The fabled tutorial thread on ViewingDale

[Redrobes]

Theres a similar section in the help files within the app covering this but its probably a good thing to reiterate it as its so vital. Incidentally, all the help is in ViewingDale format as is all of the artwork used to make the laminated card, insert, and box cover.

As you recall from the intro what were after is a mechanism to have the whole world at your fingertips and we would like to be able to reuse those tree icons to make copses, woods and forests. What were building here is a hierarchy.

The main view looks at a map. Actually your looking at one layer in an infinite set. This layer is called an icon. An icon is just a bunch of a small set of parameters one of which is a reference to an image. The image is whats shown on the screen and its sized to extents which are parameters in the icon. So you can have two different icons with the same image. I.e. you can have a small chair and a giant chair. Two different icons using same image. Most of the time you have one icon per image because many of the icons are so unique but things like arrows, lines, circles and so on have many icons for the one image. The other thing that an icon has is a list of child icons attached to this one. I.e. for an icon of a village it might have a list of child icons, one for each hut in it. Those child icons are listed with their position, scale and rotations for each one.

So we can have a Forest which has 3 child icons each of type Wood and those have positions and rotations so that they are next to each other making up a little group.

Now if the Wood icon happens to have 6 children called Copse arranged in a little group also then when you view the Forest then it will show its icons image, 3 Wood images and 18 Copse images. And it goes on and on like that. If you add another Wood to the forest then the forest icon gains one more child but 6 more Copse images are also shown.

So the ViewingDale app has controls to edit the icon size, add and remove child icons and to position, rotate and scale the child icons on the main one.

[Redrobes]

So lets run that again one more time because understand this and its all plain sailing...

Here is a table, a plate, a bowl, a spoon, and some liquid for the bowl. These are images and lets say you have the icons for them that make them all the correct real world size. You put them all down on some surface in this case a white wonderland...

If you drag these icons over one another then they stack up in size order. You don't get to control the Z order. Small things always go on top of larger objects. Theres a good reason for that which I will show later. You can see also that these images include the transparent background which were all familiar on these forums. The icon size includes the transparent bit so if you really must then you can add more transparent edge to an icon to push it down but that doesn't happen all that often.

Ok so now we have white backdrop with 5 child icons on it whether in a line or stacked up.

If we change the situation so that we make the spoon a child of the plate and the liquid a child of the bowl and call these two new icons Plate_with_Spoon and Bowl_of_Liquid then we can make these two children of the table. Then the white backdrop can have one child of table like this.

Now if we edit the table icon and move, scale and rotate its Plate_with_Spoon then note that the spoon rotates with the plate, scales with it and moves with it. The spoon is now as though its part of the plate even though its a child of it. In other words the whole hierarchy under the edited icon takes on all the changes to it.

So we can pick up that Forest and move it and all the Woods and Copses move with it, scale with it and rotate with it.

And now you can see that if we make a general village with some huts in it all laid out nicely, then we can use that village in several maps with different rotations and scales and yet at the same time on each of them we could still go in and edit that village and move the individual huts about.

So grouping icons logically in a sensible hierarchy is vital. Putting a hut on a continent is not sensible. You need a set of layers that go from world down to battle map so that at some point there is a region, a village and then you put your hut on that. ViewingDale has various features to make that easy though you can ignore it all and make something unmanageable.