Hmmm... I logged that as a bug previously.
I consider it more of a bug then a feature, but that's just me....

I'll call it a bug if it gets me the curved walls.

request: multiple tile/wall/thing select, copy and paste. So I can do entire buildings!

woops...ignore last. Helps if you actually READ the help file!

Let me echo the call for the planner to inventory the pieces I have already made and use them in the manifest first, only listing the parts I don't already have as what I need to build.

How is everyone else dealing with this now?

When you set a playing area, have a secondary grid that shows heavier lines every 6 inchs.

Helps if you don't design from the outside in but rather from the middle out.


~ + 1 to what bigandy said

~ tells you how many 3x6 and 6x6 base templates you need, bit like the walls summary.

I know this was probably stated somewhere, but I would love a zoom feature.

+1 to the walls manifest, although I'm happy at the moment just knowing how many walls I need (the answer usually being "a lot more than you've printed out").

Resizable window would be useful, maximise it to the lovely 22" widescreen here on my desk, shrink it down to run nicely on the netbook.

Android version, so I could design layouts on the move? Maybe one for the iPad or other tablet PCs?

Feature request: Ability to toggle anchor marks

Notes: This will allow layouts to be printed as clean maps (currently get a lot of annoying white squares on maps).

In my opinion, the most important missing feature is the ZOOM. It is so hard to see anything on a large monitor. Please add this soon.

I would like to be able to group sections and be able to toggle the visibility of grouped sections. This would let me experiment with builds that can break apart. For example, when building my big Thoumont's build (like the one in the promo shots) there are lots of sections that come apart. You can't capture that in the planner.


I would like the grouping to span layers. I have built a couple building plans, but I'd like an easy way to merge those plans together and display a whole town/city layout. Being able to "import" a plan into another plan might automatically create a grouping for the new stuff. I'd like to be able to "export" a grouping to its own file. I'd like to be able to copy/paste an entire grouping.


I'd like to be able to name the groupings, and navigate them in a tree (implying I'd like to be able to have nested groupings). For example, perhaps I'll make a layout that includes a forest and a city. Within the city, I might have districts, and within the districts I might have building plans. It would be neat if I could keep this all together in a single plan. All of the other bells and whistles of managing a hierarchy of named things is implied in my outlined hopes and dreams here.

I would like to be able to "publish" plans to a WWG community site, and have the planner let me browse for other plans. I should be able to filter the plans by the products I own, or on specific products/genres. If we get a TLX planner that will render the layout in 3D, I'd like to be able to set a default camera location for the plans, and have the planner automatically create a thumbnail rendering for the published plans. If we don't get 3D, then being able to generate a thumbnail with the right aspect ratio from one or more layers being visible would be a-ok. Add some overlay to the thumbnail that puts a border around it, with some fan-published-plans logo on it. With some creativity, I bet the planner can also dynamically render the title of the plans in a nice font to make them look kind of professional and proper when published.

Even if the planner can't automatically publish plans, and even if the planner can't let you browse and download plans itself, I think there'd be some value to having a section of the storefront for TLX plans. In fact, I think making the storefront first and then adding the support to the planner works out nicely. It would be neat if the plans could be tagged with the sets they require, and there could be a "My TLX Plans" link that would show a list filtered to the sets you currently own...

I'd be willing to bet that if you wanted to create a storefront area similar to the kitbash area that was filtered/maintained by someone from the community, you'd get at least one taker to help out...

Some very good ideas in there. (Just don't tell Chris, he's had enough programming work to do/oversee already )

Wasn't me who did the TLX planner, it was Brant.

Honestly, I thought the piece Chris would be involved in would be way more doable in the short term than the stuff for the planner, since I think it'd be cool to have a storefront way of publishing plans, kinda like kitbashes. But it seemed like a reasonable thing to think to the future and expect the TLX planner to integrate with that idea.

As I said before, I didn't write the planner, so I'm not familiar with its codebase. I have a pretty good idea of what it would take on the store's end, but on the client end? I'm hesitant to make any promises, declarations, or assumptions on another programmer's behalf.

The basic principle (facilitating the sharing of customer maps and layouts) is a sound one, however. I'm not at liberty to go into specifics, but making it easier to share maps with other customers has indeed been on the list for a while.

Adding or retrieving maps directly from the planner is not complex per se: it 's just a question of connecxion to a database where planner saved files are stored.

What is complex is the ability to browse maps with previews, to filter for sets or keywords...

This "sharing" of designs would not only be nice, but absolutely *necessary* for the efficient (and effective) implementation of the "TLX (Himmerveil) Community Build" from elsewhere here on the forum.

[Link: viewtopic.php?f=66&t=9320 ]

It's great to be able to drag items right off the palettes and onto the canvas, but there are some quirks that are a little frustrating.

