PICEDIT 1.3 Milestone 2 released

[lance.ewing]

A few days ago I built and released the second milestone release of PICEDIT 1.3. This gives people a chance to see yet more of the new features I've been working on for 1.3. This release focuses mainly on fixing a few bugs and making some existing features more usable. Note that this is just a milestone release and I plan to release more milestone releases before the final 1.3 release.

http://picedit.googlecode.com/files/picedit-1.3M2.jar

The new features in this milestone include:

* Single point lines so that Sierra and fan-made games that have such lines can be loaded and edited. Single point lines are supported by the Line, Pen and Step tools. Simply click on the start point then right-click to stop drawing and you now have a single point line.

* Replaced the custom Sierra-like menu system with a more modern windows-like menu (that is always visible) along the lines of what people are used to seeing these days.

* Split out the "Save" menu option in to separate "Save As" and "Save" options.

* Added support for user preferences. Two of the existing features are now saved as preferences when the user exits PICEDIT. These are grid lines and zoom size. PICEDIT will now remember what zoom size you were using the last time you used PICEDIT, and likewise whether you had grid lines (i.e. bands) enabled or not.

* PICEDIT now also remembers what the last used directory was from the last time you used PICEDIT.

* This release also includes an attempted fix for the screen resize bug. Some people noticed that the window frame and its contents were not properly resizing.

* As part of the new menu system, more keyboard shortcuts have been added, such as for toggling the bands, toggling dual mode, opening a file, saving, etc.

Let me know what you all think. I am very keen to hear your feedback and suggestions.

[gumby]

Just had a chance to play with this.  New menu style is a welcome improvement. 

I am having occasional problems with the draw controls - sometimes they stop working.  It seems to be related to using the right mouse button for cancelling the current drawing function then selecting a new color/control to use with the left mouse button.  Subsequently selecting the drawing tool with the F-keys clears the problem.

It also seems that once an area is 'Filled', it cannot be re-Filled?

[lance.ewing]

I will have to keep an eye on those draw controls. I remember seeing this issue a while back as well, but I haven't seen it recently. I'll try to reproduce it in the way you describe.

Regarding filling, yes, this is the current behaviour. It is the way that AGI pictures work. If an AGI picture has a fill action on top of an area already filled then it won't do anything. I am planning to support refilling at some point, but what it will essentially be doing is finding the original fill action and wrapping it in change colour codes. Something like that.

[lance.ewing]

Regarding the drawing controls turning off, I am starting to recall this a bit better now. I realise it was only a few weeks ago, but I now recall finding and fixing the issue that you described, probably a couple of days after I released that milestone. It should be sorted for the next milestone release, which I hope to have ready in a week or two.

[MusicallyInspired]

The 'fills cannot be refilled' thing is the same in SCI picture resources. It's a vector format thing. I like the idea of refilling going back in history and changing the colour the already filled area, though. That would be just as nice for an SCI picture resource editor as well, come to think of it.