Roadmap



ATF 3.8 is scheduled to be released on Thursday, July 31, 2014. These features and improvements are being made available on an ongoing basis to the master branch, but we reserve the right to significantly change the new code until we create the release tag.

• Allow for creating GUIs with windows-like elements and windows docking, all in Direct2D.
• Upgrade our Direct2D support by upgrading to SharpDX 2.5.
• Skinning editor, for creating skins using a GUI tool rather than by hand-editing XML files.
• Skinning improvements, to allow for more parts of ATF's GUI components to be skinnable, like the title bar.
• Windows Presentation Foundation update, to bring our WPF support to be more on par with our WinForms support.
• Review all comments on public and protected members.
• History Lister feature, to allow the user to visualize the undo/redo stack and to quickly perform large numbers of undo/redo operations.
• Fix culture-specific print formatting, especially of our math classes.
• Allow custom images to be attached to the cursor during drag-drop.

ATF 3.7 was released on January 30, 2014. (Release notes.)

• Many usability and stability enhancements to Circuit Editor, particularly with circuit groups.
• Most user interface text is now available in Japanese, especially in the Circuit Editor.
• Added a new sample app, “DOM Property Editor”, that demonstrates the use of all the various property editing controls. This replaces the old Property Editing sample app.

ATF 3.6 was released July 31, 2013. (Release notes.)

• Circuit Group work with Santa Monica Studios and Guerrilla Games:
  • Circuit pins can be made visible or not.
  • There have been many usability improvements.
• Perforce performance and workflow improvements
• Timeline Editor improvements with respect to child documents
• Recently used documents can be "pinned" so that they are not displaced by more recent documents.
• DOM debugging improvements:
  • Visual Studio DOM debug visualizer. (See blog post.)
  • DOM Recorder improvements
• Many memory leaks related to documents have been fixed and Controls are disposed of sooner. This helps with automated testing and opening hundreds of documents.

ATF 3.5 was released January 23, 2013

• Circuit Groups and Templates, with Santa Monica Studios. See here for details.
  • Circuit Group editing has been improved – elements can be dragged in and out of the group in-place, when the group is expanded.
  • Circuit Templates allow circuits to be referenced, reused, and updated, within a document. References to circuit templates in external documents will be implemented shortly after this release.
  • All core implementations have been moved from sample code to the Framework, so that clients don’t have to copy and paste code.
• Open Sound Control support, with Guerrilla Games. OSC allows game designers to create custom GUIs and macros on the iPad® and to use the iPad® to edit properties of objects on the PC. See here for a 6 minute video made by Anton Woldhek, a senior sound designer at Guerrilla.
• ModelViewer is a new sample app that has been added, for viewing ATGI, Collada, and OBJ formatted models. It uses OpenGL® and replaces the Level Editor sample app, which has been removed. We have removed the ATF 3 Level Editor and the Legacy Level Editor projects since they have evolved into a Level Editor in the WWS SDK.

ATF 3.4 was released on July 30, 2012

• Circuit Editor groups have received months of work, in a joint project with Santa Monica Studios.
• The SkinningService has received a major performance boost. Many of our controls have improved skinning.
• Our source code comments are in the best shape ever. Nearly all public and protected members should now be accurately documented in Framework. The sample apps have been reviewed, too.
• The Rename Command (for ATF 3) has been rewritten to be much easier to use and with more predictable behavior.
• Added the Lock User Interface command to optionally prevent docking windows and dragging toolbars.
• IronPython has been updated from 2.6.1 to 2.7.3.

