WadAuthor Progress Update #3 (03/01/01)

Database Hell/Purgatory

My life since the last update has been very little fun, and let me stress heavily the "very little" qualifier. This week, just as in the last update, I have made very little progress with WadAuthor. The reason for this lack of progress remains the same: I have been trapped in database hell, or at least database purgatory. There is little I can think of in terms of software development and maintenance that is less fun than cleaning up database errors—particularly when they are not my own. Nevertheless, I have completed my first pass with the project at hand, and I have hope that I shall not be distracted by it like this again. In short, I hope my penance in database purgatory has been completed.

Some Minor Progress

Despite the torments of database purgatory, I've managed to get a few things done, the very least of which is a change to the minimum grid size. A post to the DoomWorld message boards requested a minimum grid size of a single unit. Apparently WadAuthor's previous minimum of two units, which is in fact the best real resolution the game engines themselves support to my knowledge, was insufficient for this hard-core precision maven. Never let it be said that something as silly as reason gets in the way of my accommodating users (grin). The minimum grid size is now one unit for whatever that's worth.

The second and more interesting news item to report is that the new image browser is 99% feature complete. All that remains is for me to fix some minor scrolling problems. By the way, if one notices scrolling popping up again and again as a problem in these updates, rest assured it's for a good reason: keeping scrolling straight between logical and device units with Windows is a pain as far as I'm concerned. It always involves hordes of niggling little bugs in my experience. But then I suppose that's why I get the big money, right? Whoa! I think I broke my sarcasmometer with that one.

Anyway, I have decided to include a couple of screen shots this week in order to show people where the code base is currently. All of these images were captured at my normal desktop resolution of 1280 x 1024 x 32 bpp with no doctoring, then dumped to a JPG file of moderate quality thanks to Fireworks 3.0, my web graphics tool of choice. You know the drill: click the following thumbnails for full-size versions.