« Forum Index < Platformers Board | jebby |
Interguild Founder
Age: 32 Karma: 233 Posts: 968 Gender: Male Location: United Kingdom pm | email
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A few changes made today based on your feedback:
- Improved zooming! The grid no longer wobbles around when zooming into large caves and centres the cave when zooming out.
- HATPC Reborn now opens in a new tab rather than a popup window.
- Palette tiles have tooltips and are grouped into categories to make them a little more understandable for new players.
- Insert and Delete keys work as in previous cavemakers.
- The clipboard icon on the Copy button is now 53% more clipboardy and has a tooltip for those who weren't sure what it did.
- Grey squares are replaced by the actual terrain texture on the grid. This does impact performance on large caves - I may add a high performance option some time in the future.
| | soccerboy13542 |
~*~Soccer~*~
Karma: 450 Posts: 4466 Gender: Male Location: 1945 pm | email
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I'm not sure if other people used this feature, but having hotkeys for tiles could be helpful. In CSD's cavemaker i exclusively use Alt + key to place things.
'Livio' said: You know, I was thinking of getting an internship at Microsoft, but I'm not sure I want their lameness to rub off on me. | | jebby |
Interguild Founder
Age: 32 Karma: 233 Posts: 968 Gender: Male Location: United Kingdom pm | email
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It just shows how much of a casual user I always was of the cavemaker - I never even touched the hotkeys. No excuse not to know about them though.
CaveGen has hotkeys for selecting tiles and there is a key (Insert) for placing the current tile, but there are no hotkeys for placing tiles without selecting them. Fascinating how many different ways there are of placing tiles. The closest approximation of your existing workflow for say, boulders, would be:
- Press 'o'
- Press 'Insert' wherever you want to place boulders at the cursor
However, I'm aware that at least 2 people are used to the Alt insertion method. For this reason, I will add the Alt insertion keys as another alternative placement method. This will also need to be accompanied by arrow key navigation of the caves. It's on my short-term to-do list.
Livio gave me some useful feedback in a similar vein. He said that he wanted keyboard shortcuts, meaning that CaveGen completely fails to explain to the user that it actually does has shortcuts, just slightly different to the ones that people are used to. He also said that he would like to know which tile is selected from the palette. I'll solve these, at least partially, by labelling the tile tooltips with the hotkeys and highlighting the selected palette tile.
Livio also made an interesting point that he didn't know whether his cave was being saved. In his attempts to save his cave, he ended up rebuilding it and losing his progress (this can be fixed with an "Are you sure?" type dialog). The reality is that CaveGen saves automatically like Google Docs.
I perhaps listened too much to the people at my job who tell me that manual saving is dead and that automatic saving is the future. Perhaps it is, but I shouldn't be saving silently. I will add some subtle means of notifying the user that their changes have been saved.
Thanks again for this kind of feedback. I wouldn't know about these problems without it. My goal is to use these incremental improvements to make an awesome cavemaker. | | Yaya |
Age: 28 Karma: 747 Posts: 5367 Location: Ohio (US) pm | email
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Would it be possible to make it so hitting the play button closes previous HATPC Reborn tabs that were generated from the play button?
COMING SOON: A giant meteor. Please.
Give me +karma. Give me +karma. | | DroidFreak36 |
HATPC Reborn Dev
Age: 30 Karma: 200 Posts: 491 Gender: Male Location: droidfreak36.com pm | email
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Quote: Would it be possible to make it so hitting the play button closes previous HATPC Reborn tabs that were generated from the play button?
No. It wouldn't be possible. A webpage can't make your browser close other tabs.
Quote: Rictory for Ralkyon!
HATPC Reborn home page | | Yaya |
Age: 28 Karma: 747 Posts: 5367 Location: Ohio (US) pm | email
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Okay, I wasn't positive. It's not that big of an inconvenience
COMING SOON: A giant meteor. Please.
Give me +karma. Give me +karma. | | jebby |
Interguild Founder
Age: 32 Karma: 233 Posts: 968 Gender: Male Location: United Kingdom pm | email
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Quote: No. It wouldn't be possible. A webpage can't make your browser close other tabs.
It can... if it created that tab and the webpage it was visiting was from the same origin. If those conditions are satisfied, you can also refresh tabs as well. So, while CaveGen and HATPC Reborn are on different domains, this will always be a limitation. Of course, the ideal would be having HATPC Reborn run in the same tab, replacing the level editor grid in a seamless transition. Given that me and Droid currently take separate ownership of the two projects, that won't be the case any time soon. It's the best we can come up with for now. | | aych bee |
when i am king
Age: 104 Karma: 147 Posts: 1002 Gender: Female Location: you will be first against the wall pm | email
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wow now we are stepping into some hacker territory this is gettin DANGEROUS
| | canadianstickdeath |
Age: 35 Karma: 350 Posts: 2990 Gender: Male pm | email
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It REALLY wants me to make an account. I probably won't. :/ | | jebby |
Interguild Founder
Age: 32 Karma: 233 Posts: 968 Gender: Male Location: United Kingdom pm | email
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That's a shame. If you're uncomfortable with using a Facebook or Google account, there is the option to sign up with just your email like you did for this site. Unfortunately, security (and the possibility of a variety of interesting features down the line) is rather difficult without authentication. | | jebby |
Interguild Founder
Age: 32 Karma: 233 Posts: 968 Gender: Male Location: United Kingdom pm | email
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Hotkey guide added. A lot of the old cavemaker hotkeys have been added with it, including means of moving the cursor, panning, zooming, inserting and deleting without needing the mouse. | | DroidFreak36 |
HATPC Reborn Dev
Age: 30 Karma: 200 Posts: 491 Gender: Male Location: droidfreak36.com pm | email
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Uh, I can't edit the cave size in the properties. Or the cave name. Issue occurs on both firefox and chrome.
