Not sure if this is the place, so if moderators think it should be moved to another forum, do it.
I'm sure a lot of you know about TileStudio; may be it's the best tilemap editor ever and it was developed with Delphi! Unfortunately it's Windows only and I didn't use Windows for a long time. I did try to use TS with Wine but it's exasperatedly slow, almost unusable (or it is it in my Xubuntu running in a core-duo; didn't test it in my "brand new" Debian, though). Since it's open-source I decided to port it to Lazarus. Mike Wiering didn't return the mails I sent and project seems dead, so I started by my own thinking it would be easy. But it wasn't at all.
Now I have a version that compiles and "runs", but it's still too slow and raises "SEGMENT FAULT" too often so it's still unusable. It's hard to trace: The main window has hundreds of components, each one with its own events and a plethora of cross-references (for example: drawing-tool to drawing-style selector to color selector to palette selector to tile TDrawBox to tile-list panel...), and a lot of them doesn't have descriptive names, or the name is descriptive but actually it doesn't does what it says it does... Also it isn't "modular" and it mixes concepts that I would keep in separate modules.
I think I have find why it's so slow: It has 3 Timers, one of them breaks each millisecond! I did changed the rate but then the program freezes and can't close it or raises a "SEGMENT FAULT" in random-like time. Actually I don't know what does it do but I think I can get it and fix it in the future.
I know how I can improve it (i.e. move a lot of those hundreds of components from the main form to some TFrame [PaletteEditor, ImageEditor, MapEditor, TileSelector, etc.] then put that new TFrame in the main form, use TActionList to group actions, etc.) but it will need a lot of time and work, and currently I haven't much of that.
Then, I'm asking if anybody has interest and may help. At the moment I don't want a "TileStudio 3.0", but port the current version. Since Wiering didn't answer my asking we should create a new project in SourceForge (I prefer SF), then plan the work. I'll be a bit busy next two months (until mid-September) so at start we'll go slowly.
Comments, offers, suggestions...
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