Strip Compass for starter.fps released

#1 Well, I have just started playing around with TGE 1.5.2 and Ed's book GPGT and I'm having a lot of fun so far. I know Ed's post above is quite old, and I'm also not sure this is the proper place to post my question, but this is the only post I could find concerning the Strip Compass.

I tried last night , 4 times, to install the Strip Compass. I *think* I carefully followed the directions (it was pretty late). The starter.fps missions still come up fine after the install (with the exception of Stronghold, which always hangs) but the compass is not there.

Does anyone know if the compass is compatible with TGE 1.5.2?

Is it possible the compass is there, but not visible to me for some reason?

Anyone have any other suggestions I could follow?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer me!

#2 Well, I finally got it to work. I'm not sure what went wrong or how, but I don't understand how this compass could have worked for anyone, unless things have changed in Torque since he wrote it. Here are my observations, which hopefully will save people some time.

First off In Ed Maurina's strip compass package there are 3 playgui files. The only one you need to deal with is playGui.gui_solution1. Solution0 is an older version, and playGui.gui_bak is just that, a backup.

I found the instructions in the read me file to be fairly arcane. They seem to be overkill, but I suspect they will work. However, the compass will still not show up, even if you follow the directions faithfully (at least it didn't for me).

Using a text file comparison program to compare the original playGui.gui to Ed's file I determined that playGui.gui_solution1 is missing the following line:

canSaveDynamicFields="1";

file as given includes the following snippet:

//--- OBJECT WRITE BEGIN ---
new GameTSCtrl(PlayGui) {
profile = "GuiContentProfile";
horizSizing = "right";
vertSizing = "bottom";
position = "0 0";
extent = "640 480";
minExtent = "8 8";
visible = "1";
helpTag = "0";
noCursor = "1";

You need to amend the above to include the canSaveDynamic commands as follows:


//--- OBJECT WRITE BEGIN ---
new GameTSCtrl(PlayGui) {
canSaveDynamicFields="1";
profile = "GuiContentProfile";
horizSizing = "right";
vertSizing = "bottom";
position = "0 0";
extent = "640 480";
minExtent = "8 8";
visible = "1";
helpTag = "0";
noCursor = "1";

Compass will then function properly.

Hurray!

#3 Hey I was using this resource, modifying it to my needs, I wanted to resize it so it fit in a bit better, took it down from 400 width to 150 width, which is a 37.5% decrease However I end up with this happening: Note: The strip is the strip that was supplied, I just edited its appearance in photoshop, to give a more fitting look for my project I didn't move anything around, just changed colors and background.


which leads me to believe that something is special about the 400 width of the frame and the 1200 width of the strip. I tried reducing the strip to 450, which is also a 37.5% decrease, but this didn't help either. I also get other jumps in the compass when looking around. I saw some script pointing to stripwidth but I don't see why I have to change function variables if i leave the strip the same width but only limit the view field.