[Suggestion][Editor] Indicate style associated with backgrounds

Started by namida, July 21, 2018, 09:26:56 PM

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namida

Currently, backgrounds are listed by their name only. I do notice backgrounds associated with either the level's theme, or the currently-selected style for the piece selector (I'm not sure which, as whenever I've been paying attention to backgrounds, both of these have been the same anyway), get brought to the top of the list.

Very understandable that, for an optional "pick one of these per level" feature, there's no full-blown menu or seperate dropdown or anything to select a style, then select a background from it. However, in order to save the background info into the level file correctly, the editor must internally know which style each background is associated with. So - could that not be added to the info displayed in the dropdown? Eg: Instead of the Abstract tileset's background just being listed as "colors", it could be listed as "namida_abstract:colors" or "colors (namida_abstract)" or something like that - personally I'd be in favor of the tileset name coming first, but let's see what others think re: that.

Severity: For me, minor. I'm generally working with 3-4 tilesets at a time, and rarely use tileset mixing. For creators who like to make things more complex and/or use a wider variety of styles at a time, I could see this getting frustrating.
My projects
2D Lemmings: NeoLemmix (engine) | Lemmings Plus Series (level packs) | Doomsday Lemmings (level pack)
3D Lemmings: Loap (engine) | L3DEdit (level / graphics editor) | L3DUtils (replay / etc utility) | Lemmings Plus 3D (level pack)
Non-Lemmings: Commander Keen: Galaxy Reimagined (a Commander Keen fangame)

nin10doadict

I agree with this and sometimes find myself leafing through the set of backgrounds to find the ones that match a tileset or to pick another one that's fitting for what I'm trying to do. That's why I prefaced my BGs with "nin10_" so it would be easier to see what tilesets they go with.
This fix (or at least adopting of some kind of naming convention) would mainly help for tilesets that have multiple BGs associated with them.

Nepster

It would be trivial to add this info in the drop-down box. However it would not help you one bit!
The actual problem is how C# dropdown menus work: Their width is fixed to that of the original dropdown box and all text that goes beyond is simply cut off. So if we choose "colors (namida_abstract)" it would probably display something like "colors (nami" and if we do "namida_abstract:colors" we would see "namida_abstract". And this problem becomes only worse if the background name is not as short as "colors".