Installation of Bleeding-Edge Sources

It will make things easier if you just use the prebuilt packages. If, however, you want to test the very lates features and fixes, you will need Git. Clone the lightningbeam sources with
git clone git://github.com/skykooler/Lightningbeam.git
To run:
cd Lightningbeam
python lightningbeam (or C:\Python2.7\python.exe lightningbeam on Windows)
And that's it. However, you will probably want a bit more advanced functionality.
The most important thing is probably to be able to view trace() output. The regular Flash player from Adobe can't do this. On Linux, simply install Gnash and run it with -v.

On Mac, you will need the debug Flash player from Adobe and Vizzy. Launch Vizzy first, then open your .swf with the standalone debug player. You should see your trace output in the Vizzy window.
Lightningbeam now displays the trace output internally if you use the debug player. Simply press Tools>Execute and an output window will come up to show the trace, as well as the flash player window.



To enable the experimental OpenGL rendering, you will need PIL and PyOpenGL. This is incomplete, however.

35 comments:

  1. it didn't work. i tried cloning the repo from terminal but i kept getting this error:


    Cloning into Lightningbeam...
    Permission denied (publickey).
    fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

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  2. I fixed that, I put the wrong command up there. The new one should work.

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  3. I managed to get it to run, but all I see is the stage and the drawing tools. Is there supposed to be a toolbar? Terminal says "SyntaxWarning: name 'root' is used prior to global declaration
    global root
    " if that has anything to do with it.

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  4. That line does not matter.
    You should see something along the lines of the first screenshot here: http://lightningbeam.blogspot.com/p/screenshots.html
    There is not toolbar yet.

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  5. That's still not what I'm getting. Here's what I mean http://coolstuff.host56.com/142857.png

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  6. Oh. I got that on my netbook but I thought it was because the screen was too small. I suppose this is a bug related to Unity. Do you still have access to a gnome desktop?

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  7. I'm getting the following error when I run (Win7 64bit with 32bit ActivePython) "Sorry, something went wrong. InternalError: _win_menu_command called on non-window: "

    Traceback:
    WinUtils.py:106 in _win_menu_command
    called from: WinUtils.py:89 in OnCommand self._win_menu_command(id)

    Also had to comment out lines 56&57 in the included GUI\Win32\Font.py file, and add a line saying:
    "pywin32_build = 213"
    because I was getting the following error:
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "lightningbeam.py", line 15, in
    import svlgui
    File "G:\source\Lightningbeam\svlgui.py", line 175, in
    import GUI # Using PyGUI. Experimental.
    File "G:\source\Lightningbeam\GUI\__init__.py", line 94, in
    import GUI.Application
    File "G:\source\Lightningbeam\GUI\Win32\Application.py", line 11, in
    from GUI.GApplications import Application as GApplication
    File "G:\source\Lightningbeam\GUI\Generic\GApplications.py", line 14, in
    from GUI.Printing import PageSetup, present_page_setup_dialog
    File "G:\source\Lightningbeam\GUI\Win32\Printing.py", line 11, in
    from GUI import Canvas
    File "G:\source\Lightningbeam\GUI\Win32\Canvas.py", line 15, in
    from GUI.StdFonts import application_font
    File "G:\source\Lightningbeam\GUI\Win32\StdFonts.py", line 9, in
    from GUI import Font
    File "G:\source\Lightningbeam\GUI\Win32\Font.py", line 56, in
    pywin32_info = api.GetFileVersionInfo(api.__file__, '\\')
    pywintypes.error: (1813, 'GetFileVersionInfo:GetFileVersionInfoSize', 'The specified resource type cannot be found in the image file.')

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  8. Menu bug confirmed; I am looking into it. I haven't managed to reproduce the font one yet.

    Windows should be considered more experimental than other platforms, as I rarely am at a Windows computer to test things. This may change soon though.

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    Replies
    1. As a developer, I can give you a hand. Do you know what that line is supposed to be doing? It looked like a MS API function to me, and I know that you can associate meta information with files in windows, so I checked the file that it was looking at, and it existed, but did not have any "version" info associated with it. I'll try to look it up again to see what is going on there, but a quick search at 5AM after having been up all night didn't produce anything good, lol.

