MiDs update

[Snarky]

Progress is great.  driving a thing into the ground is not progress.

 

We all know MiDs has gone steadily downhill.  I just tried to load the new update.  Now the program no longer works.  So.  Bright side, you will not have to listen to my snarky comments on MiDs builds anymore.

[srmalloy]

4 minutes ago, Snarky said:

I just tried to load the new update.  Now the program no longer works.

Uninstall Mids, then run the installer again; that fixed the problem for me.

[High_Beam]

Yeah man, the last update, after I uninstalled and reinstalled works fine.

 

v3.7.4 rev 9 using Homecoming DBVersion 2024.5.759

Windows 10 22H2

 

I know it can be a little frustrating sometimes, but seriously its the best tool we have for the job and until something better comes along, I will support it.  They do listen to bug reports and do actively work to fix them.

[Lunar Ronin]

Your best bet with Mids Reborn is to not use the installer at all and just use the ZIP archive.

[Snarky]

8 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

Uninstall Mids, then run the installer again; that fixed the problem for me.

Thanks I uninstalled everything and did a fresh install.  Which, now works.  ...and tells me there is a new update.  Seriously, their latest link.  

 

Either the new people working on this program are idiots, or if it is the same people they are drinking way heavier in their later years.

 

This thing has become a piece of hot garbage.

[High_Beam]

Yes the latest installer is for 3.7.4 rev 8 while rev 9 is an update only

[PhotriusPyrelus]

25 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

Uninstall Mids, then run the installer again; that fixed the problem for me.

This crap is getting old.  What the hell is the point of an auto-updater if it's going to break the program so I have to go manually install it anyway.

[shortguy on indom]

• HAVE YOU TRIED TURNING IT OFF THEN ON AGAIN?

[Sanguinesun]

4 hours ago, Snarky said:

Thanks I uninstalled everything and did a fresh install.  Which, now works.  ...and tells me there is a new update.  Seriously, their latest link.  

 

Either the new people working on this program are idiots, or if it is the same people they are drinking way heavier in their later years.

 

This thing has become a piece of hot garbage.

 

If you really want to be a glutton for punishment, head to their discord to give feedback. 🤢

 

Honestly, I wish someone would come up with and maintain a better planner, if just to simply to make the situation less complacent by the ones running mids now. Right now its more or less the feeling of the South Park episode where they were dealing with the cable company.

Edited June 5 by Sanguinesun

[Digirium]

It should be expected by now every new major release of MRB has consistently ended up being an uninstall and fresh new install, at least for me. There is some new cosmetic stuff in the latest version which I thought "Thanks!" then kept using MRB the same old way I have always used MRB. May be one day I will try out those new features?

 

Worryingly there is stuff broken now that was not broken before in the previous major release.

 

The problem is the code is a nightmare to understand and develop upon without breaking something. Two steps forward, fractions of a step backward is the cost. Even though it is not 100% MRB is still workable when you know the bugs old and new and can adapt for them.

 

Without it, many of us would probably give up playing.

 

 

 

Edited June 6 by Digirium

[PhotriusPyrelus]

3 hours ago, Sanguinesun said:

I wish someone would come up with and maintain a better planner

Hear, hear.  One that's friendly to making sub-50 characters would be nice.

[Oubliette_Red]

I'll wait whilst one of you volunteers your time and builds a new app.

[Lunar Ronin]

33 minutes ago, Oubliette_Red said:

I'll wait whilst one of you volunteers your time and builds a new app.

 

And then it can sit quietly with the half dozen other failed attempts over the past five years.

[Ghost]

I see people complaining about mids, but I genuinely don’t know what the problem is.

 

I’ve not had issues with it and am generally very happy with it.

 

What issues have you guys so upset with it?

[Ukase]

I can understand the frustration. It happened to me. AND - what makes it laughable, is a fellow on the help channel just put out a psa about manually installing, and I'm just saying, no - the app will now do that for you. And they say, yeah, you do that and you'll have to uninstall and reinstall it to get it to work. 

Silly me, I just assumed it was a problem he was having and I wouldn't have it. But I did. 

Still, it's not like I use mids daily. Just once a week or so. I make the build, then go about ensuring I have the IOs for that build in a bin to just grab as needed. I don't play as often as I used to, (By play, I mean actively play - not market or afk-farm) so a week is about right for me to get to 50. 

I remind myself - these folks built this for free. They try to improve it for free. They fix their own mistakes for free. It must be something they really like doing! 

If nothing else, just go to brainstorm and try the random builder, now that's as scary as some of the rng costumes! 

[Sovera]

Dang. Yes, it has problems. Anyone who can do better or can help the project do better please do so. Until then enjoy your free use of an unpaid program.

[Maelwys]

Mids is by many metrics quite an amazing program.