ATF 3.3 was released on February 1, 2012

• SkinService is a new component that allows for easy customization of an application’s appearance by using inheritable properties that can be applied at run-time and loaded from *.skn (XML format) files. Skin files can affect any public property of any control in an application. This release of SkinService should be considered preliminary because not all of ATF’s own Controls are customizable yet.
• Circuit Editor and the Circuit Control has been enhanced for usability:
  • Wire connecting can be done with left-mouse-button clicks
  • Wire-snapping to pins now aids in connecting wires
  • Middle mouse button can pan the view
  • Keyboard navigation and been ported over from ATF 2
• Live Connect Service is a new component that wraps the WWS SDK’s Live Connect, and makes broadcasting and listening to messages on a local network very simple. Please see the Timeline Editor and Level Editor sample apps.
• Array Editor is a property editor for editing arrays of simple types.
• TargetEnumerationService is a new component to display and edit target platform Deci4p and TCP/IP connections. This is a redesigned and improved version of the old TargetService. Please use TargetEnumerationService for new development and avoid using both TargetEnumerationService and TargetService in the same application, because both services will present targets in their respective UI that are not related to each other. Please see the new sample app, TargetManager.
• The spreadsheet-style Grid Property Editor has received many usability improvements, including the removal of the duplicate row when editing, 2 mouse clicks instead of 3 to get to editing a cell, better keyboard navigation, some bug fixes.
• DOM Recorder is a new component for logging all changes to the DOM, listing them, and exporting them (programmatically).
• CustomFileDialog now remembers the directory that the user last navigated to for a particular filter string, and will use this most-recently-used directory if possible. A new property, ForcedInitialDirectory, allows clients to force the open/save dialog box to open at a particular directory. IFileDialogService exposes this functionality, too.

ATF 3.2 was released in early August, 2011

• Direct2D implementation of our adaptable diagram controls and timeline control for improved performance
• Improved support for Windows® Presentation Foundation based apps
  • Common ATF interfaces and classes will no longer require WinForms types
  • WinForms and WPF framework code will be in separate independent assemblies
• New sample applications
  • 3D model viewer to demonstrate using OpenGL® to view ATGI models without requiring all of the code of our Level Editor
  • Non-DOM editor to demonstrate that documents can be edited without using our DOM
• Greater usage of C# 3.0 for cleaner code
  • Lambdas can specify properties in BoundPropertyDescriptor, instead of only string literals
  • Extension methods can be used within the framework
  • LINQ expression syntax can be used within the framework
  • 'var' can be used when the implicit type is obvious
  • Visual Studio 2005 will no longer be supported
• GUI-based ATF Refactor tool
  • To help with migrating from one version of ATF to the next, our automated tool, AtfRefactor, will be improved
• Migration from Perforce to Subversion, to be consistent with other WWS shared tech and to make access for clients easier

ATF 3 Level Editor to be released shortly after ATF 3.2

• Will become a stand-alone product and no longer a sample application within ATF
• Will be fully-featured, on par with the ATF 2 Level Editor, and no longer considered beta

ATF 3.1 released December, 2010

• 3D graphics support
  • OpenGL® graphics support
  • ATGI, Collada, and OBJ model loading support
  • Level Editor sample app, ported with minimal breaking changes
• WPF (Windows® Presentation Foundation) support and new sample apps
• Reworked curve editor
• General-purpose Find/Replace. See SimpleDomEditor.
• Application Scripting, using IronPython. See the FSM Editor sample application.
• Visual Studio 2010 support
• TreeList Control
• WWS Code Exchange. Comments section. One big bucket with tags & search. No ratings. See CodeGuru.com. Analytics for the poster. - Ricky and Max. If we can set up something on Ship with Alex Davidson's help, this would be great. We need to formalize our feature set. Then hand off to Alex, who may need to use a new version of Alfresco. We need to think of items to populate the exchange with; Ricky knows of at least 3 different people with items that can be contributed immediately.
• Improved Target Service control

ATF 3.0 released May, 2010 This is a major release that contains better implementations of large aspects of ATF 2's functionality while still being backwards compatible and while keeping duplicate code within ATF to a minimum. We don't anticipate any breaking API changes for ATF 2 based code. The changes in ATF 3 are user-driven in the most part and tailored to address lessons learned in previous releases and from user feedback. Major features/enhancements (as currently envisaged) include...

• Reworking the file structure of scea_wip/ATF to put the .csproj and .sln files in a consistent location.
• A tool to automatically fix existing client .sln files to refer to the new location of our .csproj files.
• A new DOM (current DOM still available so existing apps dont break on recompile)
• A new editing framework for ATF3
• MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework). Rewrite the PluginDictionary to work on top of MEF so that existing client code and new plugins work together seamlessly and without any breaking changes.
• Current ATF 2.x assemblies reference the new ATF3 core assemblies and make the ATF 2.x classes into stubs or shims to the new locations. The goal is to have little duplicate code and no breaking changes.
• Sample applications to use ATF 3, except possibly the Level Editor.

...

ATF 1.1 released August, 2006

ATF was started probably before 2006, because by May of 2006, there was a Level Editor demo and a version of the Document Object Model (DOM).