Map Editor Feedback

I dug into the map editor last night. The biggest problem I had with it was that selecting groups of cells by dragging over them had pretty unintuitive results. I still don’t entirely grok how the editor determines which cells I get in my group selection based on the area I lasso. cliffski, have you experimented with different heuristics to determine what cells the user gets when trying to lasso groups? I was thinking last night of a basic one that just gives you whatever ones have the center of the cell fall into the lasso, though I can think of ways that that might produce unintuitive results as well.

Hmmm I thought that was the current system, but I will investigate a bit more.

It looks like that’s what’s usually happening. But I’m reliably reproducing a result where I try to select a column of three squares, clicking in the lower left hand corner of the bottom on and dragging up and to the right, making sure to include the center of all three squares, and getting none of them.

more testing

I think the direction of the dragged lasso is affecting the results. If you take an area and try to get the centers of the squares, if you drag from the upper left down to the lower right, you get more or less what you’d expect from a ‘take the squares with included centers’. However, dragging in any other directions appears to reliably fails. You’ll get the square you initially clicked in, but none of the other squares.

Right I’ve fixed all of this for the next version (which will be 1.009, 1.008 is the first release build coming up…)
Basically now you can select a square if the dragged rect is within any part of it (which feels much more natural), and selection also now works backwards and upside down (so in all directions now).