December 2015 development updates

Development
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Week 50

Tiled Monday

I started this Monday with the writing of the previous update. It was the first time I wrote the development update in the development time, but I felt I had to because I had not gotten around to it for too long. I much prefer using the full day for actual Tiled development, so that’s what I’ll keep aiming to do.

After that I set out to resolve an inconsistency in the TMX and Lua export formats regarding the use of the offsetx/offsety attributes. On object layers and tile layers, these are used as pixel offsets for the respective layer since Tiled 0.14. The image layer however used the x/y attributes for this. Now the image layer is stored consistently with the other layers. In addition, the “Move Images” tool that previously only worked to drag the image layer around, can now be used to change the offset of any layer. (b8b8c9)

Then I started working on the ability to disable plugins, where some plugins would also be disabled by default. This is a feature I had added to the 1.0 milestone because some of the shipped plugins often confused users (most notoriously the Flare “.txt” export) and there were two plugins exporting to “*.lua” files (but one format is very specific to T-Engine4). I made good progress on this feature, but did not have enough time to finish it right away.

Closed Issues

  • #1130 Lua: Inconsistent property names - Fixed
  • #1156 Move an object order up/down in its current object layer - Already Possible

Week 51

Tiled Monday

I was eager to finish the support for disabling plugins, so that’s what I did the first half of the day. I put quite some polish into the change, adding some nice icons and also making sure that if a plugin would fail to load, there will be feedback about that in the UI. And you do not even need to restart Tiled for the changes to take effect!

After lunch I made a quick change to move the location of the option that toggles live automapping, which had been requested by @Red_Eagle_LXIX a few days before.

Then I fixed a visualization problem with Tile Stamps, a regression from the changes made to support editing tileset parameters. It was unfortunately a bit more work than I had expected, so that concluded the day.

Except, in the evening I spent a bit of time playing around with a solution to allow scrolling past the edges of the map, a frequently requested feature. I’ve had some success with a partial solution and am looking forward to finish that upcoming Monday!

Closed Issues

  • #1088 Allow plugins to be enabled/disabled - Implemented
  • #1146 Visualization problem with Tile Stamps - Fixed
  • #1152 Toolbar Button Toggle “Use Automapping, when drawing” - Done as Menu Item

Looking Ahead

Monday 21st will be the last day for me to work on features for Tiled 0.15, and the start of the string freeze. I expect to do the release about two weeks later. In the meantime I’ll be visiting family with my wife and children, but I hope to find some time to work on Tiled anyway.

Then, with hopefully a much smaller list of open issues for the 1.0 milestone, I look forward to continue working towards Tiled 1.0 next year!

Finally, I want to again thank all who donated to make this work possible! After a quiet period there has been an influx of 4 new patrons in the past few days, which is really nice to see! I really hope to be able to put even more time into Tiled soon so that things could go quite a bit faster.

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Week 52

On Sunday I set up a Gitter chatroom for Tiled just to try it out. I’m hanging around there through my regular IRC client, but I don’t plan to replace the official IRC channel with it anytime soon. I do like that it combines the chat a feed about what’s happening on GitHub and possibly other services.

Tiled Monday

It turned out that the partial solution I had to allow scrolling over the edges of the map was quite tricky to enhance into a complete solution. The main reason for this is that the scrolling behavior of a QGraphicsView is hardcoded in its internal private class. The part that I didn’t manage to solve is to make zooming in/out more comfortable, so for now the map edges will still be repositioned to the edges of the view when changing the zoom level. But overall I’m quite happy with the feature and I’m sure it will be appreciated at times.

Since I had been struggling for a long time with the above change, I had only a few hours left which I spent preparing for the string freeze. I updated the NEWS file with the changes since the last release and updated the translation files, so that I could announce the string freeze to the translators. Finally, I made sure daily builds were still running on OS X after an upgrade to Xcode.

The next day, I left with my family to visit my parents and my mother in law.

Week 53

Tiled Monday

While we were staying at my parents, I still spend this day on Tiled as well as I could. Unfortunately, by now I had a huge backlog of e-mail and I have answered many questions, including clarifications asked by translators. The Russian translation was the first I could merge in.

I made a small improvement to the ability to pan past the edges of the map, in that you could now do this from the mini-map as well, which was something my brother had asked about.

Once we were back home, I pulled in more translation updates and worked around a problem with the daily builds for Windows. The latter was an NSIS packaging issue, which was later resolved.

In Closing

Overall I think still quite a bit happened despite the holiday. The Tiled 0.15 release was looking good and was not far off now. But first it was time to celebrate the new year!