chrisboyle
Net wrapping: can't shift board
Gwen Groover points out that while Shift + arrow keys shifts the board one space around on other platforms, we currently have no way to do that.
The iOS version combined panning with scaling. i.e. two-fingered scrolling and zooming. Is that possible here?
+1 Missing this makes it harder for me to see when connections wrap around the edge of the board.
Re suggestions of multi-finger input: the main problem with that is that it's already used for pan and zoom, in all games. I think any deviation from that in Net, whether it's via a mode switch (which seems clumsy) or some other solution, would have to be something really easy for people to understand, but also not get in people's faces with a tutorial as that's rather out of keeping with the rest of the app. That's a tricky combination.
It might belong in the keyboard area, but that's already a bit crowded if you turn on the (cursor) arrow keys. The obvious analog to Shift+arrows on a physical keyboard is to introduce a shift or mode-switch for the arrows on the virtual keyboard, which still feels clumsy, but may be the least-bad idea? Better ideas welcome :-)
In some sense though, panning is exactly what we want to do here. Conceptually, you can think about it as panning on a torus instead of a plane, though the code underneath probably treats panning and shifting as two very different actions, which I guess is the problem.
They are indeed implemented in two very different places: shifting, by one tile at a time, is in the original game. Pan (continuous) and zoom is an Android feature on top in the view layer. They also serve slightly different purposes, and people who play larger wrapping boards on smaller screens are quite likely to want both at the same time.
This might be a bit out there, but could it be displayed as a repeating pattern on the plane? (So if you zoom out you'll see multiple copies of the board.) The highlighted central node would provide a clue about what you're seeing.
