June 1, 2012
There's a new update out this morning, the main change is the complete overhaul of the drawing tools based on your feedback. We tried to do our best to find a solution that balanced people using the drawing tools for battle planning/sketching, with those using it for drawing maps, with those using it to do things like set up complicated boards for RPG systems like FATE. We still consider this a "work in progress", so do let us know your thoughts on what changes were good and what still needs work.
First off, a quick definition. When we talk about "drawings" below, we mean drawings made with the brush (squares, circles, etc.), as well as text created by the text tool and any images that you choose to treat as drawings instead of tokens.
The main highlights:
- There is now only one drawing tool, the "Brush" tool. The Rectangle tool has been folded into this. Now, by default you'll draw freehand drawings. If you hold down the Shift key, you'll draw straight lines (snapped to the grid if you have a square grid enabled). If you hold the Alt key, you'll draw ellipses. And if you hold Shift+Alt, you'll draw circles. After the drawing is complete, you are free to move and resize it as before.
- The Brush tool allows you to choose both a stroke color (which defaults on the tokens layer to your player color) and a fill color (which defaults to transparent). So you can draw lines, filled boxes, circles, filled circles, etc., etc. You can also now choose the width of the lines that the brush tool draws.
- The drawings and tokens have now been separated. You can still use the same 3 layers for each, but the default selection tool will now not select drawings. Instead there is a separate drawings selection tool in the drawings menu on the toolbar. You can switch between the two quickly by using Cmd/Ctrl+S (for Select tool) and Cmd/Ctrl+D (for the Draw tool).
- You can now choose to treat images (that you upload, or from the Art Library) as either a token or a drawing. By default all images added while you are using the normal select tool will be added as tokens, those added while using the drawing select tool will be drawings. You can toggle back and forth by right-clicking on the image and selecting "Advanced -> Is Drawing". Basically, a drawing will not have a radial menu or a settings dialog box. It will also be able to be grouped with other drawings (like text).
- There is now a "Clear" button in the drawings menu on the toolbar which will delete all drawings on the current layer. (You have to confirm this with a Dialog box pop-up).
- The text tool has also been completely overhauled. You can now choose the font, size, and color of the text before, during, and after you use the text tool. Multiline text is now fully supported (it will no longer break up into separate boxes).
- You can now group multiple elements together. Just highlight them, right-click, and choose "Advanced -> Group" from the menu. Whenever you select one grouped element, all of them will be selected. This allows you to move them all together. It should also make it possible to create a "board notecard" by drawing a box, writing text on top of the box, then grouping the two elements together.
- You can now copy/paste drawings.
- Players now have access to the brush tool as well as the text tool. They will be able to edit/move any drawings and text which they have created. We're planning in the future to add a way for the GM to allow players to edit/move drawings the same way that they can assign control of tokens.
Other non-drawing-related improvements:
- You can now use the right-click menu when you have multiple objects selected.
- There is now a "Shortcuts Reference" popup available, it's in the same menu as the Help menu (last button on the toolbar).
- Note that the "Switch to GM Layer" shortcut has changed from G to K!
- Mentors (including Benefactors and Game Masters) should now see their plan name as "Mentor" in the My Account page. In addition their quota should successfully show as "1,000 MB". Everyone else should show "Free" as the plan name with a quota of 100MB.
- Your public profile page will now contain a badge showing at what level you pledged to the Kickstarter campaign.