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Argent Forge 1.1.0

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@Xcommand Xcommand released this 12 Oct 23:29
· 90 commits to master since this release
v1.1.0
c378085

Argent Forge 1.1.0

The Menu Constructor. It edits a mod's menus in the MENUDEF text you already have open, and shows
you what the game would draw.

The Menu Constructor with its preview open on a mod's MENUDEF

The Menu Constructor

  • Opens from the text editor's toolbar, from its right-click menu, or from Tools > Menu Constructor.... The title says which lump in which archive the window is editing, because several
    are open at once.

  • Blocks on the left, that block's lines in the middle, the arguments of the selected line under
    them. Nothing is kept twice: the window writes the text, so the editor's Ctrl+Z is the undo for it
    as well.

  • Preview draws the menu the way the engine does, at the resolution you tell it to imitate: the
    same line spacing, labels right-aligned to the gutter the engine works out for itself, the game's
    colour codes, and LANGUAGE labels resolved through the same two passes the game makes. A line the
    engine would stop loading on isn't drawn at all, and the window says why. The picture behind the
    menu is the one the game would be sitting on, and a knob dims it when it fights the text.

    Two menus as the preview draws them

  • The names it offers come out of your own archive: the cvars it declares, its TEXTCOLO ranges, its
    LANGUAGE labels, the pictures inside it, and the widget classes it writes in its own ZScript, whose
    Init() becomes that line's fields. You pick from that list instead of typing a name and hoping.

    The archive's own cvar names offered under a field

  • SHIFT does the arranging: Shift+Up and Shift+Down move a block or a line, Shift+click picks a run,
    Shift plus the wheel over the preview sets how large it draws, Shift+Ctrl+Z redoes. Ctrl+C and
    Ctrl+V carry a block or a line between the window and the text editor in both directions, and
    Delete works in whichever of the two lists has the keyboard.

  • An empty MENUDEF is a starting point rather than a dead end. The window asks where your first menu
    should hang, under the game's Options list or on the main menu, and writes both blocks it takes to
    be seen in game. One Ctrl+Z takes the pair back.

    Where the first menu should hang

    The page and the line that points at it, written

  • Lines you didn't touch come back exactly as the file had them: mixed CRLF and LF, indentation,
    comments, and the shapes the window has no row for.

Smaller things

  • Open Containing Folder shows the folder a selection lives in, from the entry list's right-click
    menu, its left toolbar, or the Entry menu. It is there for a project opened as a folder, not for
    an entry inside an archive.

    Open Containing Folder, and the window it opened

  • AceZDL: Settings > Extra Features writes this program's path into the launcher's Config.xml, so
    its "Open with SLADE" starts Argent Forge, and keeps the path that was there before so you can put
    it back.

    Extra Features: the SLADE import, the Recent Files size and the AceZDL block

  • Settings live in Argent Forge's own folder now rather than SLADE's SLADE3, so the two programs
    stop writing over each other. A first run offers to pull an existing SLADE configuration across,
    and the same import sits under Settings > Extra Features.

  • The Start page's Recent Files list has a font size of its own under Settings > Extra Features,
    and a configuration written from nothing starts on the dark editor scheme.

  • The splash screen is our own artwork, and nothing asks SLADE's server for anything any more.

Notes

  • The lists the window works from are generated from GZDoom's own sources and from a pile of real mod
    files by the scripts in scripts/gen, so what it offers is what the engine's parser reads rather
    than what someone remembered from a wiki.
  • The MENUDEF reader is checked headlessly against a corpus of real mod files before a build ships:
    every block pasted and taken back has to hand the file over byte for byte.

1.1.1

Same release, one fix on top of it. A window closed while minimized, or on a monitor that has since
been unplugged, used to come back at a corner nobody could reach: the taskbar showed it, the screen
didn't. Such a corner is refused now, both saved and read back, and the window opens centred. That
matters most for the map editor, which is the window people leave open for hours. The archive is
argentforge_1.1.1_win64_portable.zip.

Download the newest argentforge_1.1.*_win64_portable.zip below, unzip the folder anywhere and start
ArgentForge.exe. Nothing is installed and no file is written next to the exe. Needs 64-bit
Windows.

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