Malban is clenching his teeth and working on vecci again. There it all started – and I don’t know why it is so hard for him to finalize poor vecci.
Apart from the little fact,that vecci can not export to asm data yet (only thru external export scripts), Malban changed pretty much and IMHO vecci has made huge steps towards usability!
Here a current (but in no way final) screenshot:
Following are some features, which are already implemented:
Basic “philosophy”:
- there are 3 modes vecci can work in:
+ “set” sets new vectors (or points)
+ “select point” for point manipulation
+ “select vector” for vector manipulation - not all features of vecci are available in all modes
- all vectors can be viewed in a table
- selection of vectors can be done in the editor or in the table (in select vector mode)
- vectors can be edited in the editor – or directly (number crunching) in the table
- vectors can have patterns and intensity
- it is possible to have 3d vectors
- the display of the editor window can be scaled, the grid can be switched on and off, and you can specify the grid size
- VectorLists can be grouped together to form an “animation”
Mode: Set
“Basic” setting of vectors in the editor window. The sub-mode “continue” lets you draw vectors which are connected by their start and endpoints (these will later in vectrex terms be relative vectorlists).
Selection modes in general
Selection is done with the mouse. Clicking on an entity (point or vector in their respective mode) selects that entity (and unselects previous selections).
You can “drag” entities and while dragging displace them.
SHIFT clicking on an entity allows selection of several entities. If several are selected and you want to unselect, shift “middle mouse button” click on the entity to deselect.
Holding the (shift) mouse button you can drag all selected entities.
Mode: Select point
Right click brings a popup with the following options:
- join selected
continues mode: the two (exactly) selected points are joined “here”, they share this point (programatically speaking they share a vertex)
non continues mode: the two (exactly) selected points transfered to this spot, they share the same location, but are not “joined” - join here
continues mode: all points at this location are joined - connect selected
continues mode: between the two (exactly) selected points a new vector is inserted. Both ends of the new vector are joined to the respective selected points
non continues mode: between the two (exactly) selected points a new vector is inserted. - rip joined vectors:
both: the “joined” point underneath is unjoined, the two vectors do not share the same vertex anymore, but both points still have the same location
Mode: Select vector
Right click brings a popup with the following options:
- delete selected vectors
- delete all not selected vectors (why this is a valid option will be revealed later …)
Further in this mode you can also:
- copy selected vectors to an internal buffer
- paste these vectors (as often as you like)
- cut selected vectors
- save selected vectors as a VectorList
- insert a VectorList (loading…)
Animation
Although the picture is not “animated” you can guess what it looks like in real life:
- at the bottom you see the four animation frames (I did in about a minute)
- the small black part in the middle has again two modes, a play mode and a “non” play mode
- the non play mode allows you to view the current edited vector list in a custom 3d view (which I won’t explain at this point)
- the play mode – “PLAYS” the animation from below
- there is a little “delay” setting which allows you to influence the speed of the animation (and a zoom slider)
- clicking on an animation frame allows editing of (a copy of) that frame
- you can “build” some animations automatically, to the left you see the
first “winker” rotated 360 degrees around the z-axis in 10 steps. - naturally you can save and load these (as of now in XML format only, all imports and exports are not done yet)
Scenario (not done yet)
VectorLists will also be able to be collected to something which I call “scenario”. These will be vectorlists grouped together to not be played one after another in form of an animation, but vectorlists which are supposed to be visible at the same time.
With such a scenario format you can – well – build scenarios consisting of different vectorlists.
Something cool to finish this long entry:
Vector-Screenshots!
Dissi has got a new button, using that you can “screenshot” your current vectrex. All data is saved in form of a huge vectorlist!
(Beware! In order to get nicely aligned vectors, switch off all the “good” emulation stuff, no drift e.g. – since the vectors are not the ones the assembler program produces, but the vectors which are “displayed by the phosphor screen”).
In the above picture you can also see the “file loader” for VectorLists.
Now! Imagine, that you would like to reuse the turtle vector list. All you have to do is “drag” a rectangle around a turtle, press the right mousebutton and chose “delete non selected vectors”! Tada!
(Yes – I know, you could also just have saved the selected vectors and reloaded that list – spoilsport!)
Bye for now!