Introducing Perspective Piping, a major new Coordinate Container feature available in the next nightly. Perspective Piping allows you to quickly draw pipes within Perspective.
A new Coordinate Container Prop named "pipes" has been added to the coordinate container. Each pipe is an object containing a name, appearance, various appearance specific props, and an origin.
An origin is the (x, y) start point for the pipe. Each origin may have any number of connections, and those connections may have any number of connections, and so forth. Together they form a tree that represent the entire pipe.
When Pipes are present, they appear in the Project browser just like a component. They can be quickly selected, renamed, cut, copied, duplicated, and deleted through the project browser.
Selecting a pipe in the Project browser will switch to Pipe Draw Mode. Two new design modes were added: Pipe Draw Mode, and Pipe Move Mode. They can be quickly toggled through the toolbar. From Left to right: Component Mode(the default - what we're all familiar with), Pipe Draw Mode, and Pipe Move Mode.
While in Pipe Draw Mode, clicking anywhere within the Coordinate Container will create a new Pipe with an origin at the location you clicked. This will also select the newly created origin. Selected pipe origins and connections will display arrows which can be dragged to create new connections.
Clicking in the middle of a pipe will split the pipe, creating a connection in between the two connections.
Dragging a point on top of its immediate parent or child will combine the points. You can also delete points by pressing delete key, or right click delete.
Dragging a point to another pipe will combine the pipes. The newly combined pipe will inherit all the appearance properties of the connection being dragged.
Components have anchor points at their top, right, bottom, andleft locations, and Symbol Components have custom "natural" anchor points. When dragging a pipe point, the point snaps to these anchors. However if the component is moved afterwards, the point will not "stick" to the point. These points are only used while dragging pipe connections.
While dragging a point, there are different move modes that are activated by holding down a hot key. Orthogonal- the default attempts to keep connections orthogonal to each other as they are moved. rotation (alt) - rotates a point about its parent, if its the origin it will rotate around its first child. Free move (shift) moves a single point freely without snapping.
While in Pipe Draw Mode a hint displays at the bottom of the window to remind you of what these hotkeys are.
While in Pipe Move Mode, pipes can be selected by clicking on them. ctrl click to select multiple pipes. These pipes may be moved all at once by dragging the selection and scaled by dragging the scale anchor in the lower right corner of the selection.
A new Pipe Property Editor has also been added, allowing for rapid editing of the appearance and appearance specific props. It displays when at least one pipe is selected. When multiple pipes are selected, a subset of properties are displayed that are relevant to the appearance of all selected pipes. IE if a mix of Mimic and Simple pipes are selected, only the Simple related props are displayed(because they are relevant to both Mimic and Simple).
The value displayed is based on the first selected pipe, but changing the properties will affect all selected pipes. This works similarly to editing props of multiple components at the same time.
Weâd been working on these features over the last several sprints, and they all just happened to wrap up in the same week.
