TURBU

I’ve been really busy with work in the last couple months, but I’ve found some time to work on TURBU as well.  The next one’s almost ready, and should be out sometime this week.  I’m still putting the finishing touches on it, though.

I’ve added a bunch of new Event Builder editors, plus music-playing capabilities, but probably the biggest change is to the project database.  I’m changing the storage mechanism from the old, built-in file format to a Firebird database.  (Don’t worry; you won’t need to set up a database server on your system or anything scary like that. Firebird’s got an “embedded mode” that can run a local database file without needing a server.)

This has several advantages.  First, the load time at the start of the program will be much faster, since I don’t have to read through the entire database file to find the stuff that the program needs, the way the current system does.  Second, since the database has several checks it can do to make sure your data is good, setting this up has helped me find and fix a bunch of bugs.  And third, the big one:

NO MORE RE-IMPORTS WITH EVERY NEW VERSION!

I know some of you have really big projects, and running the importer every time a new version comes out can be painful.  It had to be done to accommodate new data or new formats, but with a real database, changing the format can be done without wiping out and rebuilding all the data, so in the future when you get a new version and things have changed, it’ll go to open your project database, see that its format is outdated, and update it for you automatically.  This also means that you’ll be free to actually do some serious work with the TURBU editor, since you know your changes won’t be wiped out in the next release.

I’ve still got a few minor details to work out, but the new version should be up within a few days.