I've had several people on the Minecraft forums contact me about Amidst and seed logging.
To those that weren't aware of "History.txt" and how to get Amidst to start logging I provided instructions on how to get that set up.
Tied to this is the ability to go back to a previously displayed map.
I would love to see the logging functionality of Amidst enhanced somewhat.
At one point in time I was hoping for different history file names and locations for different MC profiles.
This may not be necessary as 4.0 logs the MC version that was use to display the seed.
However, as I typed that last line I realized that now there is a problem.
What needs to be done about the situation of wanting to display a previous seed that was displayed with a different profile than the one currently being used?
Possibly warning the user that they MAY not get the same map as was previously displayed?
This would require Amidst to read and parse the history entry, not just extract the seed from it.
I can see situations where a user might actually want to do this to see what changes exist between different Minecraft versions. For example, Stronghold location differences between a 1.8.9 world and a 1.9 world.
I'm currently running two instances of Amidst at the same time with one set for my 1.8.9 profile and the other set to my 1.9 profile just so I can produce both map .png files to post to the forums.
Of course, I have to edit the file names since they are saved to the same folder (directory) and both Amidst instances use the same naming style.
I've come up with an Amidst history file archiving "system" that's a little clunky but works for me.
As time goes on my history files get quite large since I tend to use Ctlr-R a lot.
I use a program called Notepad++ as my text editor for displaying and editing these files because of one very nice feature of the program. It monitors the status of any files that it currently has tabs open for. If Amidst writes to the history.txt file and I've got that file open in Notepad++ then Notepad++ updates its display to show the appended line to the file.
Notepad++ is strictly a Windows program.
For equivalent programs for Mac see: http://formac.informer.com/notepad
For Linux see: http://askubuntu.com/questions/313973/what-are-the-alternatives-to-notepad-on-ubuntu
My archiving system consists of three files:
history-blank.txt which is a one line .txt file that is copied to produce a new, empty history.txt file.
That single line looks like this at this time:
Amidst v4.0 History file
TimeStamp.vbs which is a VisualBasic program that produces a text string containing the current date and time and passes it to the calling batch file.
RenameHistory.bat which is the batch file that renames the current history.txt file with a date and time. For example: "history 2016-03-02 0129.txt"
Here's the contents of RenameHistory.bat :
Rem TimeStamp.vbs needs to be in this same folder
@echo off
cd C:\Users\Alan\Favorites\Downloads\Amidst40
Rem the above line needs to be set to the current location of these files
for /f "tokens=1-5 delims= " %%A in ( ' cscript //nologo TimeStamp.vbs ' ) do (
set dd=%%A
set mm=%%B
set yyyy=%%C
set hh=%%D
set mn=%%E
)
if %dd% LEQ 9 set dd=0%dd%
if %mm% LEQ 9 set mm=0%mm%
if %hh% LEQ 9 set hh=0%hh%
if %mn% LEQ 9 set mn=0%mn%
REM Format requested: history 2009.03.13 2126.txt
rename "history.txt" "history %yyyy%-%mm%-%dd% %hh%%mn%.txt"
copy history-blank.txt history.txt
pause
exit
Of course, I have to remember to invoke this batch file every once in a while but when the size of the history file gets to several hundred lines I get annoyed enough to do it.
The reason I keep the current history.txt file open in an editor is so I can quickly add a comment to the file about the map being displayed. Luckily Notepad++ will warn me if Amidst has written to the the file and the one in its buffer is now out of sync. I have to be careful to remember to hit Ctrl-S (to save my changes in Notepad++) before hitting Ctrl_R in Amidst.
That leads up to my next request.
Add the ability to append a comment to the history file just below the currently displayed map entry.