Adventure Creator original thread

[Wolfschadowe]

[quote="tlaero"How about if I add a "RegEx" checkbox and, if you check it, it does full Regular Expression parsing? Then you can do pretty much anything you'd like.[/quote]Sounds good to me.

Wolfschadowe

[tlaero]

Okay, I've got your regex working and the fix for the bug. My ImageViewer is working but is a little rough around the UI edges. It doesn't crash, but needs a keyboard interface and has a few strange behaviors I need to clean up.

Would you rather wait until I clean it up before I release the version with the regex, or should I release it now and keep working on the image viewer?

Tlaero

[Wolfschadowe]

I'm not in any rush. Take your time for the spit and polish.

[tlaero]

I just uploaded AC 6.4.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/six8f ... reator.zip

I was having trouble selecting between a number of similar images in the File->Open dialog box, so I added an Image Viewer. This lets you set the image as large as you'd like, cycle between them, and apply it to the current page. This is the first implementation of ImageViewer. I'll refine it as I use it and decide what else I want it to do. If you have suggestions or feedback, let me know.

Also added the ability to use Regular Expressions to filter the GameView.

Fixed the bug Wolf reported where writing a page comment changed the active picture area.

Tlaero

[Wolfschadowe]

Hi Tlaero,

Took AC6.4 out for a test drive this morning and it seems to be working great! Love the RegEx! I can't begin to describe how useful that is to me. THANK YOU!

Also confirmed that I haven't been able to repro the comment bug on the latest version.

I also enjoy the image viewer. Here's the hip-shot of ideas that came to me. (These are just brainstorming, I haven't thought them through, so you should gleefully say no to any/all of them. .)

• Display thumbnails on a scrolling filmstrip of images matching the current filter below the image, and allow selection from there. Similar perhaps to the Bing Image Search filmstrip you get after clicking on an image. (I know, who uses Bing, right? But their image search is awesome. Especially marking favorites in search)
• Add a button to open the current image in the AC defined editor.
• Integrate image compression/conversion to the gui. Possibly with prompting for a root Originals folder to be defined in AC that the Pre-compressed original is moved to. Maybe just a Compress button, and a box/slider for compression ratio.
• Image conversion from common image formats, .png, .tiff. etc.
• Basic editing. Thinking just brightness, contrast, hue, etc... Backup original to the originals folder. Increment backed up images to prevent overwrites.
• Sweet talk Kexter out of his image scrambling code and have an option to scramble/descramble select images, as well as properly detect and display scrambled images. (see BEW/Files/EBS/AODemoBonus/Images for an example. I scramble bonus images in BEW to increase incentive's to earning them.
• Count and or list of pages where the active image is already used.
• Image size label for the active image.
• RegEX search for the filter.

That's all I've got for now. I'll let you know if I think of more ideas. Again, these are ideas, not to the level of feature requests.

Thanks again for all the hard work you put into this tool!

Wolfschadowe

[Wolfschadowe]

Been creating pages for a new scene in BEW, and I've found the Image Viewer to be very useful. Especially for describing movement and transitions in text, I can pull up the image from the previous page on one monitor from the image viewer while adding text to the current page with the current image.

One bug to report, that I found by accident. I get unable to find image errors with the following steps to reproduce.
1. Open Game in AC.
2. Show Game View
3. Show Image viewer.
4. In Game View, select a page in one path. (ex. BEW\Files\Base\d1office\images)
5. In Image Viewer, Select "Get Current AC Image"
6. In Game View, Select a page in another path (ex. BEW\Files\EBS\n1bar\images) //At this point, Image Viewer shows an image from d1office\images and AC Main shows an image from n1bar\images
7. In Image Viewer, Select "Set Current AC Image" -- Error occurs. //I did this by accident. I meant to select "Get current AC Image" although I can see a scenario where Someone would use this to quickly get an image.

Feature Request: Cache the previous image that was in AC when using the "Set Current Image" button, and recall it through a new button. "Display old image," or "Revert image" or something.
I find myself doing this a lot in my new workflow: Find image in Image Viewer, Set Current Image, View previous image that was in AC. Fine when it's just the "Prev Image" button.

Also, the button layout is a little non-intuitive for me. I keep setting, when I should be getting. Maybe I'll get used to it, but I think some kind of separation of the "Set current AC Image" button would be helpful. Maybe justify right? Maybe also center the Prev/Next buttons so you have left justified "Get" Center justified "Prev/Next", and Right justified "Set"?

Must say though, I'm really enjoying using the Image Viewer as a picker. It's the best feature I didn't know I needed!

Wolfschadowe

[kexter]

@tlaero:
In my opinion, the ImageViewer should utilize the same smart-sort that the GameView employs for pages.

And I think you can safely disregard the following feature requests by Wolfschadowe, as they seem pretty out of scope for this utility. (And would just lead to unnecessary bloat.)

• Integrate image compression/conversion to the gui. Possibly with prompting for a root Originals folder to be defined in AC that the Pre-compressed original is moved to. Maybe just a Compress button, and a box/slider for compression ratio.
• Image conversion from common image formats, .png, .tiff. etc.
• Basic editing. Thinking just brightness, contrast, hue, etc... Backup original to the originals folder. Increment backed up images to prevent overwrites.
• Sweet talk Kexter out of his image scrambling code and have an option to scramble/descramble select images, as well as properly detect and display scrambled images. (see BEW/Files/EBS/AODemoBonus/Images for an example. I scramble bonus images in BEW to increase incentive's to earning them.

