WadAuthor Progress Update #2 (02/22/01)

One week ago today I posted a progress update regarding the ongoing work on WadAuthor. Because I've received such a positive response and useful feedback, this is something I'm going to try to remember to do on a weekly basis. At least, I'll try to remember to do so as long as there is any news worth reporting (grin).

The Dragon is Slain

Having said that, then, there are only minimal confirmed changes in place as of today, though they are surely quite important. When last I wrote, I had taken the first steps toward slaying a dragon from WadAuthor's past, namely, its zoom limitations. I said then that scrolling was still broken, and oh how it was broken! Not surprisingly lots of other things were broken as well: drag and drop, keyboard placement of new items, panning, rubber-band selection, etc. The biggest news to report for today, I suppose, is that all such problems I could find are fixed. WadAuthor today seems as functional as it was when I first began ripping out the awful old zooming code. The big difference, of course, is that I can zoom in until I get positively dizzy expecting my head to hit the map floor, and that's a plus in my book. I think I can safely say that the zoom-dragon is finally dead!

Research

Now that I have fixed the zoom and added support for multiple maps, which were previously the two greatest limitations of WadAuthor, I have been working on brand new stuff. Some of it involves code I wrote years ago but never got around to developing more fully while some of it involves entirely new classes. The two items foremost on my research agenda at present are (1) lump management and (2) image browsing.

WadAuthor has never really managed lumps. The WadAuthor Value Pack, a collection of utilities made available to registered users, provides limited features, but WadAuthor doesn't integrate these features within its own user interface. At least, it didn't a week ago (grin). I'm not going to promise that this feature will ever see the light of day, but the work at present is promising. I have added code to my development build to let me choose to open maps within a wadfile or work directly with the resources (i.e., lumps).

If one chooses to work with lumps, then the view is essentially much as a detailed file listing in Windows Explorer. The direction I'm headed right now involves supporting all the basic operations one might want with lumps: adding new lumps, deleting lumps, renaming lumps, etc. I'm not sure yet whether these operations will be immediate or whether they will be queued and then applied to the file at time of save. The former is simpler to code, but I could see how making lots of little changes to a large wadfile could take an enormous amount of time if they are applied singly. I prefer the latter approach, but I don't yet have a feel for the development cost.

Note well: User feedback on how this ought to work would be very helpful.

Regarding image browsing, I always thought WadAuthor's image handling was second to none. I still think this is the case in terms of speed and ease of use, but I must admit that a user suggestion on the board caught my eye. I forget who it was, but someone pointed out that one could see only a handful of images in the image browser dialog box. Since reading that suggestion, I've found the limit kind of annoying myself, so I've been researching possible solutions.

Step one was to make the dialog box fully resizable. This code is done, tested and seems to be working just fine. The dialog box was sized originally for systems running at a resolution of 640 x 480. On my desktop, which I typically keep at 1280 x 1024, the dialog is a bit small to say the least. With the new resizing code in place, however, I can expand it to fill the whole screen. Unfortunately, the image browser does not tile graphics, so it doesn't matter that much how big I make it. I still get maybe eight or nine images at most before I hit the vertical limit. Thus, I'm working on a replacement for the image display control. If I can get past some technical hurdles, the new code will allow display of a much greater number of images by tiling them to make best use of the available space. I don't know yet whether a zoom setting will be included or not. I can say this much with confidence: the image browser dialog will be resizable. It might also provide a better display than ever previously available in WadAuthor.

Well, that's it for now. I've spent very little time on the code base this week because I've had all kinds of other projects clogging up my to-do list. Note to self: never give users the ability to delete records in a database system because (1) they will screw up and delete what ought not be deleted, and (2) they will expect you to fix it. Suffice it to say that WadAuthor has been suffering as the result of mistakes made by users of other software I have written. I have hope that the upcoming week will be better, however, if only I can dig myself out of database hell. Until then, stay tuned for more WadAuthor updates and keep the feedback coming!