If I change the zoom factor, the image I'm dragging around isn't also scaled so it doesn't like up well at all with where I'm dragging it.

The drag doesn't respect the snap-to-grid feature, so often when I drop it, it doesn't line up and I have to adjust it again.

Operating System: Mac OSX 10.6.8
Java version: 1.6.0_29

I am having trouble using the auto-wall feature effectively - it can actually feel quite frustrating.

I've got one six-inch tile on the screen, and I'm trying to:

draw a 6" wall along each side

or

draw a diagonal wall along the middle of the tile

Neither will work for me. I can only get a 3" wall on one side. As I drag from one corner to the next, I get a 3" blue line, and a 3" red line. When I start to travel along the next edge, the red line moves up, and I end up with a diagonal blue line.

When trying to make a diagonal wall along the middle of the tile, it only will let me do a 3" wall to the middle of the tile.

OK. I accidentally discovered that I need to overshoot the end of the wall section I want by a good margin to make it decide to put down a wall.

I routinely find that while I click darn near precisely on the corner of a tile to begin drawing a wall section, the wall begins 1/2 a square away from that point. So, with a 1" grid showing, I might get the start point half-way between two corners of a grid square, or even sometimes in the center of a grid square. When it does this, I don't end up with walls that line up with my tiles.

Undo/redo is active while in auto-wall "mode" which has messed me up. It's been easy for me to accidentally make the line go astray, and there's no way to undo just a segment. I suppose I'll get used to being a little sloppy with the walls, then fixing up the ones that didn't go quite right.

Ok. Take this with a grain of salt - I write software for a living, and I basically spend my days pushing on usability issues with all the customer facing bits. Look at it this way - if I didn't like your stuff, I wouldn't spend all this time typing this up!

The "Build Manifest" button is located over where the features of adding stuff to the canvas is. This is a little odd. It feels more like a feature that would go under the File menu, the Tools menu, or somewhere on the toolbar.

In the terrain library, the tiles are hard to navigate. I'd like a way to turn off the "buy it here" button and the tile set logo, or at least come up with a way to capture that stuff in a more compact form - it uses up a huge amount of real estate for this. I've already bought almost all these sets, so this is just getting in my way.

I can only get about 7 tiles on the screen at one time. I feel like there are lots of examples of UIs that can display way more "tiles" at one time than this. And this is where I spend a lot of time - scrolling around just trying to find a tile. Maybe consider overlaying some "labels" on the corners of the image - one shows how many are currently in the layout, and another would show how many are in your collection. Maybe you can hover over the collection label and get controls for increasing/decreasing the value.

For reasons I can't explain, when I scroll the terrain list (at least on my MacBook Pro) the list is very jittery.

I'd like the ability to control not only what genre is displayed, but what sets are displayed in each genre. That is, maybe I don't want to see it if I don't own it. I really don't want to have to scroll past Necroblock and Chronometer simply because I *do* want to have access to hinterland cliffs and forest.

The menus don't line up properly - there's a gap between the main menu item, and the list that drops down. There are some items on the toolbar that don't appear in a menu, and the toolbar buttons aren't organized in the same order the menus are. The "Copy (tiles)" menu item and "Paste (tiles)" menu item - they don't just operate on tiles - they work on walls, posts etc.

It's not clear to me why Set Outline Color and Toggle Tile Outline is a different beast than "regions". The "regions" features could benefit from tooltips on the buttons. When I select a region from the "Region list" dialog, it would be nice if it somehow indicated which rectangle that corresponded to. The buttons in the dialog could benefit from tooltips too.

Why do the Auto-Post/Auto-Wall buttons appear yellow when I can click on them, but grey when I cannot, but the Define Region buttons always appear grey?

Are the "Tile outlines" and "Regions" really so different as to warrant separate ways to toggle them on/off, create them and color them? Drawing a region doesn't appear to respect the grid. If it did, it'd be easy to use the regions to outline tiles. Without it, not so easy. I say it doesn't appear to respect it because the performance of using the grids on my Mac makes the feature unusable. The playing area feature also slows things down (but not quite as bad). I find I'm forced to turn them both off in order to use the planner.

When I add a tile and immediately use the Set Outline Feature, clicking Reset changes the border to white. Maybe I'm missing something, but the way I have found to remove the outline altogether is to open the color dialog, then click Cancel. It seems to lose the outline, which doesn't seem right, but at least it gives me a way to remove it. The "recent" colors doesn't stick around very long. When I close the outline color dialog and reopen it, they're all red.

The scrollbar for the zoom control is an odd choice. It's rare I need to get, say 47% exactly. I'd think you could make the control more compact simply by having an editable drop-list where I could pick zoom levels in increments of 10 (or 20), type in an exact amount if I needed etc.

