Version 1.93 Alpha/Beta 1

1. Fixed a bug that I don’t remember anyone pointing out where Link no longer slides if he gets hit. This was from the fix to keep Link from sliding the wrong way off the ladder (still have to make a quest rule for that I think).

2. Compile-time optimizations. For you programmers out there, I basically took out all and replaced them with which means I had to take each file and extract a header file for it, which is much more fun when you are working with inherited classes. Took me 29 revisions of the code to get it finished (2 days work, too). Now when I make a small change, I don’t have to wait for 5 minutes for 5 or more unchanged files to recompile to get an object to link with.

3. Screen drawing optimizations. Before, there were several sections of code for drawing the screen scattered throughout different files (anywhere from 7 to 40 lines long each). I’ve consolidated them all into one command. This will make the drawing more consistent and make sure I didn’t forget to draw something at each spot, especially if I make a change to screen drawing at a later date.

4. Linux port (which causes this version to be renamed to 1.93 Alpha 1).

5. Semi-working Mac OS X port.

6. Tile grabbing now has a reduce feature, which will try to match the colors of the imported image (if you are grabbing from a bitmap instead of from exported tiles) to the colors in the current CSet.

7. ZQuest (the Windows version, anyway) now lets you switch between full-screen and windowed mode at will. You can either use Alt-Enter or select Fullscreen from the Etc menu.

8. When loading or saving quests in ZQuest, you now get a progress list displayed. It shows you exactly what data is being loaded/saved and where it dies if there is an error. This will help in quest recovery if there is a problem later.

9. Automatic data recovery. Because of the new format of the quests, if there is an error while reading the quest, many times, the program can scan from that point and find the beginning of the next section and continue from there. So, instead of losing your entire quest, you may just get some ectra junk thrown in to the section that had a bad value in it. This feature may possibly be expanded to cause it to rescan the entire quest looking for any data it hasn’t already read (in case the bad section caused it to skip a section header and miss a vital section), so that very little, if any, data is lost.

10. Translucency now works with palette cycling.

11. Animation and palette cycling no longer pauses during most operations.

12. FPS display in ZQuest doesn’t flicker anymore.

13. Link sprites don’t flicker anymore in the Link sprite dialog.

14. Animation speed is now more constant in ZQuest (same speed in DOS/Windows and doesn’t speed up when you hold down the mouse button).

15. Combo brush size option restored and fixed. Space bar changes how it looks (the same way as it does in the combo list screen).

16. Fixed (I hope) the bug where using the combo brush would make your mouse disappear if you used the keyboard to go somewhere.

17. Fixed the bug where Link would be fully visible when he was exiting a cave (instead of the stair-climbing effect).

18. Right-clicking on a combo selector will now set the combo and cset to 0 (for fast deletion, instead of having to manually select combo 0 and changing the cset to 0).

19. The tile editor now shows what pixel row and column the cursor is on and what color that pixel is (both the color number and the r, g, and b values).

20. The tile editor now has a mouse that shows what color is assigned to each button. Cosmetic, really.

21. The tile editor now has a new tool, the eyedropper (lens of truth). Clicking on a pixel in the tile while using this tool will set the color of the button used to be the color of the pixel clicked on. Holding down the Alt key provides quick, temporary access to this feature without having to manually select the tool, then selecting the previous tool after picking a new color.

22. SPC files can now be used as alternate dmap music (like MOD, IT, S3M, and XM files are), although they are a little buggy at the moment (they don’t pause properly when you go to a system menu, for instance).

23. Now, in the Misc Colors dialog, you can click on one of the color edit boxes, then click on a color in the color table, and it will set that color automatically (no need to find the row and column yourself).

24. The dungeon template dialog (Tools->Template) has 2 new features. Before, the floor tile would always be whatever your current combo and cset selections were. Now, if you hold down the shift key while opening the dialog, the floor tile will stay what it was the last time you opened the dialog (unless that is the first time you opened it, in which case it will use the current combo and cset). The second feature is that now, you can click on the floor tile and pick another combo and cset, without having to change your current selections outside of the dialog.

Here are some screenshots of the current alpha, for those of you who are curious (all of these are nam):

The enhanced tile editor.

The string editor.

The side warp editor.

The enhanced quest rules editor. Notice the tab control. Lots of programming involved in making that thing work.

Miscellaneous colors editor.

The main screen.

Door Combo Set editor. Tab control again instead of the little arrow buttons.

Enhanced DMap editor. Nested tab control in the 4th screen.