Dragon Web Screen Designer - Try it out Please!

[daftspaniel]

Hi Folks,

(Not been Dragoning for a while - irritating bug with my laptop GFX driver made XRoar unusable Anyway all going on Ubuntu now so back to it )

I am working on a web based screen designer for the Dragons text screen. Draw with blocks, hit a button and it generates the Basic code which you can load into XRoar or whatever.

Please take a look:
http://daftspaniel.com/Dragon/JSTools/S ... igner.html

Would appreciate any feedback before it goes 'live' - especially on the generated code

Thanks,
Davy

[daftspaniel]

Whoops forgot to say it is tested on Firefox and Chrome only....

[admin]

Nice - works fine with IE9

[daftspaniel]

Thanks for the feedback!

[sixxie]

Nice!

I think the only obvious user-interface thing I noticed was it would be good if you could draw freely if you keep the mouse button down.

Do you plan to make it handle the subdivision of character cells? That could be quite useful: maybe make it change the colour of any other 'set' pixels in a cell if you try and draw there in a new colour.

As for output, a list of assembly FCB directives would be useful for pasting into code, although I guess it would actually be pretty easy to search & replace the existing BASIC DATA lines.

[Alastair]

Something else that may need changing is that the grid disappears when you select white and then press CLS.

[daftspaniel]

Thanks - great feedback!

Something else that may need changing is that the grid disappears when you select white and then press CLS.

Ok - Will pick a neutral colour for this.

I think the only obvious user-interface thing I noticed was it would be good if you could draw freely if you keep the mouse button down.

Good idea - the clicking might cause RSI

Do you plan to make it handle the subdivision of character cells? That could be quite useful: maybe make it change the colour of any other 'set' pixels in a cell if you try and draw there in a new colour.

Would be good - think I will add a text option first tho.

As for output, a list of assembly FCB directives would be useful for pasting into code

Another good one - a save to tape/disk routine on the Basic code would be handy too.

Cheers,
Davy

[Sarah]

That's neat, well done. I created something a little similar on the Dragon once, which scanned the text screen and then converted it to a BASIC program that uses the appropriate set of PRINT or PRINT@ statements (choosing literal strings, CHR$ and STRING$ as necessary) rather than the POKE approach. It doesn't seem to be on my website, though, so I don't know what I did with it, probably still stuck on an old tape somewhere... lol


Edit: Just remembered it appeared in Dragon User and found the article (September 1988, pages 17-19) if anyone's interested.

[daftspaniel]

I looked at the article, I like the Dragon based solution!

Well worked on this today and I've got some of the requested features in there plus keyboard shortcuts which is particularly handy for changing colours.

Doing a big code tidy up as I changed it from a table to multiple divs which give much more consistent results across browsers. There are more buttons now so need to tidy the page layout a bit.

Not sure which features will be in the next version I put online but expect some goodies!


Davy