Official coding starts, my first task – polished!

Hello again, it’s been a while!

The last time I wrote this, I felt like I was getting pretty close to the completion of my first task. But, whenever I’d complete one thing, another thing popped up and so on and so forth it went.

These past 3 weeks,

  • I worked on the positioning of tabs and dialogs which overlapped each other.
  • I then worked on some individual widgets and added the support to flip them internally.
    Have a look at some of them!

DropDownButtons:

Flipped
Original

Lists:

Original
Flipped

Sliders:

Original
Flipped

These involved majorly working with the XML theme-based layout system that ScummVM uses, and it feels so awesome that all of them now have the support to be viewed as in RTL!

I worked on extending this RTL based support to the 3 existing themes, as well as extending support for RTL based on the resolution. Have a look!

High res: 960×600
Small res: 320×200

If you’ve ever played IGI, this gives some sort of relevance to it. I love this theme, so classy!

ScummVM classic theme
ScummVM classic theme
I also worked on making the text look right aligned and easy to see for RTL users
Load game lists – the numbers are on the right

While working on these, I also found a problem with the grid-based loading and saving of games. Notice how the middle row shows icons correctly, but the other rows don’t? I spent a lot of time looking for this (2 days!), but couldn’t figure it out!

Load game icons glitched
I asked for help and eventually saw what was causing the issue. It was because my code – while flipping the icons, did not modify the widths of the image basically. I didn’t study the backends code related to this, which was causing me more time to understand what was going wrong.
I thought my work would be abstracted away from the backend (and for the most part it was), but having at least a basic knowledge of how everything works internally can be very helpful, as you can see in situations like this. Below is the issue resolved!
Lastly, I worked on the input-able text:
Adding text

From the last week, I am polishing up on this task, and making everything pitch-perfect. For the most part, I am so happy to say this – It is complete!

Except for one small thing, you see the search bar above? It does not have the ability to view the previous chars if the text expands beyond the region it is drawn… at least, not yet :)
Tonight is the night I plan to finish this and have my PR feature ready and enabled for use!

It was a pleasure talking! The coding period might officially start now, but my schedule will stay the same, as I started my tasks right after my acceptance. I’ll be blogging more often now, so – I’ll see you in a week!