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SLADE v3.2.0
Tue, Apr 12 2022

And finally here we are, SLADE v3.2.0 is released!

Since beta 4 there have been a few changes including more improvements to entry tabs and restoring of the previous handling of shift+arrow key selection in the entry list.

The full release notes for 3.2.0 can be found below:

UI Refresh

3.2.0 includes a 'refresh' of various parts of the UI:

  • A new default icon set, as SVGs to allow it to scale to any size without being blurred
  • The entry list has received many updates and improvements:
    • Entries and directories are now shown in a tree structure for archives that support directories. This can be reverted back to a flat list with navigation controls like in 3.1.x via Preferences
    • Filter controls can now be toggled on/off
    • Icon size and padding is now configurable
    • Bookmarked entries are shown with bold text
  • Toolbars have received a bunch of updates:
    • Can now be laid out vertically
    • Groups can now be shown on the opposite end of the toolbar
    • No longer expand to multiple rows (was causing too many weird layout issues)
    • When groups don't fit, they are instead added to a menu under an extra 'overflow' button at the end of the toolbar
    • Buttons now correctly darken when clicked
    • Various other minor things
  • Moved a bunch of toolbar buttons from the main toolbar to down next to the entry list. This should hopefully make it more clear that they affect the selected entries in some way
  • Entry action tool buttons are now disabled if no entry is selected
  • Improved 'New Entry' dialog, with the ability to select the entry type and location
  • Creating a new archive is now done via a single 'New Archive' action, which pops up a dialog to select the archive type. Now also allows Quake PAK archives to be created
  • Added an option to condense the translation dialog a bit vertically at the cost of a smaller image preview frame
  • Rearranged toolbars for palette, gfx and texturex/pnames editors
  • The zoom slider in the gfx and texture editors has been replaced with a more compact control, with +/- zoom buttons and a combobox to set the zoom %

General

  • Major under-the-hood improvements to modernise and clean up the codebase, with increased stability and performance in mind
  • Added an 'All Files' option to the open dialog
  • Added ability to manually enter the executable path in the 'Run' dialog
  • Added the option to ignore 'hidden' files and directories (name starting with '.') when opening a directory
  • Improved high-DPI scaling and fixed some related issues (thanks @MP2E)
  • A warning is now shown when trying to save an archive if its file has been modified externally

Game Formats & Features Support

  • Support for Ion Fury (thanks @mykola-ambar)
    • Added palette
    • Support Ion Fury .art files
  • Added support for UMAPINFO (entry type and text language)
  • Added Exhumed (Powerslave) palette (thanks @mykola-ambar)
  • Added .VOX -> .KVX voxel model conversion (thanks @mykola-ambar)
  • Added the ability to convert to PSX DOOM format textures (thanks @BodbDearg)
  • Mixin classes are now handled when parsing ZScript
  • Added new 'Boom + MBF' map editor port configuration
  • Updated ZDoom language definitions (thanks @Blue-Shadow)
  • Updated Eternity EDF definitions (thanks @Altazimuth)
  • Fixed handling of ZMapInfo includes without enclosing double quotes

Resource Editor

  • Entries with duplicate names in zip archives are now disallowed
    • Attempting to rename/add an entry that would result in a duplicate will now append a number to the entry name
    • Entries with duplicate names won't be affected when opening a zip, however it will be unable to be saved until the duplicates are corrected
  • The 'Close' and 'Save' actions will now affect just the current tab (rather than the 'current' archive)
  • Added shortcut key to save the current entry (Ctrl+Alt+S)
  • Changed Ctrl+Shift+S shortcut to be for 'Save All' instead of 'Save As'
  • Added new ZDoom TEXTUREx cleanup operations for removing duplicate iwad textures, redundant single-patch textures and unused textures (in the maintenance menu) (thanks @ill)
  • Added 'Import Directory' action to import a directory and all its contents to the current archive
  • Selecting 'Open in New Tab' for an archive will now open it in a new tab as expected
  • Multi-image selector for gfx entries replaced with a spinbox (thanks @mykola-ambar)
  • Improved mp3 support and playback, no longer requires windows media player to be installed (on Windows) or wxMediaCtrl support (on Linux/macOS)
  • Bookmarks improvements
    • Bookmark action now toggles the bookmark on the entry/directory
    • Added a bookmarks toolbar button with a dropdown menu to switch between bookmarks
    • Added keyboard shortcut for the bookmark action (Ctrl+B)
  • Fixed MIDI playback via Timidity
  • Fixed Jaguar textures loading incorrectly (thanks @viciious)
  • Fixed gfx editing tools not working (on Windows)
  • Fixed buffer overflow when loading FON2 gfx
  • Fixed importing text-based palette formats (JASC, GIMP, CSV)

