I was really hoping to have a release ready for you guys today, but I keep running into little issues here and there as I bring the new icon editor closer to completion (at least first-stage completion). My new goal for release is to get that out before Thanksgiving. Because heck, I love some BYONDing on Thanksgiving weekend and I hope you do too. Load up on leftover pie and you've got yourself a good time.

So without ado, here's some of what I've done this week to get things ready:

An animated icon preview has been added. I kinda don't like where it is now and I'd like a way to toggle the animation on and off. I'm thinking of moving this to the left-side preview area (currently static) and adding a way to zoom in and out of that preview at will. (Actually adding some way to zoom that was already on my list.) The animated preview also does a better job of keeping up with the real speed you'll see it at in a game. In the old movie editor, animations updated by doing the next frame, looking at how long the delay was, waiting, then doing another frame; invariably they fell behind, making the animation slower.

The movie grid has tooltips to explain how to use it. You can click to change which frame you're editing, or click a delay value to change it, but you can also click a column/row header, and drag to make a multi-frame selection. With shift+drag you can swap frames, and with ctrl+drag you can copy them. You can do this with whole rows or columns, too. This is some of my favorite new functionality, because it makes some things a breeze that were outright hellish in the old movie editor.

The palette color-square size can be increased by dragging the right splitter. No more tiny palettes!

The old movie editor has been unhooked from most of the functionality in Dream Maker. I'm keeping it in place somewhat for the moment in case something brings it up or I need to grab code from it, but it'll be removed completely in a later iteration.

And on my short-term to-do list:

• Tiled mode toggle
• Animation toggle
• Preview zoom controls
• Palette import/export (working on this now)
• Updated foreground/background color display and a swap command
• Extra info display with details about the current icon

I'm contemplating whether I want to make the right-hand splitter dominant over the bottom one as well, because currently the movie grid takes up a ton of horizontal space and most people simply don't have animations with that many frames.

Next week is Thanksgiving! It'll be a short week so I don't have a ton of time to work on that to-do list, but I've been working pretty steadily at this so I think my goal is reasonable--even if I end up leaving out a couple minor items to get there.

Thanks again to all our Members and donors, and our Patrons! I really can't do any of this without you. If you like that I'm finally tackling parts of the software that no one has worked on in ages, please show that support by signing up on Patreon or through Membership.