Finally add a second option for Chunk MapAccessor implementation besides the
MapAccessor. The RLEAccessor is basically a MapAccessor that will compress
your drawing with Run Length Encoding (RLE) in the on-disk format in the ZIP
file.
This slashes the file sizes of most levels:
* Shapeshifter: 21.8 MB -> 8.1 MB
* Jungle: 10.4 MB -> 4.1 MB
* Zoo: 2.8 MB -> 1.3 MB
Implementation details:
* The RLE binary format for Chunks is a stream of Uvarint pairs storing the
palette index number and the number of pixels to repeat it (along the Y,X
axis of the chunk).
* Null colors are represented by a Uvarint that decodes to 0xFFFF
or 65535 in decimal.
* Gameplay logic currently limits maps to 256 colors.
* The default for newly created chunks in-game will be RLE by default.
* Its in-memory representation is still a MapAccessor (a map of absolute
world coordinates to palette index).
* The game can still open and play legacy MapAccessor maps.
* On save in the editor, the game will upgrade/convert MapAccessor chunks over
to RLEAccessors, improving on your level's file size with a simple re-save.
Current Bugs
* On every re-save to RLE, one pixel is lost in the bottom-right corner of
each chunk. Each subsequent re-save loses one more pixel to the left, so what
starts as a single pixel per chunk slowly evolves into a horizontal line.
* Some pixels smear vertically as well.
* Off-by-negative-one errors when some chunks Iter() their pixels but compute
a relative coordinate of (-1,0)! Some mismatch between the stored world coords
of a pixel inside the chunk vs. the chunk's assigned coordinate by the Chunker:
certain combinations of chunk coord/abs coord.
To Do
* The `doodad touch` command should re-save existing levels to upgrade them.
* Add "Options" support for Doodads: these allow for individual Actor instances
on your level to customize properties about the doodad. They're like "Tags"
except the player can customize them on a per-actor basis.
* Doodad Editor: you can specify the Options in the Doodad Properties window.
* Level Editor: when the Actor Tool is selected, on mouse-over of an actor,
clicking on the gear icon will open a new "Actor Properties" window which
shows metadata (title, author, ID, position) and an Options tab to configure
the actor's options.
Updates to the scripting API:
* Self.Options() returns a list of option names defined on the Doodad.
* Self.GetOption(name) returns the value for the named option, or nil if
neither the actor nor its doodad have the option defined. The return type
will be correctly a string, boolean or integer type.
Updates to the doodad command-line tool:
* `doodad show` will print the Options on a .doodad file and, when showing a
.level file with --actors, prints any customized Options with the actors.
* `doodad edit-doodad` adds a --option parameter to define options.
Options added to the game's built-in doodads:
* Warp Doors: "locked (exit only)" will make it so the door can not be opened
by the player, giving the "locked" message (as if it had no linked door),
but the player may still exit from the door if sent by another warp door.
* Electric Door & Electric Trapdoor: "opened" can make the door be opened by
default when the level begins instead of closed. A switch or a button that
removes power will close the door as normal.
* Colored Doors & Small Key Door: "unlocked" will make the door unlocked at
level start, not requiring a key to open it.
* Colored Keys & Small Key: "has gravity" will make the key subject to gravity
and set its Mobile flag so that if it falls onto a button, it will activate.
* Gemstones: they had gravity by default; you can now uncheck "has gravity" to
remove their Gravity and IsMobile status.
* Gemstone Totems: "has gemstone" will set the totem to its unlocked status by
default with the gemstone inserted. No power signal will be emitted; it is
cosmetic only.
* Fire Region: "name" can let you set a name for the fire region similarly to
names for fire pixels: "Watch out for ${name}!"
* Invisible Warp Door: "locked (exit only)" added as well.
* New built-in wallpaper: "Dotted paper (dark)" is a dark-themed wallpaper.
* New built-in palette: "Neon Bright" with bright colors for dark levels.
* New cheat: "warp whistle" to automatically win the level.
* In case the user has a VERY LARGE screen resolution bigger than the full
bounds of a Bounded level, the Play Scene will cap the size and center
the level canvas onto the window. This is preferable to being able to see
beyond the level's boundaries and hitting an invisible wall in-game.
* Make the titlescreen Lazy Scroll work on unbounded levels. It can't bounce
off scroll boundaries but it will reverse course if it reaches the level's
furthest limits.
* Bugfix: characters' white eyes were transparent in-game. Multiple culprits
from the `doodad convert` tool defaulting the chroma key to white, to the
SDL2 textures considering white to be transparent. For the latter, the game
offsets the color by -1 blue.
* Editor: Auto-save on a background goroutine so you don't randomly freeze
the editor up during.
