shillingworth

Was offline for awhile again, but got a lot of work on this done. The whole thing works with Direct X now. Got the preview panel working in the editing tool, even a caching system that handles maintaining a cache of images and animations. Currently adding a layer between the interface manager and the editor to handle default UI lookups (like referencing an animation in the default ui from some custom ui). That part is going slow though, it's tricky to allow a custom ui to access parts of the default ui without having conflicts between the two.

Also added some functionality to the interface manager, allowing it to build the equi.xml file with a reference ui in mind. What I mean by a reference ui is including an entire ui in the equi.xml file, similar to the <include>../default/equi.xml</include>, but not restricted to just doing that to the default ui, of course some validation comes into play, like if it tries to load a ui that doesn't eventually lead to the default ui, it will reject it and prompt the user to decide if they want to add a reference to the default ui in the root of it all.

In example the reference ui works like this:

You have a UI called BOBUI that has an equi.xml with <include>../BILLUI/equi.xml</include>
BILLUI doesn't make a reference to "default", so the program ask the user if they'd like to reconstruct the equi.xml file to include a reference to the default ui.
After BILLUI's equi.xml is reconstructed, assuming it just had a copy and pasted equi.xml from the default ui, all of the <include>s that pointed to files in the default ui would be removed and <include>../default/equi.xml</include> would be put in their place.

With that functionality came a new setting though, I realised that some of ya wont want that stuff, so I added a setting called Good Practice Guidelines, or GPG, which will disable or enable restricting code to what is theoretically safe. The GPG can be enabled for each node in the equi structure, for all interfaces, a certain interface, a certain file, even a certain element.

Also added a very powerful feature called Snapshot. What it does is take a Snapshot of a UI, not visual what it looks like, but of it's data. The Snapshot was originally going to be my Undo feature, but evolved to allow me to store an entire interface in a single file that's 1/65th the size of the actual interface. Each Snapshot is saved using a naming scheme, like EQIASnapshot_Default_01082008_1324.sns for a snapshot of the default ui on jan 8 2008 at 1:24pm. The snapshot's can be loaded almost instantly, with the compression I used on them, they actually load faster than the xml it represents. They store everything from images, to xml, even additional text files that describe what's in the ui.

After I get the main manager working I'll be releasing the first usable version of the program, without the main manager it's all so worthless since no custom ui replaces all of the default ui elements.

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