CEED wishlist
A wishlist of smaller CEED features that I want implemented but can't get around to do that. Catch me on IRC if you would like to implement any of these.
Contents
Recent files (easy)
We already have recent projects (even though it's slightly broken), recent files also makes sense. Probably only for files not opened from the project manager screen.
Auto-saving and restoring in case of crashes (medium)
Currently when things go mighty wrong (SIGSEGV, SIGABRT or such), the editor crashes and all changes are lost. Saving most of the CEGUI files is quite quick and cheap, maybe we could create some sort of restore folder inside the project folder and store changes to opened files there (maybe also including the project file). When you save a file or choose to discard changes, this tmp file would get deleted. When you open a new file it looks into the tmp to check whether there is a recovery file there, if there is, user is asked if she wants to recover.
Compatibility layers (easy)
Since the editor has API for compatibility layers, adding support for new formats is relatively cheap (the editor is there and works the same no matter the format) as long as you somehow map the "foreign" format to CEGUI's format. The candidates that come to mind are MyGUI imagesets, Gorilla spriteset support (it's already there but needs finishing and polishing) and other imageset formats.
Future candidates include Ogre overlay mapping to CEGUI layout format. My idea is to create a fake looknfeel mimicking Ogre's overlays and map that to Ogre's overlay elements.
note: compatibility layers allow a two-way support (and that's strongly preferred over one-way support to just open the file), that means that you can migrate freely between formats and even edit foreign imageset formats semi-natively.
MetaImageset editor (hard)
GUI to manage meta imageset files, command line tool for compiling them is already done (mic.py) but some sort of easy to use, artist-friendly editor of the meta imageset sources would be very helpful and super easy to do (I labeled this as hard because it's harder than the rest but this is probably the easiest editor in the whole CEED to make).
Save project file when files are changed (easy)
Basically mimicking the behaviour of Eclipse and MSVC (which I think is what people are used to and expect). Right now saving the project has to be done explicitly.
Finish the bitmap previewer / external editor launcher tool (very easy)
At the moment, it just displays the image as it is and offers a "Launch external editor" button that doesn't do anything.
Better XML editing (easy)
Right now I am using plain text QTextEdit to edit code in both imageset and layout editor. The best would be to include XML highlighting that allows you to see mistakes and distinguish tags and property name typos, etc... The module I am talking about is called xmledit and it's in the root CEED directory. It's not used at this point. Perhaps the best would be to include QScintilla but that's another dependency and I would have to really think about that, CEED already has a lot of dependencies IMO.
