News

The Artist's Easel has returned! See the article for further details.

Overall progress for the Loradon 3.0 Preview has reached 88%!
www.ifthensoftware.net/loradon_online/progress/


From the Programmer
Written by Invisible

I have decided to make modal elements darken and lock all the elements behind it. The code will not block when the modal element is created, so it is not a "true" modal element, but it will work well for things such as the menu, amount window, and message boxes. Making this a feature of the GUI system will greatly help to clean up the user interface code, since darkening and locking is currently handled by the GUI user code.

After attempting to continue coding the GUI system, I realized that I needed to redesign a couple other features, namely drag and drop, and bringing an element to the foreground when it is clicked on.

Before I describe the user-set foreground element feature (clicking on a window to bring it to the foreground), I should describe something else which it relies on; the "System Foremost" feature. An element has system foremost status when all the parent elements between it and the root are the foremost children of their own parent. The foreground element is the GUI tree leaf node that has system foremost status. The foremost child of an element always has system foremost status when its parent has system foremost status. If an element does not have system foremost status, none of its children can.

Now that I have explained that, the user-set foreground element feature works as follows: If an element is clicked on, and does not have system foremost status, it can request for this status from its parent. If its parent doesn't have system foremost status, the parent requests its own parent for the status. This continues until a parent is found which has system foremost status, at which point the child that requested for it is made the foremost child and is thus given system foremost status. If the child was making the request in response to a request from one of its own children, it makes that child its foremost child and this process repeats until the original child that requested it is given system foremost status.

Keyboard focus is handled in a similar manner, and there is even a "System Focus" feature which works as you would expect.

Drag and drop is proving to be somewhat complicated, however I am making steady progress with it.


Artist's Easel
Written by GreyKnight

Since I finished the town, I have started an iScribble board where I will be drawing various sketches, some of which are related to our projects. I will be showing them in this article from now on.

Here are some of the drawings I did this week:

This is the first drawing I made on iScribble. It took me about 6 hours to complete.
(Click to enlarge)


Here are some various sketches.
(Click to enlarge)



Community Spotlight
Written by Acaceol

After the aforementioned sketches by GreyKnight, hype for "Loradon 3.0" has been higher than ever. I even decided to get on Loradon Online for a bit, and it's been a topic that's come up quite a lot recently. On the more technical side of things, InvisibleMan recently attempted (to no avail) to remove message throttling from the IRC server. This would make HAL perform better, and not lag when moderators clear the screen. However, the server InvisibleMan uses can only be compiled with an old version of VC++, which can't be downloaded anymore. Looks like the swearers in SAO will be annoying still.