LIME Status Report (03/08/2014)

This week I finally forced myself to take a break from my regular job and focus solely on LIME for a couple of days.  The result is perhaps the most productive single week I've ever had on a project.  I need to blow off the rest of my life more often!

The LIME 4 user interface now features scroll buttons that appear when necessary, a data overlay on the editor pane, and slide-out panels for layer selection.

When all of the slide-outs are closed, the editor pane expands to offer the maximum working space.

Accomplishments

• Finished implementing file I/O for saving maps.
• Corrected the size of text boxes on the input dialogs.
• Implemented the functionality behind the New Map dialog.
• Corrected the issue with the grid lines and mouse cursor appearing in the full screen renders.
• Changed the scrolling controls to use buttons rather than mouse-over zones.
• Implemented the slide-outs for the viewing and editing controls.
• Discovered and fixed a miscalculation in the game timer.
• Discovered and fixed a scaling bug in the full map render.
• Implemented a data display overlay for map data.
• Added rotation and a redimensioning function to the MHPCImage class.

Known Issues

• Functionality Issues
• Full-screen mode quit working as soon as I started porting functionality from MHF 2 to MHF 3.  Gotta find out why.
• Usability Issues
• The buttons on the New Map screen's cycle controls are occasionally unresponsive.
• The tile map view's anchor space doesn't always scale correctly when resizing the editor pane.  I've had trouble reproducing this on command, but it happens occasionally.
• Portability Issues
• The Android platform layer doesn't yet have the ability to rotate the captions for the slide-out tabs or dynamically resize a graphics canvas.  Currently a low priority since this tool is intended to be used on a developer's PC, but something that needs to be addressed eventually.

Next Steps

• High Priority:
• Implement the Open File dialog.
• Implement the Map Info dialog.
• Finish programming the toolbox buttons.
• Eraser Tool
• Tile Picker Tool
• Tile ID Toggle
• Finish programming the view panel buttons.
• Finish programming the edit panel buttons.
• Medium Priority:
• Add "Actor Mode" to the palette window.
• Test the tile palette with larger tile sets and different tile sizes.
• Low Priority:
• Implement the MHBitmapImage.rotate() method for the Android platform.
• Following the rotate example, implement other capabilities like scaling, image filtering, color blending, and alpha composites.
• Implement isometric modes.