So yet again, almost a year transpires between coding stints; I'm starting to realise that these projects simply have to be done whenever time allows - gone are the days where I could set aside chunks of time to tackle this stuff uninterrupted. My brain needs to learn how to learn, as my maths teacher would say.
Although Citadel has been on the back burner for way too long, I'm really interested in updating FishEd to work in Blitz Max, partly to (maybe) make some money by flogging it to other developers, and partly because the previous version of FishEd was written in Blitz+ and will thus be largely incompatible with the Citadel engine (FishEd, if you remember, was written as an editor specifically for the Citadel project).
I have a shell that I started in July 2007, and armed with a pencil and notepad I recently set to work jotting down all the issues, improvements, and changes I wanted to make to FishEd, including feedback from some people who'd been using FishEd extensively. This time, I want to approach development logically and methodically, which means getting organised and planning ahead.
The first stage involved enlisting help from some of my chums on the YakYak forum; I want Blitz to work in Mac and Linux environments, and thus I need to plan things extremely carefully, especially gadget and screen layouts. After exchanging a few emails, my Mac test pilot is raring to go, but Linux development has stalled due to the fact that the test pilot doesn't have Max GUI (a minor hiccup).
Yesterday was the first 'proper' coding session, and my main task (before I get to do the fun stuff) is to get the window/environment working nicely. I experimented with parent/child windows for the tool panels (as PhotoShop does so well), but I can't really abide them in FishEd; I can appreciate that some people like to have multiple windows overlaying their work area, but to me it's just cluttered and hideous and makes everything less intuitive and more like somebody else's messy desk (i.e. impossible to find stuff).
In the end, I decided to keep the main canvas attached to the top left of the window, and the tool panels aligned to the right. Expanding the window (yes, FishEd afficionados, the program window is now minimisable, maximisable, and resizable) will now increase the size of the canvas in chunks according to the current tile size - I just need to tweak the code to get it running flawlessly.
