The visualization editor was retaining an IPlugin reference for the
visualization generator selection combo box. After 5 minutes the
proxy object timed out, so if you left the editor open and inactive
for that long you'd start getting weird errors.
We now keep the script identifier string and use that to get a
fresh IPlugin proxy object.
Visualization animations are now exported as animated GIFs. The
Windows stuff is a bit lame so I threw together some code that
stitches a bunch of GIFs together.
The GIF doesn't quite match the preview, because the preview scales
the individual frames, while the animated GIF uses the largest frame
as the size and is then scaled based on that. Animating frames of
differing sizes together is bound to be trouble anyway, so I'm not
sure how much to fret over this.
We now store Visualizations, VisualizationAnimations, and
VisualizationSets as three separate lists linked by tag strings.
WARNING: this breaks existing projects with visualizations. The
test projects have been updated.
Bitmap animations are composed of a sequence of other visualizations.
This is all well and good until a visualization is deleted, at which
point all animations in all sets in the entire project have to be
checked and potentially changed, and perhaps even removed (if all of
the animation's members have been removed). This turns out to be
kind of annoying to deal with, but it's better to deal with it in
code than force the user to manually update broken animations.
This change adds thumbnails for the animations, currently generated
by offscreen composition. This approach doesn't work quite right.
This adds a new class and a rough GUI for the editor. Animated
visualizations take a collection of bitmaps and display them in
sequence. (This will eventually become an animated GIF.)
Fixed the issue where changes to tags in the set currently being
edited weren't visible to the tag uniqueness check when editing other
items in the same set.
First swing at a visualizer for Atari 2600 sprites and playfields.
Won't necessarily present an accurate view of what is displayed on
screen, but should provide a reasonable shape for data stored in
the obvious way.
The Adventure playfields looked squashed, so I added a simple row
duplication value.
Also, minor improvements to visualizers generally:
- Throw an exception, rather than an Assert, in VisBitmap8 when the
arguments are bad.
- Show the exception in the Visualization Edit dialog.
- If generation fails and we don't have an error message, show a
generic "stuff be broke" string.
- Set focus on OK button in Visualization Set Edit after editing,
so you can hit Enter twice after renaming a tag.
Various improvements:
- Switched to ReadOnlyDictionary in Visualization to make it clear
that the parameter dictionary should not be modified.
- Added a warning to the Visualization Set editor that appears when
there are no plugins that implement a visualizer.
- Make sure an item is selected in the set editor after edit/remove.
- Replaced the checkerboard background with one that's a little bit
more grey, so it's more distinct from white pixel data.
- Added a new Apple II hi-res color converter whose output more
closely matches KEGS and AppleWin RGB.
- Added VisHiRes.cs to some Apple II system definitions.
- Added some test bitmaps for Apple II hi-res to the test directory.
(These are not part of an automated test.)
Thumbnails are now visible in the main list and in the visualization
set editor. They're generated on first need, and regenerated when
the set of plugins changes.
Added a checkerboard background for the visualization editor bitmap
preview. (It looks all official now.)
The Visualization and Visualization Set editors are now fully
functional. You can create, edit, and rearrange sets, and they're
now stored in the project file.
Implemented Apple II hi-res bitmap conversion. Supports B&W and
color. Uses essentially the same algorithm as CiderPress.
Experimented with displaying non-text items in ListView. I assumed
it would work, since it's the sort of thing WPF is designed to do,
but it's always wise to approach with caution. Visualization Sets
now show a 64x64 button as a placeholder for the eventual thumbnail.
Some things were being flaky, which turned out to be because I
wasn't Prepare()ing the plugins before using them from Edit
Visualization. To make this a deterministic failure I added an
Unprepare() call that tells the plugin that we're all done.
NOTE: this breaks all existing plugins.
Got parameter in/out working in EditVisualization dialog. Did some
rearranging in PluginCommon interfaces and data structures. Still
doesn't do anything useful.
Basic infrastructure for taking a list of parameters from a plugin
and turning it into a collection of UI controls, merging in values
from a Visualization object. Doesn't yet do anything useful.
WPF makes the hard things easy and the easy things hard. This was
a hard thing, so it was easy to do (with some helpful sample code).
Yay WPF?
