Dialog Extension 2.0 Devlog

Some UI work. More sleek? Definitely. Will it increase productivity? Remains to be seen.

This morning I started to pull more of the code into the common layer that's shared between dialog, data structures, and the extras manager. The above file-explorer-type view will be available for dialog then, and will replace what the Extras Manager currently has.

Based on some ideas in the above screenshot, I've also pulled more issues into the Dialog Extension 2.0 milestone.

Dialog Extension 2.0
- Open Issues
- Closed Issues

I'm making both the tree on the left and the file lists on the right use the same selection model (select something in the tree, it'll be selected on the right as well, and vice versa). Still not sure if it's a good idea, and it's... buggy???

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipbg7gA8ZKI

Justin,

I just wanted to make sure you know about the bug that causes Dialog to crash frequently in both Desktop and Cppia -- I saw a crash bug listed in the issue tracker a while ago, and I assumed that was the bug I have been dealing with, but it occurs to me that I shouldn't make that assumption. The crashes I have been experiencing don't seem to correlate with any specific action or procedure that I can observe in the game. I can post a log if this doesn't sound familiar.

I've posted a log of the crash, because why not.

Also, I am using build 8658. Thanks.

Only crashing issue I recall in the issue tracker was this one.

I'll look into that too before releasing 2.0.

OK, great, thank you. I also want to make sure you know that it sometimes doesn't save a new dialog chunk. Sometimes, I have to close the game, reopen the game and then retype the new dialog chunk before it will save. I am in the habit now of always copying out the new dialog chunk to a notepad file in case Dialog doesn't save my work.

Ugh, really? Do you happen to have logs from when it does this, in case something shows up there?

I will try to get you a log of this -- it usually happens if I've been doing other things first, then try to create/save a new dialog chunk. It always works if I close down, reopen and enter the dialog chunk first thing.

(Also of note, if dialog hasn't saved the chunk, it will give me an error when the game tries to pull up the chunk. If I go back to the dialog extension before closing, the "missing" chunk will be there, but if I close down and re-open, the missing dialog chunk is gone.)

Yeah, makes sense if it's not saving the dialog out to the text file. Maybe it's because of some error that shows up in the logs, in which case it should be an easy fix. Or perhaps there's a problem with marking the dialog as "dirty" and needing to be saved.

Here's a log of the crash ....

Been slogging through the general UI stuff for ten days now. Results?

We've got drag and drop pretty much everywhere, and we have right click menus pretty much everywhere. I feel bad because these are pretty obvious things that you would expect in any decent UI, and it's taken me this long to implement them. Sorry guys!

(screenshots are of the Extras Manager, but it uses the same framework that the dialog/data structures extensions use)

After a whole slew of changes in the common extension framework, I've been updating dialog/data structures so they can at least compile again. They still aren't working quite how they used to, but I'm getting there.

Making forward progress again for the first time in a while (as opposed to backward progress)!

Most of the data types work again, and optional fields are now drawn transparent instead of completely disappearing.

Latest improvement: a few of the data types can have visual previews in addition to the dropdown, and icons (in the tree and file list) can be shown based on the selected graphic.