Week 16
Tiled Forum Moved
On Wednesday the Tiled forum moved and is now hosted by the Discourse team. I was busy the whole evening updating links, changing DNS settings and setting up the redirect.
The move saves me $10/month hosting costs and a bit of time on the administration side, while at the same time it should provide a more responsive forum that’s ready to grow. So thanks a lot to the Discourse team for providing us with this service! In return, they get more publicity for their awesome product.
Tiled Sunday
I wrote about working from an office in my last update, but this Sunday I still worked in the bedroom. It went pretty well though and I managed to make some progress in multiple areas, though I didn’t get around to streaming any development.
First of all I finished the patch I was working on last week, moving the Add/Remove Tile buttons (for managing image collection tilesets) to the new tileset editor. If you remove tiles that are in use by any of the open maps, such usages will automatically be removed. What Tiled doesn’t currently stop the user from doing, is to undo this removal. This was previously covered by the fact that both changes lived on the same undo stack, but that is no longer the case. This is an area that will need more work, most likely I will start using tile IDs rather than Tile instance pointers, to avoid crashing when removed tiles are referenced.
Then I went back to the master branch, to fix an issue with the object IDs of tile collision shapes, which I was recently reminded about. With the improvements made in Tiled 0.16, this bug became more visible so the fix will go into the Tiled 0.16.1 release. And while fixing the above issue I ran into a crash when closing Tiled with the Tile Collision Editor still open, so I pushed a fix for that as well.
Recently somebody opened a request for a Paste in Place action for pasting objects, and provided some good use-cases for such a feature. Since it was essentially about disabling the placement behavior it was a relatively easy thing to include. The only thing I’m worried about, is that people will expect it to do something interesting with tile layers. I couldn’t agree more, but that is unfortunately not so easy.
The last thing I worked on was to make a list of all the features of the TMX Map Format. I intend to use this list to make sure Tiled ships with a set of examples that expose all of the features. The list, along with the example maps, can then be used to check the level of TMX support available in the various libraries and frameworks supporting the format. I will include this list in the documentation soon. I’ve already added a new orthogonal example map where I tried to use as many features as possible:
Tile art by Michele “Buch” Bucelli
Looking Ahead
This week I’ve managed to spread out the available time quite well over various activities, and I’ll try to keep doing that. Though sometimes things like a new development branch will simply require a lot of time. But for Tiled 1.0, it’s just as important that the documentation improves and bugs are fixed than it is to fix deeper problems with the overall design.
I hope that Friday I will be able to move into my new office room, so that I can do a full development day there on Sunday. Going forward, I will probably switch the Tiled Sunday to a Tiled Friday so that I won’t be the only guy in the premises and could potentially find people to have lunch with. 