MasterPlan News

Hello!

What's up, again!

Firstly, sorry for it being so long since the last update - life got very busy and I got sick a few times over the past few months. I still should do better with updates, so for that I apologize.

So, firstly, this update is pretty short and sweet - the main new feature is that you can now pin Cards by simply dropping them on either Map or Image cards. This allows you to, say, easily make pinboards to group related Cards, or pin relevant notes onto images, for example. There's also a fix to the Mac build - something with paths wasn't allowing it to launch there, so that should be fixed now as well. There's more stuff, but mainly smaller things like some small optimizations and fixes.

Secondly, I wanted to talk a bit about what MasterPlan's future would be. For now, I want to focus on updating its quality of life features to be easier to use, as well as do an optimization pass. v1.0 should probably be focused on delivering a polished version of the current incarnation of MasterPlan, without collaboration or modding capability. Both of those features (as well as others) are good, but they're not completely necessary to the existence of MasterPlan or to even assist with planning most projects. There's always been other gamedev planning tools that do multi-user collaboration better than MasterPlan, like Hack n' Plan or Trello - the main appeal of MasterPlan was that it was offline, purchase-once, and primarily focused towards single users.

That said, I have been investigating modding and have figured out a system that I think should work very well. Users would be able to program their own cards and share them through a modding hosting service, like mod.io - probably not Steam Workshop because MasterPlan isn't only available on Steam. That way, you could add cool additional functionality for planning projects out.

Anyway, those are thoughts for the future - the near future should be focused on refining what MasterPlan currently is.

---

Here's the full changelog:

QoL: Cards can now be pinned to other cards (specifically, map and image cards) by dropping them onto the "base" card. Doing so allows you to more easily move cards together as a group, and enables using blank Map cards or images as effectively "pin boards". Map cards also have a shortcut to "wrap around" all selected Cards and pin them to itself (defaults to Left Shift + X).

QoL: Slight improvement to where lines from card to card point to.

QoL: When resizing cards, now there's a small size indicator at the bottom-right of the cards.

QoL: Adding terrain pattern to Map Card. Useful for terrain / maps.

QoL: Segments segment harder now for Map Cards (previously different colors with the same pattern would blend into each other). This makes using multiple colors and patterns easier and more comprehensible.

Style on'em: Map Card is now (once again?) slightly transparent, giving a slight transparent glass effect.

QoL: Adding keybindings to rotate Maps by 90 degrees.

QoL: Grid background texture cleaned up.

QoL: Links to cards now appear more consistently towards the cards' centers.

QoL: Link joints are now centered in the cells when dropping them for consistency with cards.

QoL: Adding shadows for images.

QoL: Adding a shortcut to wrap a Map card around other Cards and pin them to it (called Smart Scale).

QoL: Map card blank spaces aren't as dark.

QoL: Minor optimizations to reduce memory usage.

QoL: Optimized processing stacks of Cards.

QoL: Grid background color made slightly darker.

## Fixes

FIX: Completed checkboxes have more consistent color cycling.

FIX: Dropping files previously didn't work as it should have; it should now be fixed (except on Linux + Wayland; seems like I'm getting display server crashes in this case.)

FIX: The Timer card now works properly; previously Clock Mode was broken.

FIX: Sound loading caused a crash for Macs - this should resolve it.

FIX: Pressing menu buttons in a window positioned over a map while in edit mode no longer draws / edits the map.

FIX: Creating and destroying links now creates sounds.

FIX: Map Card previously didn't go into the foreground while editing, which makes it difficult to draw on / around objects on top of the Map.

---

Welp, that's it. Thanks!