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    2. I do not. That is from the PyGUI package, which I did not write, but merely patched to add a few features (unrelated to menus or file versions). I do know that it uses the MS API for the GUI under Windows, but having never developed a Windows program before I don't know much about what it does under the hood.

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  9. Ok, I just looked it up, and figured out its a line trying to figure out what version of the win32api package is installed by checking the "fileversion" attribute associated with the file. The file it is checking is "G:\Python27\lib\site-packages\win32\win32api.pyd" which means that this dll was built without putting the version attribute on it, which I can verify with explorer (right click, no version information available). I will stick with my workaround for now. Any idea on the menu problem?

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    Replies
    1. No, but I will put traces in WinUtils.py this evening to try to figure this out. I would like to add your workaround to the source, but I'm not sure - will this only work for those who have version 213 then, or does it just need a number?

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    2. I kind of figured out my problem. I just installed win32api from the author's sourceforge page instead of through pypm (I'm using ActivePython) and it now works. there is something wrong with the package it downloaded when i installed through pypm. So you don't have to worry about the workaround.

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    3. Ok, good to know. Thank you.

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    4. I have tracked this back to being the object "win_none_wrapper" created around line 110 in WinUtils.py (I have edited the file, so might be off some). Also, I noticed that the "if id:" line (around line 88) wasn't working correctly. it appears to be checking for non-zero, but it was getting through to the "true" part of the if-else even when it was 0, so i changed it to "if id==0:" but now I'm hitting a situation where we are getting id==1 with the "win_none_wrapper" object. I will continue looking into this throughout the day when i can.

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    5. So, without knowing more about what is going on here (this appears to possibly be a bug with pyGUI) i was able to get it to run without error (at startup) by adding "if self != win_none_wrapper:" after the "if id != 0:" line i modified earlier. Ended up getting an error when clicking the lower right '---' button though. I would love to help more with this project, and may come back to do that, but I'm actually trying to find an alternative to Adobe Flash for doing Scaleform UI's for the UDK, and while this is looking like it will get there some day, it's definitely not what I need right now. Keep up the good work though, and thank you for your contribution!

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    6. Thank you for your help! I agree this is still in the early testing phase, but I hope it will be there some day.

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    7. In the meantime, you could look at swfc (which Lightningbeam uses internally) if you're ok without a GUI - it has a lot more power than I've managed to expose so far.

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    8. Thank you for that! I will definitely look into that. Good luck!

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  10. I'm getting the following error when I run (Winxp 32bit):
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "lightningbeam.py", line 15, in
    File "svlgui.pyc", line 186, in

    File "GUI\__init__.pyc", line 73, in

    ImportError: No module named Globals
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "lightningbeam.py", line 15, in
    File "svlgui.pyc", line 186, in

    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\__init__.py", line 94, in
    import GUI.Application
    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\Win32\Application.py", line 11, in
    from GUI.GApplications import Application as GApplication
    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\Generic\GApplications.py", line 14, in
    from GUI.Printing import PageSetup, present_page_setup_dialog
    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\Win32\Printing.py", line 7, in
    import WinPageSetup as wps, WinPrint as wp
    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\Win32\WinPageSetup.py", line 7, in
    from ctypes import *
    ImportError: No module named ctypes

    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\Win32\WinUtils.py", line 89, in OnCommand
    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\Win32\WinUtils.py", line 106, in _win_menu_command
    InternalError: _win_menu_command called on non-window:


    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\Win32\Component.py", line 232, in _win_event_message
    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\Generic\MessageHandler.py", line 112, in _event_custom_handled
    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\Generic\MessageHandler.py", line 40, in handle_event

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  11. second part (sorry!):

    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\Generic\MessageHandler.py", line 59, in handle
    File "svlgui.pyc", line 776, in mouse_down
    File "svlgui.pyc", line 1902, in _onMouseDown
    File "lightningbeam.py", line 92, in onMouseDownGroup
    File "svlgui.pyc", line 1308, in __init__
    NameError: global name 'FONT' is not defined


    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\Win32\WinUtils.py", line 89, in OnCommand
    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\Win32\WinUtils.py", line 106, in _win_menu_command
    InternalError: _win_menu_command called on non-window:

