Besides the normal development on the New Project Wizard, which hopefully will be all done within a week, I executed a few changes as a result of talking with a very important modder on the #KeenModding IRC channel. This person is still using an old Windows XP computer with barely any RAM, so getting Abiathar to work on it is a challenge.
Abiathar v1.4.1, the last public release, was successful in that it let him open his mod. Of course, due to his RAM situation and general oldness of the computer, scrolling with the arrow keys was extremely laggy. I'm still not sure how this is possible (it should be pretty much instant unless it trips the memory manager), but I did find some optimizable things. First, I moved the scroll detection to the top of the key-down handler. That helped a little, but lag was still happening. I tried changing the repaint call from that handler to use Refresh instead of Invalidate (to force it to happen immediately), but it made stuff slower in some cases, and I reverted it. Eventually, I added a config option to set how many tiles will be shifted per key down event, which should reduce the number of repaints necessary.
Also mentioned was the non-appearance of translucent colors (non-black pixels without the mask bit set). Fortunately, FleexCore already preserved translucent colors, so it was very easy to allow them in the image converter. It's not exactly how the game renders them, but it gives a pretty good impression of translucency.
Finally, he mentioned that it's difficult to get used to the function key controls for the plane states, especially having used other editors for a long time. Since this was also a problem for people whose function keys are permanently bound to other actions, I decided it was time to do something about it. The default is now TED5-style numbers for changing plane states, with the exception that 7-9 call the tilesets instead of the weird Space+number way. The old style can be enabled in the config file.
No comments:
Post a Comment