Quote: Rictory for Ralkyon!
HATPC Reborn home page | | jebby |
Interguild Founder
Age: 32 Karma: 233 Posts: 968 Gender: Male Location: United Kingdom pm | email
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Fix is being deployed and should be live in a minute or two. Was a result of me rewriting the keyboard handler. Thanks for letting me know!
Anyway... hotkey guide has been added | | aych bee |
when i am king
Age: 104 Karma: 147 Posts: 1002 Gender: Female Location: you will be first against the wall pm | email
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Jebby if you add the option to edit other people's caves then I will sell you my soul. I reserve the right to infringe on copyright :/
| | shos |
~Jack of all trades~
Age: 31 Karma: 389 Posts: 8273 Gender: Male Location: Israel pm | email
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I've been eager to try this today and yesterday but I remembered that my mouse is horrible and I can't do dangz.
So, I'll get myself a new mouse and get it done.
From the poor attempt at it today (with the ladders and all), this looks pretty neat. in depth response to come later this week!
| | jebby |
Interguild Founder
Age: 32 Karma: 233 Posts: 968 Gender: Male Location: United Kingdom pm | email
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Quote: I've been eager to try this today and yesterday but I remembered that my mouse is horrible and I can't do dangz.
So, I'll get myself a new mouse and get it done.
From the poor attempt at it today (with the ladders and all), this looks pretty neat. in depth response to come later this week!
Note that you can now use CaveGen almost entirely without a mouse if you want - check out the hotkey guide on the site. You can do stuff like zooming, panning and movement without the mouse. That said, I personally prefer building caves with a mouse - maybe you're the same. | | Sefro |
Karma: 313 Posts: 1136 Gender: Male Location: Canada pm | email
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Minor bug: if you use ctrl-z to undo then it also selects the secret area tile (hotkey z). | | krotomo |
The Shepherd
Age: 23 Karma: 249 Posts: 4066 Gender: Male Location: My chair pm | email
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Is there any way to change the dimensions of a cave without rebuilding the whole thing? I pretty much always start with a larger grid than I actually need, then shrink the cave when it's done.
EDIT: Nevermind, you said in the original post you're working on row and column insertion/deletion | | DroidFreak36 |
HATPC Reborn Dev
Age: 30 Karma: 200 Posts: 491 Gender: Male Location: droidfreak36.com pm | email
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Yeah, a good resizing mechanic would be an important feature to add. Steel City ended up with a bunch of extra space on the bottom because I couldn't shrink it in CaveGen. Not that that is a big issue itself, but there are also cases where an author wants to add extra layers to a cave, and it's virtually impossible to do that as-is. A workaround would be to add the ability to paste in level codes, because then users could copy a level out, change the size, and then paste it back in.
Quote: Rictory for Ralkyon!
HATPC Reborn home page | | shos |
~Jack of all trades~
Age: 31 Karma: 389 Posts: 8273 Gender: Male Location: Israel pm | email
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So, this definitely needs an option to load a cave from text, like, paste into a textbox and hit "load" and you'll start editting it.
| | shos |
~Jack of all trades~
Age: 31 Karma: 389 Posts: 8273 Gender: Male Location: Israel pm | email
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also zoom out doesn't work for me for a small cave?
| | jebby |
Interguild Founder
Age: 32 Karma: 233 Posts: 968 Gender: Male Location: United Kingdom pm | email
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Quote: Minor bug: if you use ctrl-z to undo then it also selects the secret area tile (hotkey z).
Well spotted. I need to block out tile selection on those commands and also when typing in inputs.
Quote: Is there any way to change the dimensions of a cave without rebuilding the whole thing? I pretty much always start with a larger grid than I actually need, then shrink the cave when it's done.
This is now a really high priority for me, given the demand for it. I'm working on it.
Quote: Yeah, a good resizing mechanic would be an important feature to add. Steel City ended up with a bunch of extra space on the bottom because I couldn't shrink it in CaveGen. Not that that is a big issue itself, but there are also cases where an author wants to add extra layers to a cave, and it's virtually impossible to do that as-is. A workaround would be to add the ability to paste in level codes, because then users could copy a level out, change the size, and then paste it back in.
Quote: So, this definitely needs an option to load a cave from text, like, paste into a textbox and hit "load" and you'll start editting it.
Level pasting is on the agenda, though maybe not before column/row insertion/deletion and event support.
Quote: also zoom out doesn't work for me for a small cave?
This is actually a really useful catch - I wouldn't have spotted this otherwise. For me, centring on zoom out doesn't work on tiny caves like 10x10 - was zoom centring the issue you had too? For now, you can centre using the pan keys.
If you want live updates on the work I'm doing, you can subscribe to the Trello board I've been using: https://trello.com/b/OwoCo7jc/cavegen
| | DroidFreak36 |
HATPC Reborn Dev
Age: 30 Karma: 200 Posts: 491 Gender: Male Location: droidfreak36.com pm | email
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What are the pan keys? They aren't arrow keys, because those move your brush around the level.
Quote: Rictory for Ralkyon!
HATPC Reborn home page | | jebby |
Interguild Founder
Age: 32 Karma: 233 Posts: 968 Gender: Male Location: United Kingdom pm | email
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Alt + arrows. Take a look at the hotkey guide on cavegen.com (announced in bright purple text in posts above... ) | | shos |
~Jack of all trades~
Age: 31 Karma: 389 Posts: 8273 Gender: Male Location: Israel pm | email
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A good option in the old cavemaker that could be good here too is the option to select mouse, and mark an entire block and ctrl X ctrl V it one row below, etc.
See, you asked me to test your cavegen, you never imagined it would make me make a cave!!
it's about 25% done, and it's mad.
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