(3.1.6) 3.1.7 done

[CRe]

When you do the custom shape tool and want to undo it says Undo Tiletext.

Samapico: Fixed. (rev 512)

[L.C.]

/FolderA/DCME.exe (v3.1.6)

/FolderB/_server118.lvl

 

I open _server118.lvl directly and get prompted by DCME to update to v3.1.7, so I click yes. After the update, I find out that it installed v3.1.7 into /FolderB/, when it should have installed it into /FolderA/.

 

 

 

When you turn off the grid and zoom out to the max, it would be nice if there were a feature to highlight the borders of the map with 1px white (or user-specified color) so that it would be easier to see the edges of the map when copying and pasting different shapes and sizes of bases into the map.

Drake7707: DONE in 3.1.8

 

 

Freehand selection isn't a very stable tool (bug-wise). Often when your memory is loaded up and DCME chugs when using this tool (and you continue to circle around an oddly shaped base), it will create a linear line from the point before the "chug" occurred to where after it ended.

Samapico: Can't do much about it really... any paint programs I know of that use a freehand selection would do the same thing. If it couldn't read the mouse position for a few cycles because of CPU load, it can't just guess it, it will go to the new position.

 

 

 

 

When I make a selection, copy and paste. The black parts of the selection (aka empty space, where there are no tiles) is opaque when zoomed out. Can you make every part of the selection that is not a tile or object be transparent (or something to control that)? Would be nice to see where I might be moving the base.

Drake7707: DONE (it isn't that much overhead after all)

 

When I make a selection, and then use SHIFT to add to the selection, instead of expanding the box indicating what I have selected, it should just add on to the box so that I know exactly what I have selected. For example, just select some random base with the selection tool. But wait - there is a small part of it (peninsula) that sticks way out and you don't want to include all that extra space (which contains asteroids). So then you select the main body, and then use SHIFT to add the peninsula. What should NOT happen is that the yellow-outline of your selection should not be an extended rectangle, but rather now an irregular polygon that actually indicates what you literally have selected. This should go for the freehand tool also.

Samapico: I put these two last bugs together because they are somewhat related. They both happen because we used the simplest rendering option for selections when zoomed out, else it was too slow (even more than it is now)... We'll need to find a solution...

Drake7707: solution found

 

When I turn off grid lines, I want it to stay that way until I turn it back on. Can you make DCME have an option where it would not "reset" the tools to defaults upon new map or map load?

Samapico: Done (rev 511)

 

 

 

 

Like Photoshop, there should be a magnetic and polymagnetic laso tool for selection. If I could just select points on the map (connect-the-dot styled selection), that would also be a nice feature.

 

 

 

I select (highlight) three *.lvl files and hit enter to open all three in DCME. Instead DCME gives me an error on all three maps and ends up not opening the maps afterall: 9:Subscript out of range

I have absolutely no clue at all where that error comes from, it seems to be different sometimes too. I can't debug this because it'll open the exe and not the ide :/, and it's not in the places i expected too *clueless*

 

 

Now what would definately be cool is thumbnail previews of *.lvl files (map previews). In my case it would especially save time rather than to open and close 150+ maps.

 

 

 

How do you use the tiletext tools?

Edited July 17, 2007 by Drake7707

[Samapico]

How do you use the tiletext tools?

Edit -> Edit tile-text

Select a tile, assign it a keyboard key

 

Then use the tiletext tool... click somewhere on the map, and type All notepad-like shortcuts and keys should work, except tab and insert... But things like shift-arrows, ctrl-arrows, enter, copy-paste... should work (doh, just noticed some bug with cut-paste)

only thing is that once done, the text tiles are nothing but tiles, so you can't edit your text as easily... Perhaps we should make some classes and derived classes for tiles, walltiles and texttiles. That would make things easier

 

Thumbnails... interesting, indeed... I'll try to find a way to do that

edit: did you mean thumbnails that would show in the Open... dialog? Or thumbnails that would show in XP folders?

[L.C.]

Or thumbnails that would show in XP folders?

This one. Perhaps selecting a *.lvl file and a radar picture (thumbnail) would appear on the left side of the window, and perhaps even as an icon thumbnail (as if it were a GIF/JPG/PNG and the icons were thumbnails). I was thinking more-so a radar picture appearing on the left pane/panel upon selection.

 

 

 

Samapico: Can't do much about it really... any paint programs I know of that use a freehand selection would do the same thing. If it couldn't read the mouse position for a few cycles because of CPU load, it can't just guess it, it will go to the new position.

Hmm... you could turn DCME into another Photoshop CS3 and sell it for $50 per license. I bet you know that in Photoshop when you use a freehand tool it doesn't do what DCME does, but renders it appropriately. :\ Maybe some kind of "graphics" settings so that it could be configured for high-end machines to take on hardcore stuff. New thought -- DCME needs some serious CPU optimizations before you go further.

 

 

My CPU is overclocked to the max a SocketA will allow, I've got 1GB DDR PC3200 RAM, and an nVidia Zogis 6800XT (256MB GDDR2; Overclocked). This is where the problem comes in: DCME for my machine should atleast be a piece of cake for the most part. DCME currently makes me feel like I'm low-end. Do you plan to ever recode the entire structure of DCME sometime in the future with Drake?

[Drake7707]

i don't plan to recode all of it, but i'll try to make some optimizations (i don't even get all of it anymore :s). I'll try to do!@#$%^&*ent as much as possible one day, so if someone want to make a new map editor from scratch he/she could read parts from DCME if they're stuck somewhere

 

The video card doesn't matter, DCME uses 0% of it.

 

I'll try to remove as many bottlenecks as possible, but on big operations like changing 1000x1000 tiles still takes some time, i'll try to throw in some doevents and a progressbar or something, it'll go a tad slower because it has to refresh than every now and then, but then you can see there's progress made and the user's feeling of speed increases (neat little trick )

[Samapico]

(by the way, forgot to say it but I commented some of LC's post above, if you didn't notice)

[Drake7707]

can anyone help me find an article about how to add custom extensions to the thumbnail preview ? I know it can be done because paint shop pro 9 installer does that for pspimage

[L.C.]

Would it be more efficient if a video card on OpenGL/D3D rendered the map instead of it being rendered Software/DirectDraw/CPU-calculated? That's kinda what I'm asking, if there would be some kind of mode to create some peace and ease of rendering for those who have the ability to take advantage of their video cards.

[Drake7707]

yeah, it might, directx is faster at bit block copying, but changing pixels is slower because getting stuff out of video memory in order to alter the pixel array is slow. And bitblt which it's currently using isn't all that slow either, it can easily handle 50000 bitblts under 40ms.

 

The actual drawing only takes up 40-50% of the operation speed (most of it if it involves setting/getting pixels), the rest is code, so using directx wouldn't have much impact as expected, and it also involves changing the structure of how it draws and manages the bitmaps (which could end up slowing things down as well)