@Wolfschadowe:
I take it that the last item of the above list is meant to say "sweet talk the image-scrambling code out of kexter"... We may alter or drop image-scrambling before the next bonus scene ships, so it wouldn't be fair to force something into AC that we won't use in the future.

[tlaero]

Heh. I had ImageViewer all set and ready to go. Then I tried it on BEW...

I'm sure what I did was bring in the subdirectory when getting a file but not send it back when setting it. You'll have trouble if you open an image in one directory then try to write it into another. Unless the new directory has a file of the same name. Then it'll just do the complete wrong thing. (-:

I'll definitely fix that.

The alternate button layout you described would be doable. Should the buttons each be 1/4 the width of the screen or should they stay small and have lots of white space between them. I think the whitespace would look weird. Of course, keeping them exactly how they are but doing Get, Prev, Next, Set, would be trivially easy to change.

I'll think about the concept of storing a few images. You're basically asking for the "memory" button on an old school calculator. I could add a few "memory store" and "memory recall" buttons for, say, 4 memories. I suppose you'd want them to span directories, wouldn't you?

List of pages that use the image is a pretty big change, but would probably be cool.

Why do you need the image size? Don't you have all of your images the same size? If not, why not?

Kexter, I'm not concerned with "bloating" the code if it brings features that make game developer's lives easier. I mean, the first iteration of AC just let you open an image, draw the hit targets, and then copy and paste that part of the code into your html editor. It's considerably more complex (and messy) now, but also much more useful.

That said, it seems unlikely that someone would use ImageViewer to compress an image or change formats one image at a time. That's the kind of thing you'd want to do in bulk.

Tlaero

[Wolfschadowe]

Heh. I had ImageViewer all set and ready to go. Then I tried it on BEW...

You know I'm never going to let you off that easy.

I'll definitely fix that.

No rush. I only did it once by accident. I'd say just release the fix along with whatever enhancements you want to go with and don't worry about a patch for this alone. It doesn't affect me at all at this point since I very rarely pull images across directories.

I could add a few "memory store" and "memory recall" buttons for, say, 4 memories.

I was just thinking one. I don't see a use for 4 personally. Maybe 2, I guess, if I stretch, but maybe there's a use somewhere for four.

I suppose you'd want them to span directories, wouldn't you?

Sure, why not.

Should the buttons each be 1/4 the width of the screen or should they stay small and have lots of white space between them.

GUI design is NOT my forte. I was thinking maybe smaller prev/next buttons in the middle...or maybe bigger prev/next buttons in the middle, and some white-space between the prev/next buttons (as a group, the prev/next would be abutted to each other) and the get/set buttons which would be to each side. But I don't know if that would be good or not. I just know that the current layout seems to break my brain. But however you like it, I'll get used to it.

Why do you need the image size? Don't you have all of your images the same size? If not, why not?

Don't know. I was just riffing ideas. My images are all about the same size, so that's not really an issue. Just maintaining overall awareness of the sizes I guess.

That said, it seems unlikely that someone would use ImageViewer to compress an image or change formats one image at a time. That's the kind of thing you'd want to do in bulk.

I agree. Again, I was just riffing ideas. Sometimes even my bad ideas will plant the seed for a good one in someone else.

[Mortze]

Hello.
Has anyone tried AC with Windows 10? Anything to report?

Cheers

[kexter]

Has anyone tried AC with Windows 10? Anything to report?

I have, AC works fine.

[tlaero]

I remember there being something weird with GameView when I upgraded to Win10, but I did something to work around it. If you're using one of the recent versions you should be fine.

Tlaero

[tlaero]

Oh wow. I've been using the new ImageViewer and Kexter is totally right that I need to smart-sort it. Win10 sorts the right way, but apparently .net doesn't. It's pretty hard to use the way it is now.

Okay, my current plans are:
0) Fix the "set in a different folder" bug
1) Smart sort
2) Some number of memories
3) Reorder the buttons so get and set aren't next to each other.

Longer term, the idea of a list of pages that uses the image is interesting to me. I'll have to think through the UI for that.

Tlaero

[Wolfschadowe]

I've been using AC with Win10 for about 6 months as part of the technical preview plan. I've seen 2 minor issues, that may or may not be related to the O/S.

Occasionally when minimizing and restoring the Game View, it will come up blank, like the text isn't painting to the window. I solve this by reapplying the filter. This only seems to occur when a filter is set.

Second, occasionally when minimizing and Restoring AC, the AC window will reappear at 1/4 width instead of the full width that I had set the window. Apart from those. Both may be glitches specific to my system though, and neither occurs frequently enough to be any trouble at all.

Apart from that, AC works as expected on Windows 10, for me.

Wolfschadowe

[tlaero]

I just uploaded AC 6.5.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/six8f ... reator.zip

ImageViewer sorts image names the same way GameView sorts html names.
ImageViewer now has a default filter button that filters the same way the open image dialog box does.
Added 4 "Memories" to ImageViewer. M1S stores the current image and M1R retrieves it.
Fixed the bug with setting the ImageViewer image when the current AC image is in a different directory.

Is 4 the right number of memories? I can change the number of them by changing one character in the code, so it's super easy to adjust that if we'd like.

Tlaero