Build 96 progress

[trevor]

I started a blog once, but it got annoying to keep up with. But I do like to write about what I'm working on from time to time, to let you all know what I've been working on, and stuff like that, so I'll post that kind of stuff here.

Giliath had a game last night and found what seemed like an annoying bug with fog of war boundaries and token movement.

So I took a look, and turned out to be quite a nasty bug in the way movement destinations were calculated. So I fixed those which then exposed a couple calculation bugs in a couple core classes. So I fixed those. I also took the opportunity to clean up that code and consolidate it into a single place which will make it more resilient in the future, and more maintainable.

I also reworked the mechanism that tells the map to refresh the fog of war. I bumped into a couple cases where it was still not being updated correctly, which should all now be resolved.

When the next build comes out in a couple days (Friday night probably) it would be great if you could all bang on it and see if you can find any other quirks.

Now I'm going to finish hooking up the new adjust grid dialog, remove the old mechanism, and plug in a simple stack management scheme.

For the stack management what I plan to do is show a simple panel whenever you mouse over a stack. The panel will contain a grid of tokens that are in that cell, the panel will stay open until you mouse off of it. You can start a drag directly from that panel to grab and move the token. This should be Good Enough for 1.0

From there 1.0 is only a couple minor tweaks away. WOOO !

Oh yeah, and long as I'm blabbing away, we're working with a really talented artist to create a default set of tokens that we can put directly into MapTool. Now we just need a couple default bounded maps and we're good to go !

[brisingre]

I have some good tokens, and please dont' remove completely remove the old adjust grid method, because the new one is hard to use from what I've seen of it. Better, probably, but I think there should be both.

[trevor]

because the new one is hard to use from what I've seen of it.

Which is exactly why I've been asking for feedback on it, to make it powerful but still very easy to use To do that I need everybody to use it and help make it better.

[brisingre]

I'll try to give some feedback then: The map where you are adjusting hte grid is too small to see the original grid on, you can't readjust the grid, you can't adjust a r-click map or an unbounded, I have a map with different grids in different areas (nothig you can do aout that), and it is not very intuitive.

[francogp]

Will the irregular tokens Applied after the version 1.0? I need to create Horse tokens (2x1)...

[trevor]

You betcha. In fact there will even be a Free size

[rkathey]

My grid alignment request is in another topic but I'll put it here as well. Can you include a dialog box that allows the number of pixels per grid line in x and y? We who are mouse disfunctional would appreciated it.

[trevor]

Do you mean the grid offset ? Or the grid cell count ? Or pixel per cell ?

[trevor]

So I've been working on the stacked token management feature, and I got it to the point of almost being able to drag tokens out of it onto the map, but then I ran into a problem that necessitates a structural change to the tools. Which just happens to be another of the trackers for M9, so I've switched gears to work on that one.

Whew, these last couple seem to be all intermingled. Which means it'll take a little longer, but will have some good stuff once it shows up, at which point we'll need some solid user testing

[jay]

For the stack management what I plan to do is show a simple panel whenever you mouse over a stack. The panel will contain a grid of tokens that are in that cell, the panel will stay open until you mouse off of it. You can start a drag directly from that panel to grab and move the token. This should be Good Enough for 1.0

Will you be able to set token states and other token info from this panel too? I like the idea of a panel, should make things fairly easy to figure out.

[trevor]

For the stack management what I plan to do is show a simple panel whenever you mouse over a stack. The panel will contain a grid of tokens that are in that cell, the panel will stay open until you mouse off of it. You can start a drag directly from that panel to grab and move the token. This should be Good Enough for 1.0

Will you be able to set token states and other token info from this panel too? I like the idea of a panel, should make things fairly easy to figure out.

That's yet to be defined, but the nice thing is that it's a full panel that pops up on top of the stack that we can do anything we want with.

For the technically inclined, it's a full custom JComponent that pops up on the glass pane, and is then removed either when the mouse leaves it, or it loses focus. So we have a ton of control.

[rkathey]

Do you mean the grid offset ? Or the grid cell count ? Or pixel per cell ?

Pixel per cell

[Guest]

OK, got the draw tools restructured. Here's the new system:

left click: start the action
right click: move the map, or set a joint if drawing a polygon
SHIFT: Erase the resulting drawable
CTRL: Use snap to grid

For the most part, you can use the right mouse button to scroll the map at any time, and use the mouse wheel to zoom.

This should help the drawing.

Also, if you hit ESCAPE while drawing something it will cancel the drawable (same as before), but if you hit ESCAPE again you will go to the pointer tool (WOOOO !)

Ok, back to the stacked token panel

[trevor]

Oops, that was me.

[trevor]

Oh yeah, and I also made the tools use a different mouse pointer when not on the pointer tool, that should make it more obvious when you are not on the pointer tool.