2024 is turning out to be an interesting year.
And I mean that in the "may you live in interesting times" Chinese curse sort of way.
Long story short, I ended up needing to move at the beginning of March. Most of the furniture is now in place, and I've been unpacking for the past few days. And that's why I suddenly stopped updating again after saying things were returning to "normal".
On a different note, I've had extra time to think about the future of the sprite editor. One of the major hurdles I've been trying to deal with is how to accommodate three different ways people may use it, and I don't feel like most solutions I've seen really work.
At some point in the future, I want users to be able to create animations, work with layers, or simply work with multiple related images within a single project. The latter is needed as several file formats store multiple images, and it only makes sense to support this feature.
Now, I've used programs that handle layers, animations, or some combination of both, and it feels like most approaches are so heavily geared to one approach that they hamper your workflow if you're trying something different.
I'm currently thinking that the best approach may be to use a floating "image manager" window to let the user micromanage their images and layers separately, much like how Lil' Vector uses the Shape Manager window to control the different shapes in an image.
One of the biggest issues with incorporating these features is that they brush up against what's known as Feature Creep - the sprite editor was originally intended to handle older style sprite sheets, not animations, so retooling it for animation work means changing the core focus mid-stream, and that's a seriously bad idea for any project.
In the meantime, I've figured out the goals for the 0.13.5 release of the project. In short, I'm going to iron out all of the bugs and annoyances that I'm aware of. This will make the project ready for the big 0.14 upgrade, which will include layers, multiple image support, additional filters, additional tools, additional file format support, and so on.
The 0.14 release will also involve major changes to the program's main menu, as it'll move towards "projects" rather than traditional images. However, unlike some editors that use a project system, I'm going to ensure that you can edit single images just like in MS Paint or whatever without any fancy stuff getting in the way.
It'll be a whole new ballgame when that upgrade drops, so it'll be a while before we get there.