Ok. Enough for one post. I'm not considering anything here as a reason not to use the software - I will still be able to get plans made - but put it all together, and there's a lack of polish that doesn't feel like it's of the quality I get from the WWG sets themselves.

Hi MProteau,

first of all, let me thank you for the interest you show to the planner.

Before I try to answer your rather long list of remarks and questions, let me begin with a little history.
As you mention that you work on software development, my explanations may also sometime be a little technical.

When I first began working on the planner, I did it as a bash: i literally hacked the planner to add a few features that I neeeded. One feature after the other, I ended up adding even more features, for something that would become a product.
But all in all, I just added features to an already existing product. The basic architecture of the software hasn't changed.
The planner was first designed with some features in mind and newer features sometimes don't fit with this original idea. Sometimes, it's easy to refactor the code to make it fit to newer ideas, sometimes, it's not, and you have to find tricks.
Note also that I developped the 1.5 version of the planner on my leasure time. It's not like I'm working on the planner 5 days a week from 8 to 7, so I can't dedicate myself on those bigger changes that would be necessary to refactor completly the code...
I mention all that because more than once, the answer to your questions/remarks will be: it's historical. I had to cope with the original design of the planner...

Enough with that preliminary note, the answers now...

Hinterland/himmelveil: To my shame, I must say I did notice that but thought it was already the case with previous v1.0 planner and didn't want to change this for backward compatibility issues...
I'll see how I can share a corrected version of the tilesets. Note that if you already created maps with the incorrectly named forests and cliffs, you will loose those maps (or at least, tiles taken from those sets will appear grey...)

Drag n' Drop: this is one of the "historical" issue. The drag n' drop feature is just a trick : the cursor is changed to reflect the element chosen. But every system has its limitation and cursor images can't be of any size, any color, so you will notice (even worse on some linux systems) deformation of the selected tile.
The drag n' drop do respect the snap to grid, but uses an internal 8 pixels grid, instead of the user selected grid, because some elements (like posts and walls) are not aligned directly on the user grid...

Text alignement: not sure of what the issue is here... The problem may well be due to the fact taht inherently, fonts are not compatible with the grid. Unless we severely limit the font sizes that can be used, a font will not have a size that correctly match the 8 pixel grid, leading to alignment issues. There is nothing I can do here, to my knowledge...

Autowall: the question when designing this was : how do I know that a wall is finished and that user next move will created a new wall, instead of modifying the current wall (like eg. you move along the edge of a tile horizontally then vertically: did you want to create two walls along the horizontal and vertical sides of the tile, or did you want to create a diagonal wall?)
To answer this, I decided to "fix" a wall when you go past the end position. It's just a question of practice. After a few use, it will become automatic...
The alignment issue is also due to the fact that the tool is not limited to 1" grid, but can also be used ungrided, where walls can be placed anywhere... I noticed that it's also a question of practice. I do target better now than when I first implemented this feature...
Note that when validating the autowall feature, walls and post created get selected, so you can move them to align them more precisely... (use Shift + Arrows for better positioning)
Concerning the undo of wall during the autowall : try drawing your last wall in the reverse (eg, if you draw it from left to right, try drawing it backward from right to left) : it will erase your last wall...

Build manifest : it's historical... It just stayed where it was in the previous version, even if previous version didn't have all the new section above...

tileset library: It's not an easy problem, because we don't want that part to be overcrowded (like if we put two columns of tiles instead of one). Any idea are good to take here...

Jittery: had you a grid on and/or a play area defined? I noticed that on linux systems (and MacOs may have same problem), even with very powerfull computers, these two options made everything slow...

Gap in menus : I didn't touch this component. I think there were a request in a pre v1.0 to add a gap between menu and the drop down list, but I'm not sure of that..
Menu issues: as said by Denny, this planner is still in beta: we add features but still have to rethink how to organize the whole...

Region feature was added because I've seen here and there people not completly fond of the outline feature, to restrictive. So I added this, without touching the older feature...

Grey/non-grey buttons... This is just a question of design. Autowall buttons are yellow because wall symbols are yellow. Region button are grey because, well, I created them that way

Region snap to grid : That is an interesting question : I decided to let the user design regions that are free from the grid, but that could be changed if noone see any use for unaligned regions...

Set outline : I didn't change this feature, but I do agree that "cancel" to suppress the outline is a bit weird. We'll have to think of a better way to do that...

Zoom: or alternatively, I can fix he increment on the scrollbar to 10...
but what if someone need that 47% ? The Gui is quite full already, so i decided not to add a zone to type a zoom amount...