    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "lightningbeam.py", line 327, in
    File "lightningbeam_windows.pyc", line 193, in __init__

    File "svlgui.pyc", line 2388, in __init__

    NameError: global name 'media_path' is not defined

    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\Win32\Component.py", line 232, in _win_event_message
    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\Generic\MessageHandler.py", line 112, in _event_custom_handled
    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\Generic\MessageHandler.py", line 40, in handle_event
    File "C:\Users\Skyler\Lightningbeam\dist\.\GUI\Generic\MessageHandler.py", line 59, in handle
    File "svlgui.pyc", line 803, in mouse_down
    File "svlgui.pyc", line 1938, in _onMouseDown
    File "lightningbeam.py", line 98, in onMouseDownGroup
    File "svlgui.pyc", line 1335, in __init__
    NameError: global name 'FONT' is not defined

    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "lightningbeam.py", line 15, in
    File "svlgui.pyc", line 192, in

    File "C:\Programmi\skykooler\Lightningbeam\.\GUI\__init__.py", line 74, in
    from GUI.Colors import rgb
    File "C:\Programmi\skykooler\Lightningbeam\.\GUI\Win32\Colors.py", line 7, in
    import win32con as wc, win32api as api
    ImportError: DLL load failed: Impossibile trovare la procedura specificata.
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "lightningbeam.py", line 15, in
    File "svlgui.pyc", line 192, in

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  12. I hope it could be useful, I hate so much Flash player! :)

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  13. You need ctypes installed. If you have 64-bit windows it may not be installed with your system python, you can download it from here.

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    Replies
    1. no, my OS is a Win Xp 32.. Pc dell with Atom processor.. 1.60 GHz..could you suggest to me please the correct mirror? thanks a lot.

      m

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    2. In that case, try downloading the latest version of Python, as it should be bundled: http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.2/python-2.7.2.msi

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  14. Hi ..
    the pre-build app is not working on my opensuse 12.2 so i guess the source is the only way to get it ..

    Is there another way to get the source code, other than git ?
    My git isn't working and I've never used it for anything.

    If you need, I could setup a mirror on my site on my annon. ftp and a sub-site.

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  15. TYWM :)

    Looking fwd to try your app :)

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  16. the last version works on firefox! very nice, thank you!

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  17. I get this error on Mac OS X:
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "lightningbeam.py", line 15, in
    import svlgui
    File "/Users/skyler/Lightningbeam/svlgui.py", line 13, in
    from PIL import Image as PILimage
    ImportError: No module named PIL

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    Replies
    1. I fixed this in Git. PIL is used for the experimental OpenGL drawing system, but you're better off without it as I haven't got it to work at all yet.

      Delete
  18. When I tried to run the windows .msi version I got this error in your log :

    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "lightningbeam.py", line 15, in
    File "svlgui.pyc", line 192, in

    File "C:\Program Files\skykooler\Lightningbeam\.\GUI\__init__.py", line 74, in
    from GUI.Colors import rgb
    File "C:\Program Files\skykooler\Lightningbeam\.\GUI\Win32\Colors.py", line 7, in
    import win32con as wc, win32api as api
    ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified procedure could not be found.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That looks like a tricky problem to solve. I'll look into it; in the meantime, what happens if you run in a command line "C:\Program Files\Python[version]\python.exe -vv C:\Program Files\skykooler\Lightningbeam\GUI\Win32\Colors.py", without the quotes, and changing [version] to the versionof Python you have installed?

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  19. Hi,

    I'm really looking forward to trying this package and have downloaded your rpm (lightningbeam-1.0.0-1.any.rpm) but it fails to install in Mandriva, failing with the message 'Incompatible architecture for rpm'.

    I realise Mandriva wasn't listed as a target for this rpm file, but is there a possibility of a port for Mandiva 2011 ? If not, is it possible to get the source code so that I can compile it myself for Mandriva please ?

    Thanks,

    Andrew

    PS: There's a typo in the download link that you show above, i think it should probably read:
    git clone git://github.com/skykooler/Lightningbeam.git as this works but the other doesn't.

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    Replies
    1. That RPM is fairly old; I haven't had an RPM-based system for quite some time now to test on, but the setup.py script can generate RPM packages. I updated the github link, you can now use that to download the source.

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