[p]Yo! So, MasterPlan's 33% off for the Autumn Sale! [/p][p][/p][p]Also, here's a very long-awaited update! This one's kind of a doozy. (Do people still say doozy?)[/p][p][/p][h2]The Internet Card![/h2][p][/p][p]The megaton feature is the new Internet Card.
[/p][p]The Internet Card allows you to embed Chrome browser tabs into your project plan, so you can keep videos, references, articles, and inspiration from the internet right there in your plan. It's not the most performant thing in the world, of course - it's running an internet browser in the background, after all, but I feel like it's an absolutely incredible, invaluable, and unique tool for expanding your plan out into the world wide web. (Of course, you still have the ability to simply paste links to images or sounds into MasterPlan to download them on-demand.)[/p][p][/p][p]Please try it out![/p][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p]To use it, you have to have Chrome / Chromium installed on your computer because I didn't want to bloat MasterPlan with a full Chrome install. Recent Chrome-based browsers like Opera or Brave should also work. If you don't want to use it, you don't have to, of course - simply don't create an Internet card, and MasterPlan won't spin up Chrome in the background. [/p][p]MasterPlan is still offline first, after all.[/p][p][/p][p](P.S. If you're on Linux and installed Chrome through a Flatpak, you'll have to point MasterPlan to Chrome in MasterPlan's settings. It'll probably be at /var/lib/flatpak/app/com.google.Chrome/x86_64/stable/active/files/extra/chrome.)[/p][p][/p][h2]Sounds![/h2][p][/p][p]As you might have heard in the video above, something else I added in v0.9 are unintrusive sound effects!
[/p][p]Sound effects might seem basic, but they're actually rather important - the more feedback you get from placing and moving items around your plan, the better it feels, the more "real" it feels, and the more engaged you'll be with the planning process. The more you'll _want_ to plan.[/p][p][/p][p]Of course, you can turn off the sounds if you'd like by just lowering the UI sound effect volume to 0. I'd like to offer different sound effect packs, like I currently do with themes, and even open them up to users to share. The first sound effect pack is the sine sound effect pack, SND01, from snd.dev. [/p][h2]Moving to SDL3![/h2][p][/p][p]I also moved MasterPlan from using SDL2 to using SDL3 using Zyko0's purego go-sdl3 library. This should make the building process a lot simpler on Windows. With this move, we also now have transparent window backgrounds back! Huzzah~![/p][p]
[/p][p]Note that I implemented a custom solution for the application loop timing, so it might be a bit janky and stuttery for a bit; please put up with it while I refine it. [/p][h2]M1 Mac Support![/h2][p][/p][p]Also, there's now an (experimental!) M1 / ARM Mac OS build. I still do not have an ARM Mac for testing, so I don't strictly know if it works, haha. [/p][p]Please feel free to try it out and let me know if it works for you.[/p][p][/p][h2]JUICE![/h2][p]
Another smaller QoL feature is that I did an art pass for the cards and shadows - they're now smoother and more visually pleasing. Shadows also now are colored according to the card color, which makes them look better in general and show up better on dark themes.
[/p][p]I also added a slight "lightbox" effect at the top of the screen (which is, of course, customizeable in opacity). This helps to give the feeling of being of MasterPlan being more "open". The color of the lightbox effect depends on the currently set theme. This might seem like a weird addition, but it genuinely does make MasterPlan feel less sterile and claustrophobic.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p](Quick sidenote of a small quality of life improvement: As you can see in the above GIF, Numbered cards now have an icon at the top-left. If you click the icon, it switches to having no maximum value for unbounded number values.)[/p][p][/p][h3]Wait, if this is v0.9, what About the Drawing Card?[/h3][p]
Previously, I said that I wouldn't use v0.9 until I had complete feature parity with v0.7 from years ago, which is waaaay back before I moved to SDL2, before the visual refresh, etc. One of the last big missing features from that version was the Card that allowed you to draw, right here inside MasterPlan. So what's up with that?[/p][p][/p][p]Well, I opted to just move to v0.9 because I didn't want to keep adding to the "0.9 prealpha" version number I had previously. It seemed clunky. I thought it better to just move forward with the version number, so this will be v0.9. I do see the utility of reimplementing the Drawing Card, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet.[/p][p]If you had key art that you'd like to move forward, hold off on saving over those project files until I reimplement that missing Card, which I can do in an upcoming update; please be patient!
[/p][p]Well, that's about it - stick around to after the changelog for a full message about my extended break and plans for moving forward.[/p][p]Thanks a lot for reading. Thanks for using MasterPlan. Thank you![/p][p][/p][p]Here's the full changelog:[/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p][/p][p]\[ Quality of Life Updates ][/p]