* Fix actor linking issues when you drag and re-place a linked doodad: the
level was too eagerly calling PruneLinks() whenever a doodad was 'destroyed'
(such as the one just picked up) breaking half of the link connection.
* Chunk unloader: do not unload a chunk that has been modified (Set or Delete
called on), keep them in memory until the next ZIP file save to flush them
out to disk.
* Link Tool: if you clicked an actor and don't want to connect a link, click
the first actor again to de-select it.
Updates to the `doodad` tool:
* `doodad edit-level --resize <int>` can re-chunk a level to use a different
chunk size than the default 128. Large chunk sizes 512+ lead to performance
problems.
* Added to the F3 Debug Overlay is a "Texture:" label that counts the number
of textures currently loaded by the (SDL2) render engine.
* Added Teardown() functions to Level, Doodad and the Chunker they both use
to free up SDL2 textures for all their cached graphics.
* The Canvas.Destroy() function now cleans up all textures that the Canvas
is responsible for: calling the Teardown() of the Level or Doodad, calling
Destroy() on all level actors, and cleaning up Wallpaper textures.
* The Destroy() method of the game's various Scenes will properly Destroy()
their canvases to clean up when transitioning to another scene. The
MainScene, MenuScene, EditorScene and PlayScene.
* Fix the sprites package to actually cache the ui.Image widgets. The game
has very few sprites so no need to free them just yet.
Some tricky places that were leaking textures have been cleaned up:
* Canvas.InstallActors() destroys the canvases of existing actors before it
reinitializes the list and installs the replacements.
* The DraggableActor when the user is dragging an actor around their level
cleans up the blueprint masked drag/drop actor before nulling it out.
Misc changes:
* The player character cheats during Play Mode will immediately swap out the
player character on the current level.
* Properly call the Close() function instead of Hide() to dismiss popup
windows. The Close() function itself calls Hide() but also triggers
WindowClose event handlers. The Doodad Dropper subscribes to its close
event to free textures for all its doodad canvases.
New features:
* Flood Tool for the editor. It replaces pixels of one color with another,
contiguously. Has limits on how far from the original pixel it will color,
to avoid infinite loops in case the user clicked on wide open void. The
limit when clicking an existing color is 1200px or only a 600px limit if
clicking into the void.
* Cheat code: 'master key' to play locked Story Mode levels.
Level GameRules feature added:
* A new tab in the Level Properties dialog
* Difficulty has been moved to this tab
* Survival Mode: for silver high score, longest time alive is better than
fastest time, for Azulian Tag maps. Gold high score is still based on
fastest time - find the hidden level exit without dying!
Tweaks to the Azulians' jump heights:
* Blue Azulian: 12 -> 14
* Red Azulian: 14 -> 18
* White Azulian: 16 -> 20
Bugs fixed:
* When editing your Palette to rename a color or add a new color, it wasn't
possible to draw with that color until the editor was completely unloaded
and reloaded; this is now fixed.
* Minor bugfix in Difficulty.String() for Peaceful (-1) difficulty to avoid
a negative array index.
* Try and prevent user giving the same name to multiple swatches on their
palette. Replacing the whole palette can let duplication through still.
Added a new level property: Difficulty
* An enum ranging from -1, 0, 1 (Peaceful, Normal, Hard)
* Default difficulty is Normal; pre-existing levels are Normal by
default per the zero value.
Doodad scripts can read the difficulty via the new global variable
`Level.Difficulty` and some doodads have been updated:
* Azulians: on Peaceful they ignore all player characters, and on Hard
they are in "hunt mode": infinite aggro radius and they're aggressive
to all characters.
* Bird: on Peaceful they will not dive and attack any player character.
Other spit and polish:
* New Level/Level Properties UI reworked into a magicform.
* New "PromptPre(question, answer, func)" function for prompting the
user with the developer shell, but pre-filling in an answer for them
to either post or edit.
* magicform has a PromptUser field option for simple Text/Int fields
which present as buttons, so magicform can prompt and update the
variable itself.
* Don't show the _autosave.doodad in the Doodad Dropper window.
Two new tools added to the Level Editor:
* Pan Tool: left-click to scroll the level around safely.
* Text Tool: write text onto your level.
Features of the Text Tool:
* Can choose from the game's built-in fonts, size and enter the message
you want to write.
* The mouse cursor previews the text when hovered over the level.
* Click to "stamp" the text onto your level. The currently selected
color swatch will be used to color the text in.
* Adds two new fonts: Azulian.ttf and Rive.ttf that can be selected in
the Text Tool.
Some implementation notes:
* Added package native/engine_sdl.go that handles the lower-level
SDL2_TTF logic to rasterize the text into a black&white image.
