Rajada thanks you for not bringing suit...

To be honest, I always thought the NAB CP 2.5 would be the best thing to happen to NAB for a while. I never expected to be in charge of the thing, just to update the content. I never expected to run the community, nor maintain the Updater.

Yet here I am, years after I dug this game out of the bargain bin at a Comp USA with a steady stream of people who still take an interest in NAB and find the time to really play it.

I also never expected to become a programmer either. That was a huge surprise. My first experiences with coding were frustrating and boring. Turns out you just have to look at it differently. In some cases however, some bits of code are just a brick wall covered in spikes. Which is why the Menu Update Part Two is taking so long.

I’ve coded up about a dozen possible solutions to my problem, but the issue is none of them worked. What I want to do is link a botmatch menu up to the singleplayer stats page. Seems easy enough, until you start trying to wrap your head around parent window code dependencies.

Ultimately, I think my solution will be along these lines…

I have to remove most of the code from the stats window and put it into a new, child window. Then using some previous examples, model the stats window to open the new child window, with the botmatch button that will force the parent window to switch to a different child window, namely the botmatch setup window. Of course, a button back to the stats child window will be required too.

So I guess the whole point of this is to let you all know that the wheels are still turning, albeit slowly and with a grinding noise to rival a wood chipper full of Backstreet Boys merchandise. I’m going to eventually get this all settled, then I’ll be able to work on the next huge challenge, the Mutator Selection menu. Even though it’s mostly going to be ‘just copy/adapt the code from UT’, I don’t even know how I’m going to approach that one, possibly in a haz-mat suit with a 15 foot pole and a bomb-defusing robot.

I’m thinking about doing it like this:

Since there is no need for a new CP because the files I am updating are not config files, I can release the menu update through the Updater. Right now there is two features missing, the mutator window and the set up botmatch window (though the button is there). I am thinking about releasing the menu update in two or three parts since this first one is already 16 megs zipped!

After I finish the menu updates I will work on the CP 3.0. which will have a small amount of changes, but save new users the trouble of 2 or 3 of those 12 megs + updates.