Week 42
Tiled Monday
I picked up the wip/tilesetdocument branch again and wanted to continue with the change that will make the Tilesets view show all open tilesets rather than just the ones from the current map. I ended up doing mostly some cleanup in the MainWindow class.
In the meantime on IRC somebody asked how to deselect the selected area, and it turned out there was no convenient way to do so in two of the three selection tools. Only the Rectangular Selection tool allows you to click without moving to clear the selection. Now I made it possible to deselect using right-click in all tile selection tools. I should probably reconsider how the Rectangular Selection tool works as well, since people are sometimes confused by the way it determines the area to select (which was mainly to allow a simple click to deselect).
I also wrote the previous development update and merged further changes by Mike Thomas needed to get libtiled-java deployed to OSSRH.
Tiled Friday
Probably the best way to run Qt applications on a HiDpi screen is to use QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=1. This automatic scaling factor doesn’t affect the fonts, and it adjusts dynamically when moving applications between screens. I’ve enabled this behavior for Tiled by default and also improved the quality of some of the icons (80a73171).
I worked the rest of the day on the wip/tilesetdocument branch, trying to finish the change towards showing all currently opened tilesets in the Tilesets view. By the end of the day I thought I was almost done, but I kept finding new ways of triggering wrong behavior.
Week 43
Tiled Monday
There was a question on the forum related to scrolling past the map boundaries when using the mouse wheel. So I looked into implementing this and came up with a reasonable patch to allow scrolling past map edges with mouse wheel. The patch might also improve the scrolling experience a little for OS X users with a high precision mouse, but this is still untested.
Then I made some long due documentation updates, updating the TMX map format page with the file and color custom property types added in Tiled 0.17.
Finally, after being stuck on a crash for a long time, I managed to finish the changes necessary to show all open tilesets in the Tilesets view. The tilesets are now simply ordered by name, and all loaded tilesets are shown, except for embedded tilesets that are not part of the current map. While embedded tilesets remain supported, I want to discourage their use in the next version of Tiled and fully enable the advantage of using external tilesets. The reason not to show them for other maps is mainly that it would lead to a lot of duplicates when multiple maps are open.
Tiled Friday
A bug report had come in from somebody trying to use predefined custom file properties, which turned out to be due to some code I forgot to update when adding the color and file custom property types. I decided to fix it right away.
Then I prepared for a 0.17.1 release by updating the NEWS file. I plan to make this release either Monday or Tuesday.
I’ve also been trying out linuxdeployqt, which provides a convenient way of shipping the necessary libraries along with a Linux binary of Tiled and can even pack it into an AppImage. Its author, Simon Peter, has been helping me getting it running on Travis CI and I’m hopeful that eventually it will be able to automatically push new releases to itch.io. I will in any case make an effort to release Tiled 0.17.1 also for Linux, along with Windows and macOS.
Then I continued working on the wip/tilesetdocument branch, because there are still some things to do before I can merge this into master. I had just made the random mode accessible again when I was reminded on IRC about a small feature I had promised to add. So the last thing I did this day was to add a way to reset tile objects back to the size of the tile.
Looking Ahead
Especially that last day I’ve felt more productive than I’ve been in a while, and I hope to be able to keep up that momentum. In general, in the past two weeks I’ve managed to implement several nice improvements while also finally making good progress towards the next new feature release. Maybe I can still make it to Tiled 1.0 this year!