* WASM not supported yet (if the game even still built for WASM);
native/engine_wasm.go stubs out the TextToImage() call with a "not
supported" error just in case.
Other changes:
* New Toolbar icons: they are 24x24 instead of 32x32 to make more room
for more tools.
* The toolbar now shows two buttons per row for a more densely packed
layout. For very narrow screen widths (< 600px) the default Vertical
Toolbar layout will use one-button-per-row to not eat too much screen
real estate.
* In the Horizontal Toolbars layout there are 2 buttons per column.
* Doodad outline while dragging is now sized properly for the zoom level
* Make doodad hitboxes for Actor/Link Tool more accurate while zoomed
* Fix chunks low on the level not loading while zoomed in
* Fix Link lines drawn between doodads while zoomed - they point to the
correct position and their DrawLine calls have been optimized so they
don't lag out the level when lots of them are drawn at once.
* When the Actor Tool or Link Tool is active, mouse-over hitboxes on the
level's actors now works correctly while zoomed and scrolling in the
level.
* Regression: Level chunks don't appear outside a certain range from
origin while zoomed in.
* Regression: Actors don't draw their sprite while zoomed in, but do
when zoomed out.
Progress on the Zoom feature: when you zoom in and out, you can draw
shapes accurately onto the level. Seems a little buggy if you edit
while scrolling (as in drawing a very long line).
The title screen buttons are now more colorful.
* Got the level chunks AND the wallpaper to both scale UP and DOWN
consistently together.
* Trying to draw new pixels while zoomed in/out ends up offsetting the
pixels by 2X still. Still seems an issue between screen coordinates
and world coordinates. Zoom in 2X and try and draw a line 64px from
the corners of the screen? The committed line appropriately lands at
the 64px coord on the level data but, zoomed in, it appears 2X to the
right on the screen from where I dropped the cursor!
* When zooming OUT, the limit on number of chunks the viewport will try
and render is not increased, leaving dead space in the screen; more
chunks should render when there's room.
Palette swatches gain a new property: Pattern.
Patterns are grayscale textures that the swatch color will sample
against when drawing pixels to the level, by taking the world coordinate
modulo a value inside the texture.
A few algorithms were tried (Screen, Overlay), this branch lands on one
that tries to cast the color from grayscale which comes out rather dark;
to get a patterned color to look black while still seeing the pattern,
the color needs to be as bright as #777 to get the effect.
* Added Feature Flag support, run doodle with --experimental to enable
all flags. Eraser Tool is behind a feature flag now.
* + and - on the top row of keyboard keys will zoom the drawing in and
out in Edit Mode. The wallpaper zooms nicely enough, but level
chunkers need work.
* A View menu is added with Zoom in/out, reset zoom, and scroll to
origin options. The whole menu is behind the Zoom feature flag.
* Update README with lots of details for fun debug mode options to play
around with.
* Adds global modal support in the pkg/modal/ package. It has easy
Alert() and Confirm() methods to prompt the user before calling a
callback function on affirmative response.
* Modals have global app state: they're processed in the main loop in
pkg/doodle.go similar to the global command shell.
* When a modal is active, a semitransparent black frame covers the
screen (gameplay loop paused, last game frame rendered below) and the
modal window appears on top.
* The developer console retains higher priority than the modal system
and always renders on top.
* Editor Mode: track when the level pixels have been modified, and
confirm the user about unsaved changes when they attempt to close the
level (New, Open, Close, etc.)
* Global: the Escape key no longer immediately shuts down the game, but
will confirm the user's intent via a modal.
* File->Quit in the Editor Mode also invokes the confirm shutdown modal.
* Start the program window maximized with the `-w maximized` CLI option.
* Move the Doodad Palette off the right-side dock of the Editor Scene and
into its own pop-up window: the DoodadDropper.
* Shrink the width of the Color Palette panel and show only the colors in
the buttons. The name of the swatch is available in the mouse-over tooltip.
* Added an "Edit" button to the Color Palette. It opens a Palette Editor
window where you can rename, change colors and attributes of existing colors
OR insert new colors into your palette. (Deleting colors not yet supported).
* level.Chunker gets a Redraw method: invalidates all cached textures of all
chunks forcing the level to redraw itself, possibly with an updated palette.
Add new doodads:
* Start Flag: place this in a level to set the spawn point of the player
character. If no flag is found, the player spawns at 0,0 in the top
corner of the map. Only use one Start Flag per level, otherwise the
player will randomly spawn at one of them.
* Crumbly Floor: a solid floor that begins to shake and then fall apart
after a moment when a mobile character steps on it. The floor respawns
after 5 seconds.
