Last time, I promised I would give an update on QuickDraw and the Macintosh GUI emulator. This second major part of reworking the rendering pipeline, which i thought I could finish in the first week of coding, has taken more time and gone deeper than I expected. When I am coding I am well aware of wasting time in shaving the yak. I mentioned in our Discord the other day that I might have experienced mission creep. Let me explain.

MY initial goal was to move over Director’s text rendering to the enhanced Mac text class that sev wrote for us earlier this year. I spent the early part of that week implementing the different kinds of text properties that Director permits putting on text – straightforward effects like shadows, framing, and proper text alignment. (I now realize what complex work goes into graphics management for even a simple text editor.) Then, I created a new class (widget) specifically for buttons and did the similar work for the classic Mac’s three button styles. This took me to about Wednesday last week, and this part of my work went fairly quickly. I even got several movies mostly working, including the stageColor movie (a simple one that flashed the emulator background color very quickly – I won’t show it because I myself am photosensitive). This showed off saveral pieces of the work I had done: Drawing text with transparency and extra features, as well as reading button states properly.

I then realized that in order for the window manager to process widget events in the proper order, it needed to have some concept of priority – a mirror of channels in Director. So then, I thought, we have only four major visual cast types in our Director engine: text, buttons, shapes, and bitmaps. Why not have all those be known to the window manager as widgets? This would accomplish another of the refactoring tasks I had been given, reducing the bloat of the Stage class by moving drawing methods away from there.

Then, I got rather bogged down later in the week in understanding the minutiae of the window manager, and I realized that much of the outward-facing code in our Director events manager could be handled better in the MacGUI manager instead; this was added to my list of items to finish. (You see what I mean about shaving yaks.) There were a few other version-specific irritations that I also tried to figure out; this took me into the weekend.

I soon had a lot of deeply connected tasks that seemed rather overwhelming as the first week ended; I realized that I had expanded the range of my next PR far beyond where I initially started. Until the weekend, I thought I was making good time. After I did not do much over the weekend to catch up with mechatronics research lab at where I work at university, I realized that trying to change everything at once is an excellent way to get behind. I do not want this to happen, so I talked to sev yesterday to help get me back on track.

I will post some screenshots later this week, once my improvements are complete enough to merge at least some of them. I believe our prime test move, The Apartment, will soon yield some good results in previously broken movies. I have known for a while my tendency toward over-engineering and trying to “go solo,” so confronting such mission creep in the very first week of coding was quite helpful for me.

Don’t worry, you’ll hear from me again soon!