• [p]Adding the Internet Card. The Internet Card allows you to embed Chrome tabs within MasterPlan. Note that this isn't performant, and is best used for small and quick informational browser windows, or for limited web media. This feature requires a Chrome-based browser to be installed (so Chrome, Chromium, etc). Chrome-based browsers like Brave or Opera may also work. You'll need to specify the user data directory if you want to keep your sessions, cookies, etc. from outside of MasterPlan. This would probably be the folder that has a "Default" folder in it.[/p][p][/p][p]Known issues with the Internet Card:[/p][p]- YouTube videos as played back on YouTube itself don't work properly when played back through the web card. A workaround is to play them from duckduckgo (or perhaps other sites).[/p][p]- Some webpages continuously load while you're on them, so the loading icon at the top-left appears infinitely.[/p]
• [p]This is mostly an internal change, but MasterPlan has moved from SDL2 to SDL3 with dynamically loaded extracted and loaded libraries. This should mean building MasterPlan is now simpler across different platforms, particularly on Windows. Frame timing might be a bit scuffed for now.[/p]
• [p]As a result of this change + Github having new ARM MacOS runners, there is now support for ARM MacOS! Please test it out to see if it works for you.[/p]
• [p]This also means transparent window backgrounds are back![/p]
• [p]Sounds added! When clicking, dragging, selecting menu elements, etc., sounds play to help give feedback.[/p]
• [p]Adding a Time Mde to Timer card. When in time mode, the card will enagage whenever the current system time is past the time on the card. When a checkbox is above it and enabled, the card is engaged, and if it is above and not enabled, the card is not engaged. This can be used to make everyday, regular todo lists (i.e. checkbox that says "Monday", underneath are Timer cards that engage at certain times to indicate tasks you should be doing).[/p]
• [p]UI and art fixed up a bit to look overall significantly better. Shadows are also now smoother (this does not impact performance, it's just smoother shadow sprites).[/p]
• [p]Fixing card shading to be consistent, and not for unshadeable cards (map and table, for example).[/p]
• [p]Adding a customizeable "lightbox" visual effect towards the top of the window for aesthetics + "openness".[/p]
• [p]Adding keybindings for expanding and shrinking cards vertically and horizontally.[/p]
• [p]Cards now lift up when dragging them around.[/p]
• [p]Dropdown GUI elements now have buttons to cycle through them without having to open the menu.[/p]
• [p]Scrolling through menus is now smoother and less "jaggy" because of subpixel rendering.[/p]
• [p]Dragging scrollbars is now a little less janky, and you can drag without the mouse being directly over the scroll area.[/p]
• [p]Reimplementing different numbering styles and custom numbering separators (e.g. dash, dot, etc).[/p]
• [p]Slider UI elements now display their values.[/p]
• [p]Externally pasting text now creates a Note Card for it again.[/p]
• [p]Reordering map tool buttons.[/p]
• [p]The selection box drawing is now cleaner.[/p]
• [p]Focusing on cards on undo now only pans the camera to the card if it's offscreen (so the camera doesn't jump around a lot necessarily while undoing a lot of different card changes)[/p]
• [p]Minor change - the highlight rectangle around editable text only appears if you're not active editing the text for enhanced clarity.[/p]
• [p]Adding keybinding to reset card size to original size.[/p]
• [p]Pushing map elements now loops the elements around the map.[/p]
• [p]Adding options to rotate and flip maps in the map editing menu.[/p]
• [p]Adding option to reset all settings in General Settings section.[/p]
• [p]Adding shortcuts to shift Map cards.[/p]
• [p]Possibly fixed subpage cards not taking screenshots properly?[/p]
• [p]Slight optimization in determining onscreen-ness of Cards. Previously this was done on-demand - now it's done once per frame.[/p]
• [p]Adding ability to hide the maximum number for Numbered Cards by clicking on the Numbered Card icon.[/p]
• [p]You can now click and drag up or down to change NumberSpinner current / max values.[/p]
• [p]Scrollbars that appears only when the mouse is near now are a little less sensitive.[/p]
• [p]It's now easier to scroll things to the top or bottom (by adding a margin).[/p]
• [p]Adding a new theme, the "Snowman" theme.[/p]
• [p]Logging now gets output to both a log file and the terminal, if the application is launched through a terminal.[/p]

