Stencil Editor
Circle, semi-circle, triangle, rectangle, ellipse are added as starting shapes.
The color of the grid is now selectable and a different color is used for every
tenth grid line to make grid-navigation easier. When a node is selected, the selected
node has a cross-hair instead of a solid - again to make grid-navigation easier.
And you can change the color of the lines which make up the stencil shape itself.
You can now load a background picture - any bitmap image - into the stencil editor,
which is shown behind the grid and you can create your stencil to match the features
of the image. Trace out a shape.
|
Quick Edit
We have added a Quick Edit wizard. This lets you quickly select a target for
an icon, and the title tip for an icon.
The Quick Edit wizard also lets you generate a bitmap image for the icon based
on a text message which you type in. You can chose the color, font and size of
the text and the background color - and then use the Windows Paint applet to
add finishing touches.
Quick Edit makes it easier and quicker to create content for presentations.
You can create slide-show messages which turns ROOMS with ZoomTopic into an
attractive alternative to PowerPoint.
|
Title Tips
You can now configure ROOMS Title Tips. Before now ROOMS used the Windows ToolTips
settings to specify the font size color and background for its own title tips. And this
still happens if you do nothing.
However, you can now specify your own font settings for title tips (which are
saved when you save the world they belong to), and title tips are automatically
displayed on more than one line if needed.
This is an attractive customization both for ROOMS desktop and ZoomTopic users.
|
Gravity in Any Direction
YES! And thank you for the suggestion. We especially love this one.
In addition to the no-gravity and gravity-up or gravity-down, you can now specify
an icon in the world which will act as the source of gravity.
You can turn the effect of the gravity icon on or off from one room to the next,
and where you want you can revert to either up-gravity or down-gravity or no gravity.
Currently there can only be one gravity icon in a world, but we may change that
in future releases.
The 3D Menu freeware world (bundled in this release) demonstrates the gravity icon.
|
3DS (3D Studio Max format) Auto Conversion
Before now the conversion of 3DS files to ROOMS internal format (RAV)
was via a plugin which you selected and loaded within the Shape Wizard.
Now the conversion is performed automatically from the Property/Icon Wizard
whenever you select a 3DS file.
|
Icons Created in Front of User
Before now, when you creeted an icon or dragged and dropped an icon into
a room, the icon was positioned so that it did not collide with anything
else in the room, nor arrive partly or wholly outside the room.
With this release we remove all collisin detection from the icon and force
it to appear immediately in front of you - even if it collides with an
icon or wall, or even arrives outside your current room.
We made this change because the possibility of losing the icon (through a wall)
seems less of a nuissance than having to hunt arround for the icon you just added.
|
RAV Toolkit Plugin (in the Shape Wizard)
The RAV toolkit plugin (which is experimental) is enhanced by adding a
"center" button, which changes the center of gravity of the object to
coincide with its geometric center. Otherwise, the center of gravity of
the object (where it rotates about) will be in the front face of the object
if it has been extruded from a ROOMS stencil, or it could be anywhere if
the icon is imported from a 3DS file.
Three rotational buttons are added to let you rotate the object in front
of you rather than having to use the mouse to navigate around it (which
is awkward).
|
Bug Fixes
Before now, ROOMS has sometimes failed to identify objects, especially floors
and ceilings under the cursor when running DirectX with hardware acceleration.
This is now fixed.
Before now, the Normalizer (used when you want to distribute your world to another
computer) did not copy across the target files associated with an icon. This is
changed except for programs (.exe) and software libraries (.dll) which should be
installed on another PC according to their manufacturer instructions.
|
