Major Update! - Tutorial overhaul and some new features!
Zen Trails Patch Notes — January 28, 2021
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
TUTORIAL OVERHAUL
In preparation for the iOS release of ZenTrails, I thought it was time to revisit the tutorial. In having my friends and family play the game, the main bit of feedback I got was that they wanted more explanation on how to make aesthetic designs. After all, not everyone wants to spend their whole weekend tweaking numbers to see what works and what doesn't.
So the tutorial has been completely redone, now with categories, and almost 100 slides with presets and explanations all made by me. It will walk you through everything I've learned about digital spirographing from the simplest shapes to complex masterpieces. I hope you'll check it out and let me know if you run into any bugs, or if you find anything confusing that could be explained better.
NEW FEATURE - "WINDMILLIZE"
This is explained in detail in the tutorial, but I've realized while making complex designs that I often find myself tediously creating "windmills", and thought to myself, why don't I make the computer do this work for me?
Now you can select any segment, tell it how many arms you want it to have, and hit the button and BAM!
This:
Becomes this:
So imagine the possibilities if you windmillize a segment, then windmillize the segment it's attached to, and so on and so forth!
TRAIL CURVE SMOOTHING
This has been on my mind for a while and I occasionally get "bug" reports telling me that lines become jagged if you set the speed too high. The best option is just to slow it down, but I figured why not make it possible to create complex designs really fast? If your CPU can handle it then great.
So now there's an option in the Options Panel called "Trail Curve Smoothing", set to 1 by default. What it does is, every frame, it looks at the segment speed, divides it by the smoothing value you enter, then processes the rotation that many times, every frame, for every single segment. So you can imagine that it's a good idea to use this in moderation, as it will definitely tank your FPS if you set it too high.
Here's a design I made, with the global speed set super high so it renders really fast.
Without smoothing:
With smoothing:
Of course, if your machine can't handle the extra strain, you can always just lower the global speed. The end result will be the same.
Hope you're having a good day.
Stephen.