aurora(WebUI). There have also been a lot of updates to the underlying code of the plugin, to fix bugs, and update things like the webserver, SSL for link, The RSS feed bug, where after the server was updated, if RSS was enabled for the plugin(RSS feed is now in aurora 0.7b as well, so it needs to be mentioned we are talking about the plugin), it would crash the HUD when trying to connect to link. 

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Please don't misunderstand me! :-)

I wasn't talking about the quality or the time that an update takes. I meant the release cycles! The most Linux-Distros and nowadays Windows 10  put out a new release in a frequent and they look at a new feature and if its done its in, if it not done its in the next release.

In my opinion its more comfortable for the developers cause they can release smaller updates with less changes and they have less time pressure.

But all this is just my opinion!! All the people who are working on Aurora can do what they want and release it when they mean that it is time to release. I know how much hard work and time goes in such an project and I really show my deepest respect to this people!!

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Keep in mind, that what doesn't get added in this next release has a high chance of not being released any time soon- possibly as far out as a year, or ever.    Granted, it could come out a few months later- it all depends on our motivation and work load to push out another release at any given time.

 

So if you are voting for release what works now- then you are doing so with the understanding that the future is incredibly uncertain- and not on any particular schedule.

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8 minutes ago, MaesterRowen said:

Keep in mind, that what doesn't get added in this next release has a high chance of not being released any time soon- possibly as far out as a year, or ever.    Granted, it could come out a few months later- it all depends on our motivation and work load to push out another release at any given time.

 

So if you are voting for release what works now- then you are doing so with the understanding that the future is incredibly uncertain- and not on any particular schedule.

But if you do not release now is there a guarantee of another release in the future or may we be in the same situation just at .6 rather than .7?

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9 minutes ago, MaesterRowen said:

Keep in mind, that what doesn't get added in this next release has a high chance of not being released any time soon- possibly as far out as a year, or ever.    Granted, it could come out a few months later- it all depends on our motivation and work load to push out another release at any given time.

 

So if you are voting for release what works now- then you are doing so with the understanding that the future is incredibly uncertain- and not on any particular schedule.

I agree, I can be released the way it is.

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2 minutes ago, Syco54645 said:

But if you do not release now is there a guarantee of another release in the future or may we be in the same situation just at .6 rather than .7?

My personal goal is to get out at least one more release, we have a lot of awesome features that are just waiting to get into public hands.   If it includes NetISO and WebUI- awesome, but if not, awesome as well.    After 0.7, i dont know what's going to happen or what a potential release schedule could look like.

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NetISO and WebUI would be awesome to have, what a way to put a bow on this entire endeavor.  Still, I say release and let the people know what you've been doing.  We've waited this long for .7, we can wait for NetISO and WebUI as well.  If it doesn't materialize, so be it.  Ya'll have already done amazing things for the 360 scene, people are STILL floored when they see my modded console for the first time.  Aurora is the reason why my 360 isn't in a box in the attic right now, so just know that whether we make it to NetISO and WebUI or not, you already have the gratitude of the scene for helping these little boxes become the monsters that they are.

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1 hour ago, MaesterRowen said:

My personal goal is to get out at least one more release, we have a lot of awesome features that are just waiting to get into public hands.   If it includes NetISO and WebUI- awesome, but if not, awesome as well.    After 0.7, i dont know what's going to happen or what a potential release schedule could look like.

i am conflicted then...

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