Dev Log #38 - Fitting things into small spaces (Patreon)

I like having block parameters visible at the front rather than hidden in menus but there is always going to be limited space available.

To make the spin-box controls a bit smaller I made a standard set of icons for amp, pan, pitch and sample offset. The sampler plugins can specify which icon to use for each parameter or otherwise just display a text label. In the future I could also load additional icons directly from the sampler DLL.

I also created a custom container to display items in a row and automatically hide them if there isn't enough room. The container spans the width of the block footer and has a left area and a right area where controls can be added. If any controls are hidden a visual indicator is displayed at the edge. I do something similar to this in v0.12.1 for the header elements but it works in a much hackier way.

The new container starts by trying to fit as many of the right side controls as possible and then the remaining space is used for the left side controls, so the effect at the moment is that the right side controls have priority over the left.

The envelope editor also needs to use the block footer for its controls but I didn't hook that up yet. I will see how well it works to hide the left side controls while the envelope editor is open and use that area for the envelope controls.

I also modified the spin-box controls so they will now auto-shrink themselves to fit their current value.

There's still a limit to how many controls we can get away with adding to the footer. The sampler plugins have the ability to specify whether toggle parameters like "Loop" and "Reverse" should appear in the block context menu, or in the footer, or both. At the moment the spin-box parameters are always added to the footer because I didn't create anywhere else to access them.