I'm investigating the feasibility of using Raphael for a user-research project. One of the features allows for users to drag images onto a canvas and we record where they placed it. The pool of images is potentially quite large and we'll have them in a scrollable box in the tool.
I put together a quick wireframe of the issue I'm looking into since it'll probably be clearer than my explanation.
Please see the wireframe:
I'd stick with straight HTML/CSS and use jQueryUI draggables, as you mention in your comment.
You don't appear to need any of the drawing/display features SVG offers, yet if you went that route, you'd have to build your own custom scrolling behavior (instead of setting a CSS overflow-y rule) and picture layout algorithms (again instead of using CSS floats or something).
You can create a scrollable region using Raphael.
Create the viewport with fixed
dimensions (say 800x600)
Draw the images with increasing y value. After few images, the y value will go beyond 600. It will be drawn but will not be visible in the viewport.
Create a scrollbar using raphael rects. Attach drag events to the scrollbar handle rect.
When the handle is moved, translate all the images accordingly.
For e.g. lets assume in step 2, you had drawn all the images and the bottom most point of the end image is having y value 2000. Assuming the scrollbar has length 500, each dx movement of the handle will have to translate 2000/500 = 4dx. You can calculate the handle length similarly using ratios.
Since everything inside a single Raphael paper the dragging of images will work seamlessly. You will have to maintain the positions of each images.
You might find this demo similar
Remember you can always use getBBox when you drop. In this case it's rects but images would be the same..
http://irunmywebsite.com/raphael/additionalhelp.php?q=bearbones
Related
I'm new to Unity and to game development in general.
I would like to make a text-based game.
I'm looking to reproduce the behavior of an instant messenger like messenger or whatapp.
I made the choice to use the Unity UI system for the pre-made components like the rect scroll.
But this choice led me to the following problem:
I have "bubbles" of dialogs, which must be able to grow in width as well as in height with the size of the text. Fig.1
I immediately tried to use VectorGraphics to import .svg with the idea to move runtime the points of my curves of Beziers.
But I did not find how to access these points and edit them runtime.
I then found the "Sprite shapes" but they are not part of the "UI",
so if I went with such a solution, I would have to reimplement
scroll, buttons etc...
I thought of cutting my speech bubble in 7 parts Fig.2 and scaling it according to the text size. But I have the feeling that this is very heavy for not much.
Finally I wonder if a hybrid solution would not be the best, use the
UI for scrolling, get transforms and inject them into Shape sprites
(outside the Canvas).
If it is possible to do 1. and then I would be very grateful for an example.
If not 2. 3. 4. seem feasible, I would like to have your opinion on the most relevant of the 3.
Thanks in advance.
There is a simpler and quite elegant solution to your problem that uses nothing but the sprite itself (or rather the design of the sprite).
Take a look at 9-slicing Sprites from the official unity documentation.
With the Sprite Editor you can create borders around the "core" of your speech bubble. Since these speech bubbles are usually colored in a single color and contain nothing else, the ImageType: Sliced would be the perfect solution for what you have in mind. I've created a small Example Sprite to explain in more detail how to approach this:
The sprite itself is 512 pixels wide and 512 pixels high. Each of the cubes missing from the edges is 8x8 pixels, so the top, bottom, and left borders are 3x8=24 pixels deep. The right side has an extra 16 pixels of space to represent a small "tail" on the bubble (bottom right corner). So, we have 4 borders: top=24, bottom=24, left=24 and right=40 pixels. After importing such a sprite, we just have to set its MeshType to FullRect, click Apply and set the 4 borders using the Sprite Editor (don't forget to Apply them too). The last thing to do is to use the sprite in an Image Component on the Canvas and set the ImageType of this Component to Sliced. Now you can scale/warp the Image as much as you like - the border will always keep its original size without deforming. And since your bubble has a solid "core", the Sliced option will stretch this core unnoticed.
Edit: When scaling the Image you must use its Width and Height instead of the (1,1,1)-based Scale, because the Scale might still distort your Image. Also, here is another screenshot showing the results in different sizes.
