ID:2789957
 
Development on the map editor continues, and for most of the week at least it's been going well. Over last weekend I finally got to a point where I was finally able to compile all the huge changes I'd made, which was a big deal because up to that point so much had been ripped apart that there were dangling function guts all over the place. This week I was able to get into testing those changes and making some sensible rearrangements as I tried some of them out.

The testing has a long way to go yet but for the back half of the week I've been focusing on reorganizing the way users interact with the UI in terms of placement and dragging. I was never comfortable with our old three-tool setup of Add, Fill, and Select, where the add tool also doubled as a delete tool if you used Shift+click. There was never any simple way for instance to quickly grab a mob and drag it somewhere else; the select tool did that, but not in what I felt was an intuitive way.

So in part I've been adding more tools to the interface, and more tools can follow at some other point. But also I've had to rework the way the modifier keys for dragging work. One part of that was that "free" dragging involves step or pixel offsets, and it was clear that the menu-based approach to choosing between them wasn't working well. What we finally worked out in BYONDiscord was that the best way to handle that distinction was a button toggle on the UI itself.

Before further testing I'm gonna make a big change to how the tools are setup so they're more extensible, and move them up to a toolbar at the top of the window. I'm also gonna radically alter how they interact with the UI under the hood sot hat whenever I add a button I don't have to go through adding lines of code in a ton of different places.

One of the things people have mentioned is that the undo/redo system in the old editor was a bit wonky and sometimes unpredictable. I'm pleased to tell you that because I'm completely reworking the undo system, that's no longer gonna be a problem. The testing I've done so far with movement and dragging helped me refine some of that, with more to come.

Thanks once again to all the BYOND Members who make this development possible, because I couldn't do it without you. This week that was even more literal, since I was leaning on the community for advice on how to make the tools easier to use.

The bad news is that I've had a bad feeling for some time that this was gonna be a bad allergy year, and last night I was very suddenly proved right. It's gonna be a rough few weeks.