* State Blocks: blue and orange blocks that toggle between solid and
pass-thru whenever a State Button is activated.
* State Button: a solid "ON/OFF" block that toggles State Blocks back
and forth when touched. Only activates if touched on the side or bottom;
acts as a solid floor when walked on from the top.
New features for doodad scripts:
* Actor scripts: call SetMobile(true) to mark an actor as a mobile mob
(i.e. player character or enemy). Other doodads can check if the actor
colliding with them IsMobile so they don't activate if placed too close
to other (non-mobile) doodads in a level. The Blue and Red Azulians
are the only mobile characters so far.
* Message.Broadcast allows sending a pub/sub message out to ALL doodads
in the level, instead of only to linked doodads as Message.Publish does.
This is used for the State Blocks to globally communicate on/off status
without needing to link them all together manually.
* Add initial Ellipse Tool to the Editor Mode. Currently there's
something wrong with the algorithm and the ellipses have a sort of
'lemon shape' to them.
* Refactor the IterLine/IterLine2 functions to be more consistent.
IterLine used to be the raw algorithm that took a bunch of coordinate
numbers and IterLine2 took two render.Point's and was the main one
used throughout the app. Now, IterLine takes the two Points and the
raw algorithm function removed.
* Implement Brush Sizes for drawtool.Stroke and add a UI to the tools panel
to control the brush size.
* Brush sizes: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 24, 32, 48, 64
* Add the Eraser Tool to editor mode. It uses a default brush size of 16
and a max size of 32 due to some performance issues.
* The Undo/Redo system now remembers the original color of pixels when
you change them, so that Undo will set them back how they were instead
of deleting the pixel entirely. Due to performance issues, this only
happens when your Brush Size is 0 (drawing single-pixel shapes).
* UI: Add an IntVariable option to ui.Label to bind showing the value of
an int reference.
Aforementioned performance issues:
* When we try to remember whole rects of pixels for drawing thick
shapes, it requires a ton of scanning for each step of the shape. Even
de-duplicating pixel checks, tons of extra reads are constantly
checked.
* The Eraser is the only tool that absolutely needs to be able to
remember wiped pixels AND have large brush sizes. The performance
sucks and lags a bit if you erase a lot all at once, but it's a
trade-off for now.
* So pixels aren't remembered when drawing lines in your level with
thick brushes, so the Undo action will simply delete your pixels and not
reset them. Only the Eraser can bring back pixels.
* The game's tick counter was moved from Doodle.ticks to shmem.Tick
where it is more easily available from every corner of the code.
* Fix a bug in the Level Editor where dragging an already-existing actor
from one part of your map to another, would cause it to lose all its
data (especially its UUID), breaking links to other doodads. Now the
existing Actor catches a ride on the drag object to be reinserted
later.
* Animate the Link Line visualizers between actors. They now animate a
blinking color between magenta and grey-ish.
* Add support for the LineTool and RectTool while in the EditorMode to
easily draw straight lines and rectangle outlines.
* Key bindings were added to toggle tools in lieu of a proper UI to
select the tool from a toolbar.
* "F" for Pencil (Freehand) Tool (since "P" is for "Playtest")
* "L" for Line Tool
* "R" for Rectangle Tool
* Add new pkg/drawtool with utilities to abstract away drawing actions
into Strokes and track undo/redo History for them.
* The freehand Pencil tool in EditorMode has been refactored to create a
Stroke of Shape=Freehand and queue up its world pixels there instead
of directly modifying the level chunker in real time. When the mouse
button is released, the freehand Stroke is committed to the level
chunker and added to the UndoHistory.
* UndoHistory is (temporarily) stored with the level.Level so it can
survive trips to PlayScene and back, but is not stored as JSON on
disk.
* Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y in EditorMode for undo and redo, respectively.
* Add RGBA color blending support in WASM build.
* Initial texture caching API for Canvas renderer engine. The WASM build
writes the chunk caches as a "data:image/png" base64 URL on the
browser's sessionStorage, for access to copy into the Canvas.
* Separated the ClickEvent from the MouseEvent (motion) in the WASM
event queue system, to allow clicking and dragging.
* Added the EscapeKey handler, which will abruptly terminate the WASM
application, same as it kills the window in the desktop build.
* Optimization fix: I discovered that if the user clicks and holds over
a single pixel when drawing a level, repeated Set() operations were
firing meaning multiple cache invalidations. Not noticeable on PC but
on WebAssembly it crippled the browser. Now if the cursor isn't moving
it doesn't do anything.
* On the Doodads tab is the Link button to enter the Link Tool.
* Click Link, then click the 1st doodad on the level, then click the 2nd
doodad to complete the link.
* The actors struct in the Level holds the link IDs for each actor.
