v.1.18 - RECURSION! And also KEY BINDINGS, because why not?
Zen Trails Patch Notes — August 4, 2022
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
So one of my favorite things to do when making spirographic masterpieces is to make some cool-looking design, then copy and past it a bajillion times while shrinking each recursion. It can make some really trippy art but the problem, as always, was that it was a tedious nightmare to do. Well... not anymore, my friends. Say hello to...
RECURSION
By the way if you haven't noticed, the Modify Panel got an upgrade. More on that in a bit. So now there's a shiny new button called "MAKE RECURSIVE..." which opens up the Recursion panel. You tell it how many recursions you want, and what to multiply each level by and bam! Your work of art just multiplied!:
Just be careful, if you go crazy with this you can quickly accumulate thousands of segments and bog down your machine. But this makes it so easy to make your art look like it's shrinking into the distance. As you may have guessed, this pairs famously with the recently announced SEQUENTIAL COLORING panel, which gives segments new colors along a gradient. Just look at some of the art I've made with these two buttons working together. I'm even amazed at how easy these were to make.
This simple little design:
Literally with just pressing three buttons - the recursive one, the sequential coloring, and the windmillize buttons...
Becomes this:
I'm telling you! It's easy and fun!
And to go along so nicely with this fine feature update, the Sequential Coloring feature got a little upgrade as well. You can now add more colors into the gradient instead of just two!
IMPROVED MODIFY PANEL
So this panel, which contains like 90% of the app's programming, lol, was getting messy. I had two versions of it, one for editing all segments, and one for when you box select. That was confusing. So now it's always the same panel. If you have no segments selected, any changes made will affect ALL segments, if applicable. For example, the Windmillize and other segment-adding features will only affect root segments if nothing is selected.
And guess what? I saved the most boring feature of all for last!
KEY BINDINGS
Yaaayy wooohooo it's exactly what everyone always wanted! You can now change... SOME.... of the keys.
Yep. Alright that's all for now. Let me know about bugs. Hope you're having a good day.
Stephen