On Week 24/2012
skyjake:
Last week I continued work the automatic updates by doing a bunch of small improvements to the Updater dialogs and the frequency of update checks. I also added support for JPEG images.
Here are the changes to the Updater in more detail:
.jpg images can now be used everywhere for textures, skins, and other graphics. This was relatively easy to accomplish because Qt provides both JPG and PNG support for reading and writing images. (Naturally if you want an alpha channel, you should still use a PNG image.) I also removed the engine’s direct dependency on the libpng library, meaning compilation will be a little bit simpler.
My plan for this week is to first look at some issues Snowberry is having with command line options (in #535 and #536) and then get started with my next roadmap item: adding a game mode for Hexen 1.0.
Last week I continued work the automatic updates by doing a bunch of small improvements to the Updater dialogs and the frequency of update checks. I also added support for JPEG images.
Here are the changes to the Updater in more detail:
- Added an option for checking for updates always at startup, as suggested by Vermil.
- The update notification dialog can now show a “Checking for updates...” message when it’s waiting for a reply from dengine.net.
- When changing the Updater settings via the notification dialog, a new check with the new settings is automatically made after closing the settings dialog.
- An automatic check is performed at startup when enough time has passed since the previous check. Previously the elapsed time was measured accurately: for instance, if a check was made at 10 AM with a Daily interval, the next check would only occur after 10 AM on the following day. This has an unintended side-effect, though: the time of the check keeps getting pushed later and later every day. I changed the logic to only check for differences in weekdays: a Daily check will be done once per day, the first time the engine is started on each day.
.jpg images can now be used everywhere for textures, skins, and other graphics. This was relatively easy to accomplish because Qt provides both JPG and PNG support for reading and writing images. (Naturally if you want an alpha channel, you should still use a PNG image.) I also removed the engine’s direct dependency on the libpng library, meaning compilation will be a little bit simpler.
My plan for this week is to first look at some issues Snowberry is having with command line options (in #535 and #536) and then get started with my next roadmap item: adding a game mode for Hexen 1.0.