Tile rotation is coming!

[Markus W]

Tile rotation is coming! We hope to be able to release a public beta version within the next two weeks.

Please note, the feature as described below is NOT YET ACCESSIBLE at the time of writing. It's an announcement, a preview, just so you know what's coming up soon.

ANNOUNCEMENT

Soon we'll be able to rotate the tiles in 5 degree steps. The following picture is a preview of the area above the canvas in each room.



Notice the KEYBOARD CONTROLS. You can use the buttons or the actual keys on the keyboard to nudge the tile around, rotate it left or right, or reset it to straight up (0 degree angle).


Rotation via mouse control - THE INVISIBLE DISK

The best thing is, for rotating the tiles you don't need to use the keyboard at all! Dragging works as before: Click on a tile and move it to its target position.

Then, click somewhere on the canvas (next to tile or further away - doesn't matter), and drag the canvas in a circular fashion around the tile to rotate the tile!

Hard to describe in words, but it's very intuitive once you got the hang of it. To help you understand how this works: Imagine each tile sits on a big invisible disk, and after you dragged the tile into its position you'd be dragging the tile's invisible disk to rotate the tile.


Immediate fine-positioning after rotation

Now, often when you rotate a tile you may realize that it's now a little bit off, maybe a pixel or so. You could now use the keyboard to nudge it into position, but you don't have to: You can use the mouse for this too!

So, how to nudge the tile just right after you rotated it: When you rotated the tile, your mouse pointer is somewhere on the "invisible disk", and your eyes are focused on the tile. Your finger is still depressing the mouse button. Without letting go, hold down the shift key, and move the mouse: This will cause the tile to be "remote controlled" and you can shift the tile into position!

You can let go of the shift key and you're in rotate mode again and you can switch back and forth. Once again, you have to play around with this to get the hang of it, but then you'll love it.


The "active tile" concept

The principle of "first drag, then rotate and possibly nudge" introduces the concept of the "active tile". The active tile is the tile you last moved.

When you click on a tile, you'll see a red halo around the tile for a brief moment to indicate that you've selected a new active tile. The active tile thing is handy if you want to fine-tune a whole range of tiles, let's say a line of tiles. You can use the cursor keys to jump from tile to tile and fine-tune them with the keyboard controls! Very handy for fine tuning the angles and positions of tiles that are arranged in a particular direction.


Comprehensive how-to and instructions

This post is just a preview. Rest assured we'll prepare proper documentation on how to use the tile rotation. We'll probably create a little video (or several) where you actually see how to make best use of tile rotation.


Beta testing

Next week we'll make a limited beta version available to interested members. Send me PM (to MorningStar please) if you want to take part.


Snapshots, movie rewind and replay

Snapshots and movie replay will remain unaffected - everything will still work, showing moves and rotation etc. However, this "unaffected" really means: We have to first program it! This may mean that for some time, the beta version will not have movie replays as we have to yet make it able to deal with rotated tiles. We'll either disable the replay or live with it, not showing the actual rotation. Either way, it's not a big deal, and eventually it will all work just fine as previously, but with tile rotation.


Summary

This is our biggest new feature release yet. Tile rotation lifts TheBroth and the artistic freedom it provides to a whole new level.

Moving the core engine of TheBroth to Flash has given rise to an incredible number of possible improvements that were technically impossible or at least extremely difficult to achieve.

In other words, we have a ton of new features planned that all will add significant value to TheBroth and its mosaics, and we'll be looking back wondering how we ever managed to get by without these features.

Personally, I can't wait!!