REXPaint 1.7 imminent + Full UI Upscaling, Part 2: Holy Mockups! (Patreon)

Whew, as of today I've finished a ton of writing, including many new articles to put out over the coming weeks detailing everything I've been working on as I get ready to transition to actually building the new UI layout itself. I started a series on that this week, the first part of which you can check out here. The core of that content was covered last year on Patreon when I first started on it, but it's now presented in an even more generally digestible format and I think that particular article serves as a good summary of where Cogmind's UI has been since the beginning, and why, and where it's headed now, including why and how. If people are wondering, point them there :D

Before getting started on that though, I have to catch up on a number of dev chores that have piled up as I was hyperfocused on preparing map zooming and X2, then all this documentation.

REXPaint 1.7

Among the first things on my list: a new version of REXPaint! It wasn't necessarily in the near-term cards, but all this engine work (including some new stuff you'll be reading about this month) by extension led to some free new features for REXPaint. That combined with the fact that I've had a couple feature requests more recently convinced me it was time to take a little while to put together a new version of my free ASCII editing tool. The high-priority TODO list in my REXPaint notes has also grown increasingly long over the past couple years, so now seems like a good opportunity to tick some of those off.

The new version comes with things like automated upscaling of font bitmaps, system clipboard compatibility, some command line functionality, .gpl palette importing, and perhaps support for .ans file loading.

Been seeing some new folks using REXPaint in the Cogmind community as well, including namelesssheetmusic on the Discord who's been coming up with their own item art, complete with lore and everything :D

Wiki

Cogmind's MediaWiki-based has been taken down for now, replaced with a placeholder redirection page that I plan to do more with soonish.

Full UI Upscaling, Part 2: Holy Mockups!

For Part 2 of the series we're taking a much closer look at all of the new mockups. I did a stream a while back while working on some of these, and herein you can read about UI plans for what I'll be working on soon, including most importantly how we're going to squeeze all that info into only 45 rows :)

You can read it on the blog here (password "2024FTW").