My problem is very difficult to describe, so hopefully (with the pictures I provide) someone can help me figure this out. If you are confident you can fix it, I'm willing to pay if I have to. I need this fixed.
I cannot for the life of me figure out how to work with the Unity canvas/layout groups. I have a series of canvases that only show one at a time (think of them as screens). Inside each canvas are components (the first one is a graph and timer, and then a data panel and some buttons.
Here is an image of what I'd like each of the panels to look like (only one of these will be open at a time):
Essentially, I just want each sub-canvas (the dark gray boxes) to inhabit ~50% x 50% of the screen, and when the orientation is horizontal/vertical, tile them accordingly.
Each Child panel (the dark gray) only needs to change. The children inside of the panel can stay and scale relative to the parent canvas.
I have tried EVERYTHING, dug through the documentation, and have run out of options.
Have you tried adding a Layout Element to all of those gray panels with a Flexible Width or Height setting? The screenshot below shows how to have two panels that are side by side, both occupying half the width of their container. (Both have a Flexible Width setting of 1.)
The two Panels are children of the Canvas that has a Horizontal Layout group like this:
I need to move an image down through canvas so that its central point would be where is now its top edge. It makes some 50 points, but if I decrease y by 50, it moves to different part of the screen on devices with different screen size. I guess, it's because my main canvas is set to scale with the screen size. So I suppose I need to manually divide the number 50 by my screen height and then code to multiply by Screen.height? Isn't there a more convenient way to move UI objects?
Allow me a second question: Do you think it is even wise to make a game purely on canvas? My game is simple 2D, only slightly animated and contains many layout elements, so I decided to go for it, but I have hard time to grasp the UI position rules.
you may have the problem of the anchoring.
Unity UI totally depends on the Anchoring, if you have got right anchoring there is no issue.
For example. if you anchored something at the Center than changing left and right value moves them according to the center anchor.
for clear visualization, you can paste a screenshot of the behavior.
I'm working on a Perl/Tk GUI. It will have three main areas. Two of them side by side on top and then another one below the two.
I could just use grid geometry management. The upper two would have a row weight of 2. The lower one would have a weight of 1.
This would be good for the starting position, but the user needs the ability to adjust the sizes.
Looking at the Tk documentation, PanedWindows can also have a weight, but I can't figure out how to access it.
As I have it now, with my Paned frames, the upper and left children are minimum size, everthing else fills the area below and to the right. If I adjust the main window. only the lower and right windows are resize. Worst of all, I can resize the window and make some of the children disappear.
I want to maintain the current relative sizes.
How do I do this? I'm not tied to paned, grid, pack. Whatever works.
Sounds like you are using frames in Tk. While I have never used Perl/Tk, I am kind of savy html which Tk is probably based on html. So, you might want to look into frames and framesets at Frames in HTML documents on the W3C site.
It sounds like you need 1 frameset with 2 frames for the top and another frame for the bottom.
I hope that this helps.
I've not much response so am adding some more info.
My buttons are not rectangular, nor organised in a grid so I need a way of creating what looks like a button (and shows that it has been pressed visually, as per a standard UIButton) but where the touchable area is different to the image area.
I am using a transparent PNG and that element works fine. I've added the buttons in Interface Builder and am wondering if that is the problem.
However, if I change imageEdgeInsets, it distorts the image display, which is obviously not what I want.
Bizarrely, if I increase the dimemsions of the button, it doesn't change the image, but if I decrease them it does.
I have tried different combinations of mode (scale to fill etc), but to no avail.
I am aware that there is an image and background image property, but in IB there is only one.
Essentially, I don't understand how the geometry works and the Apple documentation doesn't seem to help.
Surely, I can't be the only person to try to do this. Any help would be warmly welcomed.
Many thanks,
Chris.
Try setting the buttons setting to Aspect Fit. This will fill the button with your image so a smaller image than the button size would leave the space around the image.
Also set the button type to custom.
In the end, I stumbled across Ole Begemann's Non-rectangular buttons class. It just does what I need - to be able to create buttons where the touchable area follows the visible element of a non rectangular image.
#Helium3 - thanks - that allowed me to use a larger touch area, bit not a smaller one.