[p]
[/p][p]\[ Fixes ][/p]

• [p]Boolean Table cards are no longer stuck at being incomplete if you cycle through a row or column with all X's.[/p]
• [p]Scrollbars now reliably draw over other UI elements.[/p]
• [p]Adding table to the list of card names (I don't know what I meant by this, I forget, haha).[/p]
• [p]Color mixing was incorrect sometimes, particularly for blinking elements.[/p]
• [p]FIX / QoL: Fixed cards not collapsing properly. Cards now reliably collapse to one line, or a maximum size to display all UI elements on the card. Note that not all cards can collapse.[/p]
• [p]You can now press buttons while linking cards, allowing you to be able to go into SubPage cards.[/p]
• [p]Jumping from a Link card to another no longer causes an infinite loop and freezes and crashes MasterPlan.[/p]
• [p]The default sound buffer size is now set to 1024 to fix crackling, bad audio on Windows. (Not every OS can be Linux, sorry~)
  [/p]

[h2]An Explanation and Moving Forward[/h2][p][/p][p]OK, so! I didn't want to end this update yet without an explanation.[/p][p][/p][p]Firstly, I wanted to apologize. It's been waaaaaaaaaaaay too long since my last update, or even any communication, and I owe you all, my community, an apology and an explanation.[/p][p][/p][p]Late last year, I started to lose motivation to work on MasterPlan because while I wanted to keep working on it full-time, it wasn't selling enough for me to do so and there was still so much to do to get to release. The feeling of being slow with updates compounded as well, because when you feel like you're behind, you feel like you have to "make up for lost time", which means updates have to be "BIG ENOUGH" to justify taking the time to make it.[/p][p][/p][p]That, naturally, snowballs into it taking even _longer_ to push out an update, as the time becomes a blocker to working on it. So, while I didn't really intend to do it, I ended up taking a break from working on MasterPlan and started working on other projects (both gamedev and _actual_ freelance work).[/p][p][/p][p](As an aside, I also wanted to apologize for silently missing the v1.0 release date - I originally planned for MasterPlan to be released in, like, 2022 or something and marked that on the Steam page for MasterPlan. Well, I missed that date and just kicked the ETA forward silently, which I missed again. That's not fair to you all and was an indication of mismanagement, right there. I'm very sorry about that...)
[/p][p]---
[/p][p]To be honest, I feel like I'd bitten off more than I could chew in terms of setting the scope for v1.0 - MasterPlan has always been an offline, individual project planning tool, but I decided to take on goals that, while being very cool and useful (like modding support or multi-user collaboration), also weren't really key to the design and usability of the software.
[/p][p]You don't need modding, as an example, to use MasterPlan, because it's not an extendible platform - it's an offline project planning tool; that's what the focus has always been. So why am I putting modding as a goal for v1.0? (Although, to be fair, I do want to add those features, and I have actually made a lot of progress in determining how modding could work for MasterPlan! These features are just not high-priority at the moment.)[/p][p][/p][p]With this in mind, I would like to revisit the roadmap to v1.0 in another devlog update. It feels like any normal company would have MasterPlan at v2.35+ or something by now. Meanwhile, here's me reimplementing MasterPlan entirely from the ground up once already, having moved from SDL2 to SDL3, and it's barely at v0.8, haha.[/p][p][/p][p]I've felt like MasterPlan has not been "good enough" for all this time, when really, I think it's actually exceptionally polished for what I originally envisioned it to be (though there's still stuff to do, of course).[/p][p][/p][p]---
[/p][p]Anyway, over time, I slowly regained the desire to work on MasterPlan, without really worrying about it taking so long between updates. Since about March or so, I've been working on MasterPlan off-and-on, sometimes streaming the work I do. (If you'd like to pop in, please do over on my Twitch.) I'm very sorry, again, that I didn't let my community know what was going on, and I'm sorry for taking so long to say anything. [/p][p][/p][p]However! I still do love MasterPlan. It's a great tool, and I want to use it myself - I want to create things with it, too. That's why I made it in the first place - I'm a game developer. I shouldn't feel guilty about working on other things with it - I should welcome the opportunity to use it, and use the things I run into as fuel for development.[/p][p][/p][p]Anyway, thanks for listening, and I'm sorry, again, for the lack of communication. I really appreciate my community being patient with me and actually using the software - it's been really encouraging to get messages from people saying how it's really changed how they plan things out, or how helpful it's been. It really makes me glad to know that something I made could be useful to other people.[/p][p][/p][p]This has gone on long enough, I guess. See you later with another update soon.[/p][p][/p][p]Regards, SolarLune[/p]

