FMod - Helpful

One serious problem that I had identified with Abiathar was the lack of discoverability of its amazing features. The "did you know?" tips on the tools helped a little, but I can't be throwing them around all the time and they are also too small to provide detailed guides. People don't want to download and read a 40-page PDF to learn about this stuff; they just want to use whatever tool they just opened.

So, I removed most of the tip pop-ups from the tools (all the ones that appear at start-up are still there) and created a new panel for contextual help. Each tool can report what commands it can receive at a given point and provide any instructions that the user might need. The entire thing can easily be switched on or off at any time by pressing the question mark key or choosing Help | Contextual. It can be set to be turned on at startup through a config entry under DefaultViewSettings. I added contextual help for all the tools; I'm guessing it makes using them a lot easier for people who don't have the code right in front of them.

(The tool tips that were left on the Tile Property Modifier and Tile Instance Remapper say something to the effect of "this tool is really hard to use; you probably want to enable contextual help.")

I also identified and fixed several bugs while doing this:

• The "did you know?" pop-up looked really out-of-place, being the normal Windows Forms colors on top of the intense blue on black of the initial screen.
• The tool status text was lost when switching to the tile palette and back.
• The Tile Property Modifier left its status text behind after being canceled.
• The Tile Property Modified left the animation target highlight behind only when switching to the Palette Copier.
• The Tile Instance Remapper was extraordinarily inconvenient to use because it reset the find buffer whenever plane states were changed.

All these changes might be worthy of the version number "2.3" rather than "2.2.1", but I'm not sure yet. What I am sure of is that these changes make using Abiathar a whole lot easier for new users.