Another day of avoiding the bigger tasks saw me plucking more titbits from the To Do list. First up was the colour selector for the various grids that the User can select (the standard resizeable grid, the Brush grid, and the Tile grid). The main reason I wanted the colours to be user-definable was purely for reasons of clarity (it's not always easy to see a cyan grid if your tiles/map contain mostly blues!). Thankfully, these were easy enough to implement.
Next up came the inclusion of a proper parallax layer, complete with adjustable speeds. The Static layer is a fixed bitmap picture which sits behind the other layers; the parallax layer, as its name suggests, scrolls in parallax, and combined with the Static layer, allows the User to very quickly build up a good representation of how their finished map will look.
I'd experimented with the parallax code previously, so all that remained was to implement the I/O routine, display routine, and speed controls, as well as adding a checkbox to the main display window.
The next task was a fairly simple addition, but something that had been lacking for too long: the ability to change the Layer names (a la PhotoShop). In the end, this was a relatively simple process of reading the User input and changing the relevant Gadget name.
The final couple of tasks on today's agenda involved a simple toggle to display which tiles are currently used/unused, and a menu option to control the way Meta Data is displayed (ie. with or without flag numbers).