I remember some of the development work put into the original version and the "marketing" of the program itself on the UK forums (now unfortunately lost to the mists of time) and it really was head and shoulders above the rest at that point, even prior to Inventions (and the other planners like Suckerpunch's never coped with Inventions to my knowledge).
The sheer amount of work that has been put into it over the years in order to create an interface that lets you work with all the Invention types and their resultant set bonuses, boost them, factor in external buffs like Incarnates etc. etc. is staggering; and that's the main reason why attempts to produce a viable alternative have been doomed to failure. Long gone are the olden days where all players had to work with (and therefore all the builders had to worry about coding!) was SO enhancements plus the occasional Hami-O.

The "Reborn" variant of Mids unfortunately suffers from the age old problem of having a team of new devs stuck with a bunch of old legacy code; and changes in CoH (particularly new Powersets and Enhancements) can take a long time to be implemented.
But to be fair, they've kept it in a mostly usable state (despite the installer issues and DotNet Core v6 requirement creep) and most of the consistent inaccuracies in its database [like Robotics MM's Protector Bot Bubble +Defence value] can be manually edited and worked around.

I dare say that if we didn't have MR, it'd become infeasible for most of the playerbase to properly plan and build new characters...

The test server is great, but continually respeccing to test a bunch of different enhancement slot positions gets really tedious really quickly.

City of Data v2 is a brilliant resource, but it often gets updated infrequently. Poor @UberGuy has to manually sync it all up, and at the time of writing the Live Data timestamp is currently more than 3 months old (27th Feb 2024) so it's currently missing a few patches worth of changes.

Ultimately tools like CoD and MR aren't the work of paid teams of employees; so the fact that they're still going at all is something to be celebrated.
 

Edited June 6 by Maelwys

[tidge]

I definitely don't want to diminish the dedication of folks working with legacy code for a rather complicated problem... but I long ago stopped using MIDS variants for personal reasons:

1. It seemed like it needed a LOT of extra resources to install (and run?), far more than I expected for what should be essentially a database tool
2. For me, someone who is familiar with the sets usable for powers, and can reference other sites (City of Data!), the primary value a tool like MIDS would provide would be to see relatively tiny fractional changes between relatively major changes in power/slot choices.
3. It was during an attempted MIDS install, during a period when I was feeling like I should give it another chance, that the HDD it was being installed on bricked itself.

In reverse order:

 

(3) This is the most personal, and it isn't fair to assign blame to MIDS, but hey... it happened!

 

(2) I am not now, never have been, and at this point incredibly unlikely to become the type of player that sweats out an extra point of damage, or 0.3% defense, or tries to build a "perfect" attack chain, or similar. I don't want to yuck in the yum of players who want to go "crunchy", but my perception is that such players often present this attitude with such an intense level of detail and content constraints that I find myself wondering how mellow they would be in other, less structured, content.

 

(1) From the outside... this is very hard to gauge, but having worked professionally on a significant number of software projects, most of which involved legacy code, this project feels like it needs to be refactored. This is a nearly impossible thing to ask a team of volunteers to do, because folks will work on the parts they want to work on.

 

As for how would I refactor/redesign such a tool?

 

#1 I'd start with the Pareto principle and recognize that "80% of the development effort is focused on 20% of the features"... so delay/eliminate the 20% of the features that are going to consume huge amounts of coding. It is fine to put hooks in place for future efforts, but don't try to develop a core that does everything. If I had to guess what 80% of teh user base wants:

• A graphical interface that allows, once an AT is selected
• Choice of primary/secondaries
• Power choices (including from pools, etc.) and slot placements
• Appropriate/allowable enhancement slots for chosen powers, plus set bonuses
• "Totals" for powers (considering ED, natch) and "globals" (including "toggles")
• Saving/exporting/importing builds

Things like "DPA", even though it is considered critical to some players, could probably take a bake seat for 80% of the user base. Heck, even though I use procs, I'd probably be able to live without an explicit calculation for "%proc" chance to start. Even though *I* go for accolades... and even Incarnates... these are other considerations that *I* think might complicate getting a smoothly working product.

 

#2 is more code-specific, and likely unfair because of my unfamiliarity with the code base... I'd try to make the database (of classes, of power sets, of enhancement sets, etc.) completely standalone and "distributable" such that a local version of the database could be relatively trivially installed/modified/updated locally by users... and if necessary refactor the database. I want to believe the database is relatively well-constructed, because of how well City of Data shows things... but years ago it felt like there were a number of database issues with the MIDS variants. Similarly... get the core UI working, and come up with a way that it wouldn't need to be tweaked.

[Maelwys]

17 minutes ago, tidge said:

1. It seemed like it needed a LOT of extra resources to install (and run?), far more than I expected for what should be essentially a database tool

This is a headache for me too actually.