Texture Editor

  • Added support for advanced placeholders when renaming multiple textures, same as for entries
  • The 'Texture' menu should now correctly show again when a texture editor tab is open

Text Editor

  • Added colour scheme selection to Text menu
  • Fixed wrong comment colouring if a block comment opening is within a quoted string
  • Fixed calltip not disappearing when typing a function call with no args (ie. Function())

Map Editor

  • Added toggleable point light previews in 2d things mode
  • Vertex info overlay improvements
    • Display position as float if fractional
    • Show floor/ceiling height if set (UDMF)
  • Various improvements and fixes to texture handling and precedence (thanks @Talon1024)
  • Fixed an error when loading a custom port config from the user dir
  • Fixed issues with 2d -> 3d mode line selection conversion (thanks @kevans91)

Scripting

  • Updated/'finalised' API
    • Scripts written for 3.1.X will need to be updated to work with the new API, but from now there should be no further breaking changes to it, just additions
  • Updated documentation, has moved to https://slade.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
    • By moving it here it's much easier for me to update, and also allows for versioned scripting documentation (eg. docs for 3.1.12, 3.2.0, latest git build, etc.)
  • Expanded scripting capabilities:
    • Graphics manipulation including palettes and translations
    • Composite textures (TEXTUREx/PNAMES)

Additional Thanks

Additional thanks to @alexey-lysiuk @danfe @flarn2006 @anotak @jengelh for their additional contributions since the first 3.2.0 beta release

3.2.0 Beta 4 Released
Sat, Apr 02 2022

And finally, after almost a year, another beta release. This should be the last one before the final release of 3.2.0, which has been in beta for far too long already.

There are quite a few changes, improvements and fixes in this one - including the option to view the entry list as a flat list rather than a tree (for archives with directories), which has been commonly requested since the tree was added.

See the detailed list of changes below:

General

  • Added ability to manually enter the executable path in the 'run' dialog
  • Added the option to ignore 'hidden' files and directories (name starting with '.') when opening a directory
  • Mixin classes are now handled when parsing ZScript
  • Icons handling reworked, now loaded/rendered directly from svg
  • Improved high-DPI scaling and fixed some related issues (thanks @MP2E)
  • Updated ZDoom language definitions (thanks @Blue-Shadow)
  • Added new 'Boom + MBF' port configuration
  • Added support for UMAPINFO (entry type and text language)
  • Fixed various issues with handling non-ASCII filenames and paths in Windows
  • Various fixes for macOS (thanks @alexey-lysiuk)
  • Fixed start page 'create archive' links (thanks @kevans91)
  • Fixed endianness support on FreeBSD (thanks @danfe)

Resource Editor

  • Added the option to display entries as a flat list instead of a tree for archives with directories (ie. how it worked in 3.1.x and earlier)
  • Added ability to bookmark directories again
  • Can no longer create entries with duplicate names in zip archives
  • The 'Close' and 'Save' actions will now affect just the current tab (rather than the 'current' archive)
  • Added shortcut key to save the current entry (Ctrl+Alt+S)
  • Added new ZDoom TEXTUREx cleanup operations for removing duplicate iwad textures, redundant single-patch textures and unused textures (in the maintenance menu) (thanks @ill)
  • Added 'Import Directory' action to import a directory and all its contents to the current archive
  • Selecting 'Open in New Tab' for an archive will now open it in a new tab as expected
  • A warning is now shown when trying to save an archive if its file has been modified externally
  • Fixed Jaguar textures loading incorrectly (thanks @viciious)
  • Fixed audio metadata text not appearing
  • Fixed gfx editing tools not working (on Windows)
  • Fixed buffer overflow when loading FON2 gfx
  • Fixed various issues with the entry tree view
  • Fixed importing text-based palette formats (JASC, GIMP, CSV)

Texture Editor

  • Added support for advanced placeholders when renaming multiple textures, same as for entries
  • The 'Texture' menu should now correctly show again when a texture editor tab is open
  • Fixed duplicated textures on copy+paste
  • Fixed an issue where the first patch of a texture could ignore the truecolour option in some situations
  • Fixed desat translation not working correctly for bright colours

Text Editor

  • Added colour scheme selection to Text menu
  • Added the 'Compile ACS' button back to the toolbar

Map Editor

  • Fixed issues with reading/writing UDMF float values
  • Fixed possible crash after moving map geometry
  • Fixed special args not saving correctly (thanks @kevans91)
  • Fixed issues with 2d -> 3d mode line selection conversion (thanks @kevans91)
  • Various minor fixes and improvements

The plan now is to leave this beta up for a few weeks, fix any bugs that might come up then release 3.2.0 proper.

