Dev Log #56 (Patreon)

It's been almost 3 weeks since my last post! I've been extremely busy and there is still some more work to do for the next build. The new block cloning thing has been a huge change but the main body of the work is done. There are a few UI-related things I still need to do and other than that it's just tying up a bunch of loose ends and testing everything.

The new block list now allows you to organize saved blocks into folders. The UI for doing this is still temporary and really bad so I wouldn't recommend actually using it for now. Under the hood everything is being stored in a tree structure, so eventually I want to create an additional tree view of the folder hierarchy and a proper drag+drop interface for moving things around. In the interest of actually getting a v0.17 build out for people to test soon I am going to push this back until later.

There are a couple of systems in place to make it easier to see which blocks are connected together. Hovering the cursor over a block will highlight any related blocks on the workspace, and the associated item in the block list. This also works the other way around - hovering over an item in the block list (or sample list) will highlight all related blocks currently visible in the workspace.

Stamping new blocks by clicking on the item in the block list, which I forgot to show in the video, will currently always perform a clone operation. I think this is what makes the most sense though I may add some option in the context menu to allow creating copies directly from the block list, and maybe a "duplicate" operation.

Aside from these new features I also ended up refactoring some big parts of the block drag/drop/stamping system. The code for interpreting mouse input while dragging things around is now a lot simpler and hopefully works a bit better. A lot of that stuff was written very early on before I understood some obscure aspects of Godot's input system. I have had reports from people running old versions of macOS where apparently mouse input in Blockhead barely works at all and unfortunately I have no old mac to test on, so my hope is that these changes may help.