New Update 6/1: Drawing Tools Overhaul

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 (note that any rectangles in current campaigns will continue to function the "old way" under the normal Selection tool). 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. You can also choose all of these options before you start drawing, as well as after the drawing is on the page when you select it. - 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.

One question ( for now ). Sounds ominous. Because Ctrl/Cmd+G is now for the Text tool. So now S,D,F,G are used for switching between Select, Draw Select, Brush, and Text, respectively. O,K,M switch between layers. And they're all grouped in the same area on my keyboard now :-) - RD

Yes, they're still vector.

Edited to add: poker chips sans radial menu had better wait on drawings that character-players can move. That should be coming super-soon, because that is exactly what we want you to do with the "images as drawings" feature.

1. Old rectangles seem to count as tokens for the purpose of selecting and grouping, but because they aren't really tokens, I can't convert them to drawings, so I can't use them to group with the text that they support. It's a pretty minor thing, as going forward there won't be any more 'old rectangles', but it means that I have to redo a few things. Sadly, yes. They are two completely different types of things, so unfortunately you'll have to re-do any existing rectangles that you want to group with new drawings. Sorry! 2. I really like that the straight lines can follow the square grid. Makes it easy to outline buildings and other features when using a grid. However, when ~not~ using a grid, it confuses me a little bit that the straight line drawing still follows whatever the grid would be, were it turned on. Would it be possible to draw straight lines of arbitrary length and orientation? 3. Related to number 2. Even with a hex grid, the straight lines follow what would be the square grid, if the square grid had been chosen instead of hex. Not sure if 'follow the hex' was ever the goal, but, I could see it being a nifty feature for hex-based games. Yeah, I'm not really happy with the way that works yet, either. Honestly, here's what I'm considering doing: making the Shift+Brush tool just draw a rectangle similar to the way it just draws a circle (then you just drag to resize and let go). This would also solve the issue of the phantom corner in your other post. Then, I would add a separate polygon tool (one of the ones where you click, then move to the next point and click, then eventually circle back around (or not, if you just want to draw a straight line) and close off your polygon. That would work much better without a grid, and probably could follow the hex grid to some degree as well. Thoughts? EDIT: After playing around a few more times, here are a few more observations. 4. When copy-pasting a grouped drawing (text + background), the text seems to like to fall behind the background image, requiring that the background be un-grouped, sent to the back, then the text selected and regrouped. Re-doing copying+pasting of groups is on my to-do list. Same thing with #6. 5. I have experienced a weird thing where by some members of the group sometimes move out of sync for just a split second (e.g. text would shift off its rectangle). I'm still trying to find a way to reliably reproduce it; but I thought I'd make the issue known. Hmmmm...I would be interested if you could track that down. Because the group selection+moving is the same as the normal selection+moving of multiple objects, so in theory if it's happening with groups it would be happening anytime you move multiple things at the same time... 7. When currently editing a text-object, pressing 'ctrl-s' to move to select mode instead brings up a save file dialog, 'ctrl-d' bookmarks the page, and 'ctrl-f' opens Chrome's 'search for text' box. Maybe this is just a chrome thing, I'm not sure. Yep, I'm aware of that. Doing shortcuts in browsers is notoriously difficult, because there's no good way to just override all the keyboard stuff. But it's on my to-do list to fix that particular use case, because it drives me crazy as well...

I just ran into some weird problem: I can only add tokens from one page to the turn tracker. On all other pages, the tokens wont take a turn, but the turn tracker still has the tokens from the one working page. Well, I can say that this is "working as intended." Why do you want to add tokens from multiple pages?

Also, I just pushed out an update that should hopefully address some of Balladeer's points above, specifically: - Ctrl+S and Ctrl+D should now work while using the text tool. - When copying + pasting groups, the newly copy+pasted items will now correctly create a new group that they join, instead of randomly grouping with the original items. - When copying+pasting multiple items, the items should now stay in their same relative positions, rather the whole group will be offset. - Images treated as drawings no longer snap to grid, which should make their use as part of a drawing group work much better (since before when you moved the group the images would snap to grid if you had a grid enabled).

Oh also, not sure if I mentioned this, but if you hold Alt while selecting something you'll only select that one thing even if it's in a group.

Darn. I'll see if there's some way to overwrite that, but I'm not hopeful. This is why doing keyboard shortcuts in browsers is terrible.

Heh, that was intended for specific *RPG* systems, but I should add an article on "Linux Tips" in the Troubleshooting section, for sure. Thanks!

<a href="http://youtu.be/9NGXr4qkU1g" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/9NGXr4qkU1g</a> Thanks for the video, Henry. I guess I'm wondering more, "Can you tell me *why* from a gameplay perspective you're adding tokens from more than one page to have a turn?" Like, what is the in-game reason? Since players can only see one page at a time, I guess I assumed you would only ever want to track turns from one page a time, since it doesn't make sense to show players turns of things that aren't even a part of the current encounter. That being said, if there's a reason I haven't thought of, we can talk about changing it. I just want to make sure I understand the reasoning behind making the change (and also to make sure there isn't a use case out there I'm unaware of that would affect other things besides just the Turn Tracker).

Though we're getting slightly OT here, should we create a new thread to talk about Turn Tracker scoping? That would be good :-)