Settings/Preferences Redesign

[Goombert]

This is another feature I have finished today that I have been meaning to implement for some time. Replace the tab controls with a tree view to better organize settings and preferences. This is ultimately intended to give these interfaces more room as we need to expand them for more settings such as platform settings for not just Windows and many other things. The new interfaces are more reminiscent of Visual Studio and Eclipse or Code::Blocks preference panels.




Down the road it is possible for me to also had a filter functionality to those trees like other IDE's have once they get more features implemented to them. But this is also intended to bring about another change, removing ENIGMA settings. My objective is to allow the ENIGMA plugin to extend the Preferences and Game Settings window for permanent and per-project compiler and API settings. So ENIGMA settings will vanish without breaking any of your EGM's and all of its settings will now show up in Game Settings if of course you have LGM to hooked up to the plugin.

I would like you guys to offer some feedback on my vision for the future of LateralGM, please do not hesitate to let me know how you think about this.

[IsmAvatar]

Awesome work! Definitely looking forward to these features. This should make the interface a lot cleaner and bring it up to date with most other IDEs, making it look that much more professional. When I had designed the settings frame, the first priority was to just get it working and working well - function over fashion - and that task was achieved. It's nice to see the more-than-capable hands of Robert and Co. bringing their creative visions to even this easily-neglected interface.

My only request/reminder is that if you do take out the enigma plugin, and just have a vanilla LateralGM, that none of those enigma-specific settings show up and the interface still looks clean and usable. Although I'm sure that you already thought of that and I'd be curious to see the system you set up to achieve it, since the swing layouts I designed always seemed to end up being set in stone and unable to be modified easily with plugins.

[Goombert]

Well I've made a lot of progress, ENIGMA settings frame is basically no more. We now have the ENIGMA settings handler which glues itself to the game settings frame. The settings handler has to duplicate some of the behavior of the basic resource frame including holding the ENIGMA settings resource and the original for reversion, but really only a few extra lines. The node will no longer appear in the tree and Build->Settings will now take you to Game Settings.

[Darkstar2]

That's very nice......I see more and more software use the tree now, in fact I have many.  This will make things more tidy when new functionality will be added.

[DaSpirit]

I know the topic is about the trees, but those buttons under the search box annoy me. They should only appear if you're currently searching.

[egofree]

In the preferences window, there is nothing displayed in the code editor :



Is this normal ?

[Goombert]

ego, there never were any preferences for the code editor, they haven't been added yet and the theory is that JoshEdit should have a universal preferences panel for any program it is embedded to.

[Rezolyze]

I know the topic is about the trees, but those buttons under the search box annoy me.

I think they take up too much space. How about two small buttons next to the search text box? Instead of "Next" and "Previous" the buttons could have left and right facing triangles.

[Search For Resources... ] [<] [>]

My example is ugly, but I'm hoping it illustrates my point. When the mouse cursor hovers over the buttons you could display a tool tip that says "Next" or "Previous" respectively.

Maybe the "Whole Word" and "Filter Tree" check boxes could be in a drop down menu from a third button next to the search text box.

[Search For Resources... ] [<] [>] [=]

Seems cleaner and less cluttered to me, but that might be going too far.

[Goombert]

Guys try to stay on topic here this topic is specifically about the settings/preferences panel, this is why I made a separate topic for each.

Further discussion about the design of the search feature should be posted in the following topic.
http://enigma-dev.org/forums/index.php?topic=2228.0

My example is ugly, but I'm hoping it illustrates my point. When the mouse cursor hovers over the buttons you could display a tool tip that says "Next" or "Previous" respectively.

Maybe the "Whole Word" and "Filter Tree" check boxes could be in a drop down menu from a third button next to the search text box.

Yes I am going to replace the giant buttons with a tool bar and the whole word settings and stuff will be put into a little settings window like a F&R dialog where you can also toggle regular expression and searching inside resources and not just their names.