Week 38
This week I was on holiday with my family, as well as making a quick visit to my parents.
Week 39
Tiled Sunday
This was the first day of @Ablu’s visit to the Tiled office. I picked him up in the morning at the train station.
Being just back from holiday, there was a lot of e-mail to catch up with so I didn’t get around to do much actual development on Tiled.
In the morning, Ablu closed a small issue by adding keywords to the appdata file. This should make Tiled more discoverable in GNOME’s Software. And while trying to help someone on the forum he fixed a small issue in the code causing the “Object Properties…” context menu item to get disabled when multiple objects were selected. This was a relic from before Tiled 0.10, which added property editing for multiple objects.
I merged a pull request fixing some Chinese translations and made some updates to the Qbs project files after my version of Qbs got updated to 1.6.
Tiled Monday
While trying to get back to the wip/tilesetdocument branch, I noticed that when opening The Mana World maps, Tiled would ask me to adjust some tileset to a change in tile columns. I found out that the tileset was actually unused by the map, so I figured bothering the user about the index adjustment was actually not needed. But in the process of suppressing this message in such cases, it occurred to me that the adjustment is still needed for the tiles in the tileset (an oversight that I had just fixed in Tiled 0.17, issue #1315).
However, the tileset here was only a single row of tiles, so really the amount of columns changing was irrelevant since no tile indexes would change in the process. So I did a patch suppressing the adjustment in the case of single-row tilesets.
In the meantime I had told @Ablu, who was visiting for another day, that it would be nice if Tiled maps would show as thumbnails in the file manager and he was looking into how to set this up. It turned out to be not too difficult on Linux, as long as there was a tool to create images from the maps. Such a tool already existed and ships with Tiled (called tmxrasterizer), but it needed some adjustments to its behavior.
So I added a --size parameter that can be used to specify the (maximum) expected size of the output image. And I made it default to png format when the output format could not be determined based on the file extension. Ablu then finished the work by adding the file needed to integrate tmxrasterizer with the file manager. It works with Nautilus, GNOME’s file manager, but unfortunately didn’t seem to work for Thunar, the file manager in Xfce.
This feature is right now available to Ubuntu users who are using the nightly builds from the Tiled PPA, as well as in daily builds for Fedora. It would be nice if thumbnails could also be made to work on Windows and OS X of course, though at the moment I don’t know how their integrations work. Contributions from anyone who does are of course welcome!
Tiled Friday
As I mentioned previously, this was the last day in my own office, so in the afternoon I moved back into the bedroom at home. On the way, I also picked up my UHD 4K screen at work, the present I chose when I worked there for 5 years. Of course, I hope to optimize Tiled for 4K screens as well (once I can actually run it in 4K, I still need a new video card for this).
In the morning I had made another small tweak to the tmxrasterizer tool to improve the general quality of the thumbnails. And I fixed an issue with the type of some variables in the Lua export.
Looking Ahead
The first week of October will be incredibly busy again due to my daughter’s 4th birthday, with family visiting and organizing her first birthday party with other kids.
In addition, I’m doing a hopefully quick contract for a solution helping a project integrate Tiled maps into their game. This will also help me fill the missing income from not having reached my goal on Patreon yet, while already having reduced my work contract to 3 days/week.
For Tiled, my goals are to get a Tiled 0.17.1 bugfixing release out soon, and to continue working towards Tiled 1.0 on the wip/tilesetdocument branch.