The fabled tutorial thread on ViewingDale

[Redrobes]

No mapping app would be complete without some grids. By pressing 'G' and 'H' keys it toggles through the three types of grid. There is square grid and two types of hex grid with hexes going horizontally or vertically. So 'G' toggles square grid on and off, 'H' does hex-horz, hex-vert, and then off.

By pressing F3 or using the main menu button you can find the Visual Settings Menu. On here you can see the home key listed, the hot keys for the four view modes then the grid options.

From here you can set the grid size which brings up a text box where you enter it in. You can put in "10" for ten meters. You can also put in "10m", "10 meter" or "10 meters" and get the same thing. You can put in "5ft" "5 foot" or "5 feet". You can put in "3.72 inches" or "21.5 miles" "50 yds" "100 yards" or even "20 leagues". It has a wide variety of length units in imperial, metric and some extra ones like "AU" for astronomical units and "ly" or "lightyears" tho to be honest parsecs and lightyears are not worth using. ViewingDale has a map range of about 50 AUs to about 0.1mm

With the 'J' key you can toggle the grid color from black to white.

If you are editing the child icons then you can snap the movement of them to the grid. You need the grid enabled and you must press 'S'. When you do this it will show that you have snap enabled on the menu bar. Now when you grab a child and move it, it snaps to the nearest grid intersection. This is also true of rotate where the grid intersection closest to the mouse is used as the rotation target.

Note that the grid always originates from the current icons origin.

To finish off this menu, the set scale allows you to type in an exact numeric scale instead of zooming to it. Good for when viewing real world sized maps at 1:60 for example.

Hide banner hides the top menu bar, banner, status text thing. Thats useful if your using a projector and want a really uncluttered projection down on the table. With no menus open its all map.

Adjust Child Cut Off we will talk about next...

[LonewandererD]

I gotta looked at this in detail later. I must say I cracked up laughing when I saw the option "Edit Children", don't all parents wish they could have that.

-D-