It was last friday that I had a nice chat with Nick once again (had
been some time ago) and in the process we came to talk about MDL
Tweaker as well. It seemed that Nick had not seen the latest beta version of that tool yet, so while chatting Nick started to test this version a bit. Of course he was able to produce some new bugs and errors for me very soon, as well as a lot of good ideas on how to improve features or the interface.

All these new ideas and suggestions, formed a very good motivation for me to do some coding work on MDL Tweaker right away. So this weekend I have been busy with implementing stuff from my wishlist. Once I have the remaining issues ironed out, you can expect a new beta release.

The most noticeable changes I have made until now deal with the object preview. First I have been able to make the drawing of the preview a lot faster. So where the CPU was often the limiting factor on drawing complex objects before, it now no longer is. Another important change is that the way the textures are searched has been changed. This means that loading the object will no longer take ages if the textures can not be found. Besides these two things, I have made a lot of other small changes as well, but you will have to wait for the release to see a full list of changes.

So thanks Nick, such chat sessions are really useful for the development of any tool. It really helps me to keep the end user in mind as well, as my own point of view on how the tool should works is often slightly different from what a average scenery designer would prefer.