MapTool 1.1 Development Release Build 18

[trevor]

Here you go:

Build 18 (9/19/06)
* Menu items reflect their current selected state
* Clicking in the message area give focus to the command textfield
* Hitting cancel in the macro assignment dialog no longer kills the assigned macro
* Clicking on the minimap on selected map will center the view on that spot
* Fix maps getting small and locating in the top left when loading a campaign
* Make "New Tokens Visible to Players" only work for GMs

Note that the remaining trackers for the official 1.1 build are all bugs, so make sure to submit any existing and any new bugs so that we can get them fixed for the 1.1 release.

Thanks !

[thelevitator]

Has anyone else had a signifigant increase in map loading speeds? Holy crap, I have 4 maps in the campaign I opened up to take a look at the new build, and switching maps was almost instantaneous. Very nice!

[trevor]

Cool. Dorpond noticed some really, really slow load times for large images, so I debugged and found that my "chooseBestTransparency" function could have been smarter. Basically it looks at each pixel and determines if the image is opaque, transparent, or translucent. Well, if you are coming from an image that can't support transparency (e.g. jpg) then there's no sense checking, and it became a one-liner. Since most background images are jpg, it's really, realy fast.

[IMarvinTPA]

Why are you checking maps for transparency at all? What are we going to see through it? A PNG or a GIF map shouldn't need to be checked either.

Or am I missing something?

IMarv

[trevor]

Ahh, let me provide a little more detail. Images need to be converted into the same graphics context that the screen is in so that it can do raw blitting (image copying), which is really fast.

My image loading code has all images that are loaded go through a conversion process so that they are in the same graphics context. The general process is: create a new image with the correct graphics context, copy the original onto the new image, clear the old image.

When creating the new image, I have to tell it what kind of transparency to support, and that decision will impact performance, so it's important to get right.

You are correct that backgrounds don't need transparency, and that was my original plan, but it would have made a ton of special case code in the image loader, so I opted for a more generic approach, which will affect all image loading, and not just map loading.

[IMarvinTPA]

I guess that means it is time to migrate my maps away from PNGs.

I suppose an optional parameter wouldn't help much on the functions since you're trying to avoid extra branching.

IMarv

[trevor]

I'll have to do some testing, but what I do is ask the color space whether it supports alpha. If you make your paint program export the PNGs without an alpha channel you should still be good to go.

It would be easy to test, just create two large PNG maps (2k x 2k or something) then load them both up, and switch between them.

If you don't get to it first, I'll try that tonight after work hours.

[Phergus]

* Fix maps getting small and locating in the top left when loading a campaign

Woot!

[drswoboda]

* Clicking on the minimap on selected map will center the view on that spot

Hey nice add. Would it be possible to still allow the mouse wheel zoom while on the minimap so the you don't have to move off the minimap to zoom into an area? Workflow would be click mini then roll to zoom into area, then click in new area and zoom +- for detailed view. . .

-David

[trevor]

* Clicking on the minimap on selected map will center the view on that spot

Hey nice add. Would it be possible to still allow the mouse wheel zoom while on the minimap so the you don't have to move off the minimap to zoom into an area? Workflow would be click mini then roll to zoom into area, then click in new area and zoom +- for detailed view. . .

-David

Hmmm, interesting. Never occurred to me. I'll add a tracker.