@Aramil:
I think the planner will have problem with all "non-standard" characters; i'll have to check if i have a way to manage all those special characters).
For now, I can only advise to put the planner in a directory that has only standard unaccentuated characters...

To Akmor - don't take any of these usability comments as a reflection on you and your work. I understand that you don't do this full time, and you didn't set out to "clean up" things. The planner is a useful product - I just want to live to see the rough edges polished off so it's as friendly a product as I know it could be.



I recognize this, and appreciate you could help out in this area - especially since this isn't a full time project. It's good to see some progress with the planner. I just don't want to not raise the issues.



Put it high on the list then to decouple the *display name* from the *identifying name* of any objects!



I got that it's just a cursor trick. I'm not sure the trick is worth it. One suggestion would be to change the cursor so that it doesn't imply you're dragging the actual object. For example, use an arrow mouse cursor with some additional decoration below it. Alternatively, do it right, and actually draw on the canvas exactly how the object would appear, and snap it to the real grid.



So, snap posts and walls differently than tiles if they use different snapping rules. Knowing that a lot of this is driven from external metadata, come up with a definition of the behavior as an attribute of the set of objects so it's not like you have to hard-code the snapping rules.



This may very well be a specific issue on OSX, or with specific fonts...



If it isn't behaving naturally to the user, you kind of have two options, right? You can expect the user to adapt to your choices, or you can change your implementation. I don't think that the implementation you chose is intuitive, and so I'm wondering how many people will hit this. It'll be interesting to do a survey of people who use the software.

An alternate implementation might have been to implement a poly-line drawer, which would let you click to define the end points rather than dragging. Then, the points themselves could be drag-able things to allow fixing any mistakes, and an undo stack could easily be attributed to the line creation. Just an example of an alternative that I might find more intuitive.



As a user, I just don't get why snap-to-grid doesn't mean snap-to-grid in this and other cases. I know you may have *technical* reasons for this, but for example when I use Visio and I snap to grid, my objects snap to the grid.



Which may mean you're too experienced to be a valid test of how well a feature will work for someone who hasn't used the software yet, or for as long...



I guess all of these things were just not at all intuitive to me. I didn't know you could backtrack to remove a line, and since the feature was pitched as being able to "draw" the walls, I expected to be able to do just that.



I know that's where it was... I just don't think it belongs there. I thought it used to dynamically update as you added stuff. Now, it's an action button, so it doesn't feel right to have it there.



If all UI decisions were easy, I wouldn't have a job! There are all sorts of ways to lay out tilesets while preserving grouping. I'm not going to outline all the nifty solutions though. I'm just pointing out that the current implementation is really sub-optimal, and I wanted to point out why I thought that.



No - I had both the grid off and the play area set to 0x0. It's less a "lag" type issue and more of a rendering issue - it seems to have to adjust its scroll position in bad ways, sometimes.



Don't take any of this as a personal reflection of your work - just that there's more work to do! Maybe someone felt that there needed to be more spacing between the menu bar, and the menu itself, but having the menu detached from the bar the way it is... it's just weird.



Consider my point that just grafting on features might be good for alpha releases or releases to people for usability studies and stuff. But, it makes the product less polished if it goes the door that way.



This snap-to-grid thing keeps coming up... I think if I don't want it to snap to the grid, I'd turn off the grid.



OK. There's the theoretical "what if someone needs that 47%?" I'd really question whether it's necessary, but the idea I pitched doesn't prevent 47% - it simply requires the user to type in 47%. But, by providing a compact list of more common zoom factors, it's easier to set it to 50%, 100%, 200%. The slider doesn't prevent this, but it gets in its own way. What is the user actually trying to do? I'm guessing they want to make the screen smaller or larger. Ok. The slider can do that. But, I think there's an expectation of zoom controls that they can make it the same smaller or the same larger each time they zoom. The scroll bar makes that hard.

Working up a 4 tier 8'x4' TLX layout, and I noticed that while it tells me all the tiles skins I need, It does not list the tile templates need. It was never a big deal before, but now that I am up over 185 tiles and have2.5 levels to go it is going to be a big deal. It may not be easy to add do to the way tile templates are layed out on a page, but though I would ask.

If i don't ask, no one will know it is wanted

Moved to the TLX planner feature request thread - mod

Feature Request: Support horizontal and vertical scrolling on Mac with gestures.

Notes: Right now, the planner seems to interpret my scrolling (via touchpad, magic mouse, or mighty mouse) as a normal scroll wheel, going up and down but not side to side.

Feature Request: Alt-drag to duplicate a tile and place it.

Notes: Adobe products allow you to hold down Alt and click and drag an object to duplicate it and place it. Right now, I can duplicate by Command-clicking the object, but it just gets dropped on the workspace with an offset, and I have to release the mouse and reselect in order to move it into position.