Brass Quick FAQ
This FAQ is designed to answer some of the most
common questions about Brass. It's not a substitute for reading
the documentation though, which you should!
Q. What is Brass, quickly?
Brass itself is a container system for plugins.
Plugins are the shiny magic part of Brass. Whilst it's Brass that
provides the framework for all the magic to happen, it's the plugins
that actually contain the functionality. Not very clear, I know.
Read on, download Brass, play with it and all will become clear.
Q. What are the system requirements?
You must be running Windows 2000, Windows XP or
Windows 2003 Server. It's hard to state a minimum requirement for
processor or memory, because different plugins have different requirements.
For example a 3D graphic intensive plugin will need a faster processor
and more RAM than a calendar plugin. If you have a P3-500 and 256mb
of RAM you'll be fine.
Q. Is Brass going to impact my
system performance?
Absolutely not. Brass was designed to be small
and fast - the main Brass application with the 4 standard plugins
(Basic Start, Desktop Text, NewsGrinder, Mime) is approximately
2 megabytes in size. Right from the start Brass was designed to
be fast, easy to use and modular. All these cool features are no
use if your PC grinds to a halt every time you look at one. That's
why Brass doesn't use any scripting language for its plugins - Javascript,
XML and even Visual Basic are all nice ideas but they're just too
slow and bloated to be user friendly. Brass is written in a mixture
of C++ and Assembly language to give maximum performance.
Q. How do I get started?
Very simple. Download the main Brass application
and install it. Then visit the Plugins
section and see which plugins take your fancy. Download those and
install them. Run Brass, it will find your plugins and make them
ready for you to use. All you need to do now is use them!
Q. That's it?
Yes, really. Brass was designed to be as easy to
use as possible.
Q. Can I write my own plugins?
Sure! There's a detailed developer
guide that includes code samples, a language reference and a
complete tutorial on creating your first game. Included in the Brass
installer is SSEdit, an integrated development system for Brass
plugins. You'll be able to start writing your own plugins in just
a few minutes!
Q. I came here because I heard
about mouse gestures tomfoolery. What?
You're in the right place! There is a very special
plugin for Brass called Mime. This
plugin lets you use mouse gestures in any Windows application -
and I really do mean any application. Simply download and
install Brass, then download the Mime plugin, configure the gestures
you want to use and you're done!
Q. How do I install a plugin manually?
If you don't want to use the plugin installer (or
if your selected plugin doesn't come with one) manual installation
is easy. Brass plugins are DLL files, and usually come with some
config files and bitmap images. Simply copy the DLL to the Plugins
directory in the Brass installation directory (usually C:\Program
Files\Brass), then copy any other files that came with the DLL to
Plugins/DLLName directory. So if your plugin is called AcmeGlue
you would copy AcmeGlue.dll to C:\Program Files\Brass\Plugins, and
AcmeGlue.nfo to C:\Program Files\Brass\Plugins\AcmeGlue. It's also
a good idea to read the documentation that comes with the plugin.
Brass imposes certain standards on plugins, but developers do have
freedom to make changes.
Q. How do I delete a plugin?
If you used an installer simply uninstall it via
Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel. If you installed the plugin
manually, delete the DLL file and any associated data files from
the Brass\Plugins directory.
Q. When I try and run Brass twice,
I get an error message about Brass is already running. Why?
Brass has to do some funny things to Windows to
create all that shiny magic. Trying to do those funny things more
than once is not a good idea, so Brass prevents you from loading
it multiple times. Besides, there's no need to load it more than
once.
Q. When I run Brass, I get an
error about it not shutting down properly. Whassup?
Because Brass is based on plugins and anyone can
write a plugin, we (the 32Bits team) can't do quality control on
every plugin that we don't write ourselves. Sometimes plugins might
break, or another Windows application may crash your entire system.
In any event when Brass doesn't shut down cleanly it creates a little
warning flag. If this flag is found when Brass starts up, all auto-loaded
plugins are disabled for your safety. The principle is that if Brass
didn't shut down properly it might have been a rogue plugin, so
we'll disable everything until you can find out what happened and
remove the offending plugin.
Q. A couple of people also use
this computer. Is Brass multi-user comaptible?
Yes! Brass and all plugins created by the 32Bits
team are multi-user compatible, so everyone who uses your computer
can use Brass without breaking someone else's settings.
Q. I downloaded Brass and I can't
access the tray menu/I have to reload my plugins manually
Brass is shareware, and has a few limitations in
the unregistered version. As you've seen, you can't use the tray
menu and you can't automatically load plugins when Brass starts.
Why not register now to remove the
restrictions and support development!
Q. I found another problem that
isn't because of shareware restrictions!
Please come to the
forum and let us know, you don't need to register or create
an account to post. Post all the relevant details of the bug and
we'll get to work fixing it right away!
Q. How do I find out more about
Brass and what's coming for future versions?
You can come along to the
forum to get in touch with the Brass developers. Post a message
and we'll get back to you ASAP. Alternatively you can read and comment
on the Brass developer blog, which
deals with the cutting edge, in-development-right-now side of Brass.
Q. Anything else?
Just a final word of thanks to the people of ASB's
lists and the Tech Unity site, without whom I'd still be trying
to track down a bug caused by Microsoft that only appears on the
31st of Feb when there's a full moon with a black cat and 3 witches
riding a Dyson. In no particular order, a special thanks to: Bart
Southworth, John Harris, Phil Groome, TheGeek and Shauna for being
the #1 reg :)
Other acknowledgements: Brass uses utility code
excerpts from Hans Dietrich at Codeproject, and the FreeImage open
source image library. See http://freeimage.sourceforge.net for details.
FreeImage is used under the FIPL.
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