My main desktop PC doesn't even notice... but my old laptop really struggles to run Mids Reborn whereas the original version of Mids ran on it just fine. It seems that all the new graphical fluff they've added in recent versions has bloated everything down to a crawl on any kit with a lighter and/or no dedicated graphics card.

The current version of Mids Reborn actually has a noticeably longer startup time and requires substantially more resources on my laptop than running the CoH client itself!


Regarding the rest, as far as I'm aware the Mids database files are "standalone", which is how it lets you swap between Rebirth/Homecoming/etc. in the options menu. However updating them requires a good deal of manual curmudgeonry (it'd be lovely if both MR and CoD were able to automatically import new database changes from the game client files; but no such luck!) and for some reason minor program updates seem to keep borking the edit feature (and gaining access to the Database Edit Menu in the first place still requires typing in an incoherent string of keypresses for some reason - [Ctrl+Shift+Alt+A] IIRC...)
 

Edited June 6 by Maelwys

[golstat2003]

On 6/5/2024 at 3:26 PM, PhotriusPyrelus said:

This crap is getting old.  What the hell is the point of an auto-updater if it's going to break the program so I have to go manually install it anyway.

 

They should default to not having the auto updater on. If I want to update I'll go do that on my own. Either that or they have rock solid testing that it doesn't break the program when it auto updates.

[BazookaTwo]

Just get a Mac then you can't run mids and won't worry about it. Works for me. 

 

Seriously I'd love to see this tool making use of city of data in a web app format. It makes zero sense for it t be standalone anymore. 

[Lunar Ronin]

4 hours ago, BazookaTwo said:

Just get a Mac then you can't run mids and won't worry about it. Works for me. 

 

Seriously I'd love to see this tool making use of city of data in a web app format. It makes zero sense for it t be standalone anymore. 

 

It makes perfect sense why Mids still remains a standalone program instead of a web app.  Because the developers are Windows programmers, not web programmers.

[Mopery]

I don't know about accepting this horse from you for free... how's its dental work?

[Luminara]

On 6/6/2024 at 7:33 AM, Ghost said:

What issues have you guys so upset with it?

 

The UI has been revised several times, introducing bugs which are sometimes fixed, sometimes ignored and often break again on the next update if they are fixed.  Elements are moved around with no respect for usability or visual appeal, like the buttons at the top which are all bunched up, wasting space and leaving huge swaths of empty space to either side, and the vast expanse of empty space introduced with the main window scroll function.  Some font settings ignore bold/normal checkboxes (they used to work, then they didn't, then they did, and now they don't again) and tiny fonts which ignore size settings.

 

The UI's usability decreases with each update.  Can't toggle temp powers as a group any more, for instance, they have to be manually toggled on and they turn off every time you slot or remove an enhancement.  Power stats change location on the info tab.  It's now impossible to see at a glance what a power's Accuracy is, or how much Endurance it costs because the location of a stat isn't fixed.  Trying to work with a Kheldian or SoA build is an exercise in frustration because the UI shits itself even harder, adding scroll bars or cutting off power lists.  In old Mids', when you scrolled with the mouse wheel, it would scroll the power description, now scrolling does nothing useful and actively hinders usability.

 

The databases haven't been updated since the SCoRE era.  They've been manually edited, but not actually updated.  There are hundreds of powers with erroneous stats that don't match the live databases.  And that's especially egregious in light of the capability to pull directly from the .piggs and do automated updates like City of Data, because it means they're ignoring everything except new powers, so the less familiar someone is with the game, the worse his/her experience is going to be if he/she's using Mids'.  This was a tool created to make the game experience better, and it's not capable of fulfilling that purpose for new players or users any more.

 

There are ongoing issues with database editing, so bad that they tried to lock users out of editing the database.  Editing the temp powers group errors out, for example, so you can't add missing temp powers, and if you remove temp powers with the expectation that it's a "not enough room" problem, it allows that then crashes when you try to add what you want, leaving you with even less options.

 

Enhancement mutual exclusivity becomes more and more aggressive with each update, making it harder and harder to work with things like ATOs, and despite people actively trying to explain to them that they're making the program less usable by preventing users from slotting them differently in flipped powers, they keep doubling down on the exclusivity.

 

The .Net and Edge Webview requirements are excluding Mac and Linux users, and even experienced Mac and Linux users are finding it more difficult to make the program work with each update.  They added databases for other server groups so more people could use the program... then turned around and made the program less accessible to non-Windows people.

 

And they're avoiding the forums, refusing to engage with us, so they're effectively working in an echo chamber.  They're no longer developing the program for players, they're doing it for themselves and "graciously" allowing us to use it, with its multitude of bugs, problems and oversights.

[Ghost]

Thanks @Luminara for the detailed explanation.

 

Im oblivious to a lot of things, so I honestly never knew there were so many issues.