After that, I think for 3.2.x and eventually 3.3.0 I will be focusing on the resource editing features of SLADE. I've had less time and motivation to work on SLADE over the last few years (the long time between releases can attest to that), and while there are other more feature-rich map editors available, the same can't really be said about resource editors.

That's not to say I won't work on the map editor at all - obviously bug fixes will still happen, it's just unlikely I'll be adding any major features there for a while.

New Releases (Finally)
Tue, Jun 01 2021

After much longer than I would have liked, here are two simultaneous new releases.

3.1.13 is a minor bugfix update for the stable 3.1.X version, see the changes below:

General

  • Updated ZDoom, MAPINFO and ACS language definitions (thanks @Blue-Shadow)
  • Updated SRB2 Lua language definition (thanks @SteelTitanium)
  • Added extra UDMF flags (thanks @Gaerzi)

Texture Editor

  • Fixed an issue with the 'optional' keyword in TEXTURES

Map Editor

  • Various improvements and fixes to texture handling and precedence (thanks @Talon1024)

Along with this, I've put up another beta release of 3.2.0, beta 3. This contains quite a few long-overdue fixes and improvements for it, details below:

General

  • Updated ZDoom language definitions (thanks @Blue-Shadow)
  • Updated Eternity EDF definitions (thanks @Altazimuth)
  • Fixed lua print override (thanks @flarn2006)

Resource Editor

  • Added the ability to convert to PSX DOOM format textures (thanks @BodbDearg)
  • Fixed a crash when creating an entry/dir within an empty dir on linux
  • Fixed a crash on updating the entry list filter on linux
  • Correctly set entry as modified if offsets were changed in the gfx editor
  • Fixed directory archives not being marked as saved after saving
  • Fixed renaming entries with / or \ character in wad archives
  • Fixed being unable to undo/redo entry modifications if changes were saved via the "Save Changes?" prompt
  • Fixed undo/redo entry creation ignoring the extension

Texture Editor

  • Fixed double closing brackets when saving TEXTURES
  • Set the default texture type to 'Texture' instead of a blank string, also when converting from TEXTUREx
  • Fixed reading TEXTURES definitions with 'optional' keyword

Map Editor

  • Fixed std::bad_variant_access exception on certain operations (thanks @anotak)
  • Various improvements and fixes to texture handling and precedence (thanks @Talon1024)
  • Fixed an error when loading a custom port config from the user dir

It's likely 3.2.0 will see an official release sometime later this year, I did have a bunch more features planned for it but I think 3.2.0 has been a bit too long coming, so those features will have to wait for 3.3.0.

3.2.0 Beta 2
Thu, Jul 09 2020

The second beta release of 3.2.0 is up, with a bunch of fixes, minor improvements and a fairly major UI change.

The entry list will now display in a tree structure for archives that support directories. There are likely to be a few issues with it (it's beta after all) but it works nicely for the most part. I'm interested to see if people think it's an improvement over the flat list in previous versions - if enough don't like it I can add an option to restore the flat list behaviour easily enough.

Anyway, the full changelog is below:

General

  • Added an 'All Files' option to the open dialog
  • Fixes for various possible crashes (thanks @jengelh)
  • Various minor improvements and fixes

Resource Editor

  • The entry list is now displayed as a tree for archives that support directories
  • Mp3 playback is now possible without needing windows media player installed (on windows), and should work better overall
  • Fixed copy+paste function not clearing previously copied entries
  • Fixed MIDI playback via Timidity not working
  • Fixed files duplicating in the file browser tab of the archive manager (with the drawback that it now shows all files instead of only archives)

Texture Editor

  • Fixed patch list icons disappearing with large icon sizes
  • Fixed most patch functions not working correctly with multiple TEXTUREx entries
  • Fixed possible crash when creating new TEXTUREx/PNAMES entries
  • Various minor fixes and improvements

Text Editor

  • Fixed wrong comment colouring if a block comment opening is within a quoted string

Map Editor

  • Fixed an issue where certain UDMF properties could be removed when saving
  • Fixed possible crash after deleting a sector
First v3.2.0 Beta Released
Wed, Jun 03 2020

As promised last post, the first beta release of SLADE v3.2.0 is up. As with most major SLADE releases, it's been a long time coming :P

A majority of the changes in this release are under the hood, with a major refactor and cleanup of the codebase. This should hopefully result in improved performance and stability (though as a beta release, stability isn't necessarily guaranteed just yet).

