Brass User Guide: Configuring Brass
To configure Brass, select the "Configure..."
option from the "Options" menu. Remember, individual plugins
are configured by double-clicking them in the available and active
plugins lists, or by their menu option in the Brass tray menu.
Here's what each option does:
General Tab
"Prompt for confirmation before completely
exiting brass": When you exit Brass, all the plugins
you're using will be shut down. Tick this option if you want Brass
to prompt you for confirmation before exiting, otherwise Brass
will exit immediately and all plugins will be unloaded.
"Remember plugin selections":
Ticking this option tells Brass to save your active plugin selection
to the cache, and reload them when Brass next runs. This is handy
if you always use the same plugins and want Brass to load them
as soon as it loads. The plugins that are automatically loaded
are all the plugins that were active when you exited Brass. The
unregistered version ignores this option.
"Show splash screen when Brass loads":
The splash screen is the shiny Brass logo that appears when Brass
starts up. Untick this if you don't want to see it. The unregistered
version will force it to appear every time.
"Start Brass minimized to the system
tray": By default, Brass will show its main plugin
selection window when it starts up. Ticking this option tells
Brass to immediately minimize to the system tray and not show
an interface.
"Start Brass when Windows loads":
Ticking this option adds a shortcut to Brass to your Startup folder.
Unticking it removes the shortcut.
"Check online for update information
every time Brass starts": As the option implies, when
Brass starts up each time it will contact the Brass website and
see if there are any new updates available. If there are, it will
display a window with the update information.
"Warn me every time the update check
fails at startup": Sometimes the online update check
can fail because of Internet problems, or maybe even because you're
not connected to the Internet at all! Ticking this option will
make Brass tell you when the online check at startup fails. Unticking
will cause it to fail silently & not interrupt you, but that
does mean you won't know if the update has failed.
Hotkeys Tab
"Enable Brass hotkey":
You can specify a global hotkey for the main Brass window. When
you press this hotkey anywhere in Windows, it will immediately
pop the Brass config screen to the front. It's a quick shortcut
to let you manage your plugins through the main interface. The
fields below this checkbox specify what hotkey you want to use
- check that no other application already has this hotkey registered,
otherwise Brass will be unable to use it. If this hotkey option
seems to keep disabling itself, it's because another application
has the same hotkey registered.
"Allow Plugins to register system-wide
hotkeys": Some plugins (such as Outlooker)
have their own global hotkey option. You configure these hotkeys
directly in the plugin configuration. However this option can
be used to globally allow or deny hotkeys from being passed to
the plugins. Normally you'll want to leave this option ticked
and simply enable or disable the hotkeys in each plugin.
Logging Tab
"Logging": This tab allows
you to configure the debug logging for Brass. You
should always leave this set to "Logging is off".
You should only enable logging if you have a specific problem
and the Brass support team have asked you to enable it. Otherwise
it will have a performance impact on your computer, and will churn
out a lot of data that doesn't mean anything to you!
SSE Development Tab
This tab is only for people who want to write their own plugins.
Show Virtual Machine output options:
When developing a plugin it's useful to to see debug information
generated by Brass, and to output your own debug information too.
The 3 radio buttons control when the debug output window should
appear. Most developers will want to choose the "Show Virtual
Machine output only when an SSE is deployed by SSEdit". As
the description implies, this instructs Brass to only the debug
window when the "Run in Brass" option in the "Build"
menu is chosen in SSEdit. Refer to the Developer
Guide for more information on debugging plugins.
"Automatically close the VM output
window ": Plugins can have handlers for shutdown events,
so that when the plugin is unloaded it can perform some final
actions and clean-up. Normally Brass will automatically close
the VM debug output window when a plugin is unloaded; after all,
there's no need to keep the window open when the plugin has exited.
However if you're trying to debug a problem in the shutdown handlers
you might want the debug window to stay open after the plugin
has been unloaded so you can review the output. Unchecking this
option tells Brass to keep a debug window open (one for every
plugin) until you close it manually.
"Suppress improper shutdown message":
It's possible that during development you write some code that
causes Brass to crash, or to go into an infinite loop (see the
next tab to address this). So to get out of the problem you might
want to use "End task" on Brass.exe in the task manager.
Brass detects when an improper shutdown occurred (either due to
a crash or forced exit) and displays a warning on the next startup.
This is useful for users. However because SSEdit can automatically
recover or reload Brass after a crash, seeing this message the
next time you use "Run in Brass" in SSEdit might get
annoying and interrupt your coding. Tick this box to prevent the
improper shutdown message from being displayed.
Virtual Machine Tab
"Crash Avoidance/Infinite Loop Avoidance":
This is an experimental option that turns on code management in
the Brass virtual machine. In simple terms, the virtual machine
analyses and maintains a count of the instuctions executed for
a plugin. When the number of instructions passes the trigger level,
the VM automatically aborts the currently-executed function and
returns control to Brass. This has two effects. First it prevents
infinite loops from crashing the plugin or Brass itself. Second
it allows the plugin to continue running after the abort. This
is useful in case an unusual condition causes an infinite loop
in an otherwise working plugin. The next version of Brass will
attempt to calculate the optimum threshold for loop avoidance.
Until the next version it is strongly
recommended that the instruction count is set to approximately
one million (1,000,000), and no less than 500,000.
Setting this threshold too low will cause legitimate loops in
plugins to be aborted.
"Enable Fastdraw Controls":
This option should only be checked on slow machines that are experiencing
performance problems. When checked, instead of recalculating the
blending and redrawing entire panels when a control state changes
(think button normal to button pressed state), Brass will only
update the region of the panel containing the control that changed.
This massively speeds up the drawing but prevents alphablending
from working properly.
"Show plugin panel contents while
dragging ": When dragging a display panel by the drag
bar, this option controls whether the panel changes to an opaque
square or stays as a properly-drawn panel. This has no effect
on how plugins actually work, it's a visual change only.
"Enable cached drawing":
Plugins can trigger a redraw of the display panel in a number
of ways. Apart from specifically requesting a redraw, certain
instructions have the side effect of redrawing the panel. When
this option is ticked, Brass caches all the plugin's requests
to redraw its panel and simply redraws the panel once after the
last redraw request. How this works internally is quite complex,
so think of it as follows. A plugin can execute 50 instructions
and request 5 redraws. When this option is checked, only 1 redraw
happens. When unchecked, all 5 redraws are done. Enabling this
option provides a massive speed increase, therefore it should
always be left enabled. The ability to disable it is only
provided in case a future plugin creates a situation where cached
drawing causes issues.
Remember, plugins are configured by double-clicking them in the
available and active plugins lists, or by their menu option in the
Brass tray menu.
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