Sorry about that!

I thought I resolved the issue previously, but it clearly was not resolved. Things should be good on Windows now; thank you for your patience!

Hello! Here's a quick hotfix to resolve some of the problems users were having with the last update. Here's a changelog:

• QoL: Adding more audio playback buffer size options.
  
• QoL: Dropped files onto MasterPlan now create cards in the center of the window, rather than the mouse last was prior to exiting the window.
  
• FIX: Menus no longer disappear when the MasterPlan window is minimized on Windows.
  
• FIX: Swapping rows and columns in Tables now works properly (previously, swapping rows and columns had pressing a cell correspond to the transposed cell in the table).
  
• FIX: Tooltip bounds are sized properly now.
  

[h2]Hello![/h2]

It's been awhile since the last time I released an update - sorry about that! I wanted to get this out before 2023 started, but that didn't end up happening... In any case, here's another MasterPlan update! This one brings a few bigger improvements!

NOTE: Please be sure to backup your projects before you update and load them into the next version - better safe than sorry!

[h2]Tables![/h2]



Tables have been re-implemented into MasterPlan! Tables represent grids of information, which can hold one value each. They're primarily useful for repeatable tasks or relative statistics. However, now they're even better than their previous incarnation.

In v0.7, Tables' row and column names were editable from another screen. Now, all that can be edited right from the project overview. You just double-click on a row or column heading to rename the column or row, and you can click and drag the dotted areas on the headers to rearrange the order. Expanding or shrinking the card adds or removes cards as necessary. Left-clicking cycles through the possible values, while right-clicking cycles in the opposite direction.

Previously, Tables also only worked as checkboxes to indicate repetitive tasks that needed to be completed. Now, Tables have different modes of representing their information, accessible from a menu (the button being visible at the bottom of the Table when it's selected). Rather than just serving as checkboxes, they can also show grades (S, A, B, C, D, E, F), or numbers (going from 0 to 10). This way, you can use tables to cleanly and easily represent a variety of relevant information for your project.

By laying out information in a Table, it makes it simpler to compare and contrast information. For example, in the above example, the right-most table represents a series of stats for four classes (Engineer, Knight, Monk, and Archer). By easily laying this information out in a table, you can see at a glance that the Monk and Knight have no S-rank stats, which might indicate an balancing issue.

[h2]Multi-Card Editing[/h2]



Multiple Cards can now be edited at the same time. This is now as easy as holding the multi-card edit key (left shift, by default), and making the change you want to a card. The same property on other selected cards will also be changed to the same value. So you can, for example, select a group of Checkbox cards and edit them all at the same time, or write some common text on all cards at the same time.



