Saturday 16 April 2011

Brick Atelier news

It's almost ready for release. I still have to solve the editor pixel size problem, but I guess it's going to be quite easy to limit the max size of editor pixel when the tile size is getting too big.


This is the current development version. As you can see there are some changes made. The UI, while still trying to fit everything in one screen, is less crowded. I also spread the information about tile id which is now in bottom left next to the tile strip and there is now a new information screen that shows things like location and color values. I'm planning to move the brush icons at the left side of palette area, where that empty space is. Then the vast empty area is reserved for the editor tile and 2x2 real size tile, tile copy and clone brush.

Monday 11 April 2011

Grid intensity

There is a grid intensity value in Brick Atelier. It's of course cooler than regular grids, because it's using the current pixel's color and darkening it. I wanted to add an adjusting option for the intensity, but the current dialog system was unable to handle that kind of adjusting. It was the way dialogs were constructed, using values and buttons as pairs. Buttons were linked to the dialog in Dialog_Set class. But then I realized that with more complex dialog items it was kind of difficult to set the locations of buttons.

I refactored the dialog system by adding buttons in the individual Dialog_Item class (a Dialog_Set is a list of Dialog_Items). Now, I hope, it's easier to add different dialog types. Refactoring this one was hard, and easy. Easy in a way that I have learned to write modular code and I only needed to change Dialog_Set and Dialog_Item classes. Everything else like setting up the dialogs and processing them didn't need any changes. That's the bonus you get from writing good public interfaces.