One of the most noticeable changes this release is the reworked UI, including a new default icon set that scales to larger sizes properly. For full details see the full changes list below.

The scripting system has also seen many changes and additions, including a new (and 'final') API. Any scripts for 3.1.X will need to be changed to work with 3.2.0. The biggest change is to capitalization of functions, which are now in PascalCase instead of camelCase. The documentation has also been moved to an external site (https://slade.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), which will allow for versioned documentation in the future, and automatically keeps up to date with the latest in the SLADE git repository.

A full list of changes is below:

General

  • Major under-the-hood improvements to modernise and clean up the codebase, with increased stability and performance in mind

UI Refresh

3.2.0 includes a 'refresh' of various parts of the UI:

  • A new default icon set, built from SVGs to allow it to scale to larger sizes without being blurred
  • Toolbars have received a bunch of updates:
    • Can now be laid out vertically
    • Groups can now be added to the opposite end of the toolbar
    • No longer expand to multiple rows (was causing too many weird layout issues)
    • When groups don't fit, they are instead added to a menu under an extra 'overflow' button at the end of the toolbar
    • Buttons now correctly darken when clicked
    • Various other minor things
  • Creating a new archive is now done via a single 'New Archive' action, which pops up a dialog to select the archive type. Now also allows Quake PAK archives to be created
  • Moved a bunch of toolbar buttons from the main toolbar to down next to the entry list. This should hopefully make it more clear that they affect the selected entries in some way
  • Entry action tool buttons are now disabled if no entry is selected
  • The group box around the current EntryPanel now shows the entry name in it's label instead of 'Entry Contents'
  • The EntryPanel-surrounding group box is now hidden if the entry is opened in a standalone tab, which saves a bit of screen real-estate
  • Entry list filter controls can now be toggled on/off
  • Entry list icon size and padding is now configurable
  • Added an option to condense the translation dialog a bit vertically at the cost of a smaller image preview frame
  • Rearranged toolbars for palette, gfx and texturex/pnames editors
  • Bookmarks improvements
    • Bookmark action now toggles the bookmark on the entry
    • Bookmarked entries are shown with bold text in the entry list
    • Added a bookmarks toolbar button with a dropdown menu to switch between bookmarks
    • Added keyboard shortcut for the bookmark action (Ctrl+B)
  • The zoom slider in the gfx and texture editors has been replaced with a more compact control, with +/- zoom buttons and a combobox to set the zoom %

Resource Editor

  • Support for Ion Fury (thanks @mykola-ambar)
    • Added palette
    • Support Ion Fury .art files
  • Multi-image selector for gfx entries replaced with a spinbox (thanks @mykola-ambar)
  • Added Exhumed (Powerslave) palette (thanks @mykola-ambar)
  • Added .VOX -> .KVX voxel model conversion (thanks @mykola-ambar)

Map Editor

  • Added toggleable point light previews in 2d things mode
  • Vertex info overlay improvements
    • Display position as float if fractional
    • Show floor/ceiling height if set (UDMF)

Scripting

  • Updated/'finalised' API
    • Scripts written for 3.1.X will need to be updated to work with the new API, but from now there should be no further breaking changes to it, just additions
  • Updated documentaion, has moved to https://slade.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
    • By moving it here it's much easier for me to update, and also allows for versioned scripting documentation (eg. docs for 3.1.12, 3.2.0, latest git build, etc.)
  • Expanded scripting capabilities:
    • Graphics manipulation including palettes and translations
    • Composite textures (TEXTUREx/PNAMES)

The final release of 3.2.0 is still a ways off, with a fair few things I'd like to get done for it, including:

  • Replace the entry list with a tree for archives that support directories
  • Basic 3d floors support in the map editor 3d mode
  • Finish and enhance the Script Manager window to also handle things like ZScript and ACS, show compiler output and just generally keep all scripting related things in one place, kind of like a simple IDE
  • Extend the SLADE scripting further to allow for more things to be done, map architecture modification in particular
  • Improve the map editor UI, mainly to expose functionality that is currently only accessible via keybinds (which ends up getting missed by users)
  • Fix/implement as many minor issues from GitHub as possible

Now with most of the codebase refactoring and cleanup out of the way, things should move faster, so expect some of the above to show up in upcoming beta releases 'soon'.