Week 21
Tiled Monday
First of all I wanted to finish the change I had started last time, which was to add “file” as custom property type. This turned out to be a little more complicated than I had anticipated, so it took already half the day, but I finished it and I think it works quite nicely. Advantages of using the “file” type instead of “string” to refer to a file are that the input field features a file picker button and that the reference to the file will be stored as a relative path from where the map is saved. Later I’d like to also add a quick way to open the file.
The rest of the day I spent fixing several smaller things. I noticed the JSON plugin failed to load custom properties on terrains (29089b2). I fixed the missing export of object layer drawing order in the Lua plugin (#1289). And I made Tiled compile against Qt 5.6 when using MinGW (4c8a4b7), as well as on OS X (d67bae0).
There was also a request to add %layername and %objectid to available command variables, which were easily added (e0d867f).
Week 22
Tiled Sunday
In the morning I first spent some time trying to work towards building the OS X packages on Travis CI, but I gave up for now since I think it may be quite tricky to get it to work and it’s not a high priority. In the meantime, I also made sure the OS X snapshots now build against Qt 5.6, which I hope will fix some issues. I also fixed Tiled to compile again when using Qt 5.6 with Visual Studio (291c354), so now all snapshots are built against Qt 5.6.
After lunch, Will Luongo joined me for his second pair-programming session, which is part of this Patreon reward. We chose to work on adding support for panning the tileset view with middle mouse button, a highly requested feature. Will did all the typing and it was actually easier than expected, but it was still a good experience.
I then looked into a bug where the cursor would always jump to the end while editing custom string properties (#1292). It was a regression from the multi-line editing support, which was fortunately not too hard to fix.
Finally, I enabled some more flexibility in arranging the various views (#1291). I think this request is reasonable, and my only worry is that arranging the views may now be a bit too fiddly for some people. Also, for builds against Qt 5.6, you now have to drag the views by their tab to move them individually, since when dragging them by the title it will now take the whole group, when multiple views are tabbed. I’m curious to hear any feedback about this new behavior. Here’s an example screenshot of a layout that wasn’t possible before:
Looking Ahead
I recently introduced an “Urgent” label on GitHub, which I want to use mainly on small issues that have a relatively large impact, as well as for things I promised to look at soon. This should make it easier to get started on the things that matter. In general, I’ll aim to have no more than two days of work tagged as “Urgent”.
Contrary to what I wanted to do, I didn’t yet get around to continuing work on the wip/tilesetdocument branch. I’ll try again to get to that next time, but then again the “Urgent” list generally takes priority, which I think is in most people’s best interest.
Thanks again to everybody who is supporting me and see you next time!