For editable text, hold the multi-edit key and double-click to edit the text. As you type, the text will update on all related cards as well. Note that while this isn't perfect in its current incarnation, it does mean a huge usability boost. I'll keep working on it over time to improve things!

As an aside, while editing text in a card in a stack, you can now press tab or shift+tab (by default) to head to the next or previous card and start editing text there as well.

[h2]Text Wrapping Modes[/h2]

This isn't a huge deal, but I've added a new text wrapping system for writing text in MasterPlan. Previously, when writing text and the text became too long for the card, the card would grow vertically - now you can press a key shortcut (Ctrl+W, by default) or press the text wrapping button to switch the text wrapping mode to Horizontal Overflow mode. In this mode, Cards expand horizontally while typing, only growing vertically when you manually add new lines.

[h2]Mac Support[/h2]

I've looked into M1 Mac support in the meantime between the previous update and this one. I still don't have an M1 Mac, so I have no method to test it myself, but this update may also add support for the M1 chip through Rosetta. Please test out the Mac build if you have an M1 Mac and let me know if it at least boots properly now.

Well, that's it for the big stuff; to follow is the detailed changelog, which is also mirrored in the wiki.. Thanks a lot for your support, and I hope to keep working on MasterPlan into 2023!

____

- RE-IMPLEMENTATION: Adding tables back in.
Tables are useful to outline data in a matrix field, represented as an intersection of rows and columns. Rows and columns can be freely resized by clicking and dragging a row or column to rearrange. Double-clicking on the text allows you to edit that text. Tables can be visualized in a few different ways currently: as checkmarks, numbers, or grades (S - F). You can press tab and shift-tab to cycle between editing text for each element.
- QoL: Adding tooltip buttons to help explain unclear settings or options.
- QoL: Adding ability to edit multiple cards at the same time by holding the "Mulitple" key, (aka the "Add to Selection" key, which defaults to left shift).
- When selecting / operating on multiple cards with the left-shift key, a + will appear next to the mouse cursor to indicate this.
- Editing text is done by holding the multi-edit key and double-clicking on the text to edit. All selected cards will have their relevant text field updated by typing.
- QoL: Adding ability to move to next or previous card in stack by pressing "Next Card / Prev. Card" shortcuts (defaulting to Tab or Left Shift+Tab, respectively). Doing this while editing text will move to the next editable text in the next card up or down in the stack.
- QoL: Editing text or collapsing Cards now adjusts the rest of the stack. This isn't perfect, and I still have a lot more I want to do with stacks to improve usability and make them even more fun to work with.
- QoL: Adding a toggle-able text editing wrapping mode. The menu that displays this will appear at the top-right when editing text on a Card. You can press the button or press the keyboard shortcut to toggle between text wrapping modes (Ctrl+W when editing text).
- There are two wrapping modes currently: Wrap, and Expand. Wrap will have cards grow downwards vertically, gaining more lines as you type beyond their borders. Expand will have cards grow horizontally when necessary.
- QoL: Adding name of project to loading prompt when you decide to load a project.
- QoL: Adding setting to change how numbered cards are displayed (either as percentage or current amount out of maximum).
- QoL: Numbered Cards now allow negative numbers.
- QoL: Numbered Cards now allow the current value to surpass the maximum.
- QoL: Highlighting text should be slightly more efficient than previously (though work still remains in this regard, and for optimization in general).
- FIX: Collapsing cards is now properly undo-able.
- FIX: Icons for applying colors to cards no longer change color depending on theme.
- FIX: When render textures are recreated (primarily done on Windows when the window is resized or altered), ensure they are never too small (0x0 in size). This might fix a crashing issue for Windows users.
- FIX: If a path cannot be made relative (on Windows, for example, if a piece of media points to an external drive), the path is saved and loaded unaltered. Note that this change might mean images don't save or load properly between the previous version and this one, so double-check when upgrading to ensure things work properly.
- Contribution by Peter0x44: Improve HOME/END text selection when editing text (previously this would only expand the selection, rather than select from the original position to the caret's new position).