It’s been awhile since the last Dev Blog post so I’ve decided to write up another. This time however it won’t be about an upcoming update or software release. Instead we’ll have a look at the tools behind maintaining the SwiftKit project. The two main tools that will be shown are the Control Panel and the new Database Editor.

Database Editor
This is a new tool that has been developed to allow SwiftKit staff members to access, modify, add and delete data within the SwiftKit00x.skd files. The SwiftKitData00x.skd files are used for the calculators, quest center, atlas, achievement diary center etc. The tool was written in .NET and connects to a MySQL database on the SwiftKit server. Currently the changes made are not live, in order for the changes to take effect the data needs to be exported, packed and then uploaded. The main benefit of the tool is that it allows other staff members to manage the data instead of just myself.

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Popularity: 28% [?]

It’s been a little while since the last Dev Blog so I thought I should make a post about the Screenshot Viewer I’ve been working on. In SwiftKit RS the Screenshot Viewer is pretty ordinary to say the least so in SwiftKit MS we wanted to give it more purpose. The idea was to have something that’s similar to Windows Explorer, but not as extensive. Here’s what we’ve come up with so far.

You can also check out the new Screenshot Viewer in the latest SwiftKit MS update. For instructions on how to download SwiftKit MS see here.

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Popularity: 53% [?]

It’s been awhile since we announced that we would be developing a toolkit for MechScape so i thought it was about time for the first dev blog post regarding SwiftKit MS. Even though MechScape hasn’t been released, we’ve still been able to work on the non-MechScape related tools and functionality. We’ve also decided that the development of SwiftKit MS will be public, this means that you won’t have to wait till it’s finished to download it. You’ll be able to download ALPHA and BETA versions all the way throughout the development. For now though let’s get into the blog post, you’ll find out more about downloads in a week or two.

Docking Tool Windows:
The first feature I want to talk about, and probably the most important is the ability to dock tool windows. In SwiftKit RS you can sort of do this, by moving the tabs about. In SwiftKit MS though, we wanted to implement it properly. You will have the ability to dock, undock, add, remove, resize, autohide and detach all internal tool windows. You can see an example of this in the screenshots below, when you grab a tool and drag it you are presented with a number of placement options.

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Popularity: 100% [?]

SwiftKit is a client that is used by approximately 40,000 RuneScape users daily, and that count is slowly rising. While that count is impressive, we beleive we have room for improvement as there are a significant number of users who are not in the loop, due to technical or personal reasons. We believe we can change this with a client we have in development, simply, called SwiftKit FF.

SwiftKit Firefox will be an extensive addon which you can load into Firefox which can, and will assist RuneScape users, while keeping within a browser they feel comfortable with.  It will be similar to SwiftKit RS, but with subtle differences, ones which we think our users will like.

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Popularity: 44% [?]

One feature for SwiftKit we’ve always wanted to add was a way to count the current active users. We tried a number of methods a few years ago but all were unsuccessful, mainly due to not putting the proper thought required into the process. This time however, we stood back, looked at what needed to be done and took our available resources into account.

If we had a big beefy dedicated server at our disposal the implementation of such a feature would most likely of been quite trivial. A simple connection between SwiftKit and the server with a ping pong type system to validate connectivity would of been fine, then we could of just counted the number of connections and voila. The problem was we knew the number of SwiftKit users at any given time would be anywhere between 5 and 20 thousand. So we couldn’t do the method mentioned above on the resources that were available to us.

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Popularity: 47% [?]