By accident, I stumbled across a rather nice Map Editor which exports to Blitz+ format (though I suspect the editor itself isn't written in Blitz, as they do a number of clever things which Blitz cannot). Interestingly enough, it included a nice animation system (which allows each frame to have a millisecond timer, like animated GIFs), as well as a module to test the map to see how it appears in the finished game (as I mentioned yesterday). Some of their additions are quite nice, especially the separate layer just for pickups and bonuses and suchlike, though a few of their features (such as 100,000,000 tiles) seem somewhat excessive!
Work was cancelled again tonight, which allowed me to continue ploughing through the Windows GUI stuff. I posted a couple of messages on the Blitz forums, in the desperate hope that someone had written a GUI tutorial - alas, this was not the case, but I managed to get some answers to specific questions (and things are much clearer in my head as a result).
The first task was to get a toolbar in and working; I took the liberty of grabbing a few icons from various editors (these will be redrawn at some point, copyright fanatics!), then pasted them into a continuous strip. There seems to be no way to insert "spacers" in a toolbar, so I fired off another question to the forum to that effect, as well as a couple of menu-related issues. In the meantime, I attached a couple of functions to the buttons, and can now load and save with a single click of the mouse.
Tidied up some of the menus, inserting dummy functions for the time being, then set about creating the "Tabbers", which will ultimately allow the user to flick easily between maps. This was easier than anticipated, though the positioning was somewhat painstaking. I then attached the Tile window to the Main window, so it follows it around like a puppy when moved (awww!).
The final task of the night involved getting the tilestrip updating properly in the Tile window, allowing the user to select the tiles, and implementing a cursor. I also hit upon the idea of having the tiles currently in use highlighted by two special cursors, so this was added to my To Do list (which I'll probably tackle tomorrow), along with a small Info window, which will detail miscellaneous stats such as the cursor position, current drawing mode, tiles in use, etc.
