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Yinz like table layouts? I gotchu.
http://steelcitylug.com/layout/
I started a new thread because I abandoned the old effort and code entirely.
[]Eventually allow members to:
[]Upload their own MOCs / MILS modules
[]Duplicate entire layouts
[]Reuse common sections or modules
[]Build a library of standard layoutsFeedback is very welcome
I havent used bluebrick in a long time, but that’s basically what I was trying to mimic. but I’m not going to build that track connector functionality. That’s batty.
for now, I know it’s kinda buggy when you have snap to grid enabled. Just click on snap to turn that off and moving tables should be a lot easier.
Initial impressions during my lunch break:
– This will make planning significantly easier, and inventory integration will help quite a bit too!
– I’m confused about the 60×30 table since folding tables are usually 72×30 or 96×30.
– It’s not quite usable on mobile, even when I’m viewing the desktop site version and in landscape mode, but that’s hard to do and maybe doesn’t need to be supported.
– the blue and green baseplates both appear to be green and neither is showing up in the legendAnd I’m VERY much looking forward to the non-edit view, printable view, and event integrations!
yeah…edit on mobile isn’t going to happen for a bit…if at all…that would require someone who actually knows what they’re doing.
got lots of updates in the past 48 hours. I won’t list them all, unless someone asks me.
To your priorities though:
1) got more tables added (let me know if you want specific ones)
2) lots of odd baseplates, but it will at least lend to fashioning tools for now (all the red plates mean something, all the yellow plates mean something, etc)
3) print view, non edit view, and tie to an event are all there now.next priorities (unless someone comes up with something to distract me)
1) tie into inventory system, which also means custom dimensions for the curves and such, as well as count quantity used/available
2) possibly tie into blueblue inventory of baseplates with pictures?
3) at least a live/zoom/scrollable version on mobile
4) duplicate display (for reuse or realizing you want to break it out into 2 smaller)
5) ability to copy and paste/duplicate selections
6) zoom in/out buttons (might help with mobile?)
7) fix the snap to grid
8) figure out how to let multiple people edit it…maybe time lock/expirations…new stable version moved to production just now.
lug baseplates are incorporated (still gotta work on the shortcodes)
you can duplicate selections now
you can resize text and highlight boxes
a few other tweaks too.a reminder that you can right click on the canvas and drag to pan around
You also need to ‘enable editing’ to do anything savable. clicking on the layer will bring up the options to interact with the objects in that layer. so yeah, you can only move baseplates from the baseplate layer and you can only add text labels to the annotation layer, etc.Looking great! Definitely looking forward to Home and Garden and (hopefully) future TUBS layouts.
A few observations:
– The toolbox (tables/baseplates section) jitters around whenever the app is saving because the “Last saved” text updates. The jitter can cause misclicks (especially clicking on Delete instead of Duplicate).
– Zooming is weird. Try zooming in or out, panning over, and then zooming the other direction. The effect appears more pronounced the farther you get from the origin. It feels based on something like pixels from the map origin relative to the upper left corner of the viewport?
– On that note, an “origin” marker in the grid would be handy, since newly-spawned objects seem to always show up there. I’m imagining someone slowly accidentally migrating themselves hundreds of studs in some direction without noticing and then being unable to find their newly-added baseplate.
– Duplicated objects are sometimes misaligned compared to the original set (see screenshot).
– It’s not clear when/where duplicated objects will appear, and if there’s an error message when the app thinks there’s nowhere to put a duplicate (and therefore cancels the duplication), I haven’t noticed it.
– I can’t enable snap-to-grid, so I’m guessing it’s disabled right now. If so, could that checkbox be grayed out/disabled to make it clearer?
– [lower priority] can the shape of the large-radius curves (and the R40 single curves) be the actual baseplate layout instead of a 4×4 square?Noted, great feedback, some are addressed in the version i have in test right now.
An admin task that Someone(multiple if needed) is to come up with a shortcode nomenclature, color for each, and update the inventory accordingly. I made a quick edit page to make that super simple:
https://test.steelcitylug.com/inventory/?p=baseplatesI was thinking trying to keep it to 3 characters…but we don’t need to be too strict, as long as it maintains ‘short’ and helpful. I was thinking the first char to describe what is on the baseplate (T=track, R=Road, etc), second and 3rd can be used to describe it further, like T91 would be Track, 9v, 16×16) Doesn’t have to be perfect, just unique…this will come useful in the next version release.
That gets hard, because we’ll want to differentiate between a 16×32 single straight and a 16×32 double straight (side by side) and between 9V and RC track, so we end up with a small combinatorial explosion. It might be easier to just put a simple picture on each piece and display a regular semi-wordy name in the legend, backed by whatever the behind-the-scenes inventory IDs are that most people won’t need to care about. Also, I can’t access that edit page, probably because I’m not an inventory admin 😛
I played around with annotations a bit on test, they don’t seem to snap to the grid even with that option enabled (but it seems to work fine for tables and baseplates). A color-swap button could be handy for the background and font colors of notes, but I have no idea how often it’ll actually be useful. I’d also rather see changes applied to notes and highlights immediately instead of needing to press a Done button or even click off (because then I need to click it again).
As an additional test case for whenever you work more on duplication, a vertical column of 5 tables completely fails to duplicate, even with nothing else within a couple table-widths. I did finally notice the “Blocked” popup/toast at the bottom left of the screen when that happens. What if that appeared at the location where the blockage was detected?
Played around with this a little bit today by starting to build the Locomotion Weekend layout for 2026. Still lots to do, but I plan to try to replicate that layout in the Layout Planner.
Here’s a link to the Google Sheets file that shows what I used for baseplate color coding/legend for Locomotion Weekend 2026. Certainly nothing set in stone, but it’s a place to start.
As @gabevistica suggested, I used a unique color and an abbreviated code for labeling each baseplate on the layout, with a longer description in the Legend. I also added 9v or RC to each baseplate in the layout. For MOC spaces, I numbered them and created a table for people to sign up for specific spaces and include info on what they were putting there. In the legend, I also included information on the number of pieces used from inventory, along with the total number that we have in inventory. Might be too much to replicate, but I know for me that info was useful as I built the layout.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tN5VadkOzo39mNHT8MtlK5hc1BVYeMvLQ0_zjIYKcao/edit?usp=sharing
yeah, let me promote the lastest stable version to prod – I think you’ll enjoy it. Should be there by 6p. My goal is to be able to produce an output exactly like yours for any event we do.
I think you’ll find it close.
oh, and while you wait, I opened up the short tag/color editor to everyone in production.
I can see the page now! And I get a 403 in the Status column every time I type something 🙁
I can see the page now! And I get a 403 in the Status column every time I type something
ZOMG. This is one of those times where it’s frustrating to be frustrated…ChatGPT is just trying to be THE BEST and lock everything down, but I’m more like “Let the kids play |in the streets|” I had removed the ‘front security gate’ to get you to the page, but -NOW- you’re getting stuck on the commit security gate…after a few minutes of trying to open that gate, i realized, it’s faster if I just do it myself.
So, I started matching up Bob’s locomotion sheet with shortcodes and colors…and then, in typical Josh fashion, i just moved along and came up with my own colors and shortcodes. I made sure no shortcodes are repeated. We can change this all later, even repeatedly, but it’s a start, and a finish, so I can now move on to bug squashing and feature releasing. weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
@joshhall, I played around with trying to replicate the Locomotion Weekend layout some more this morning and it worked pretty well. Couple of comments:
1. The “snap to grid” and “duplicate” both worked well for placing baseplates.
2. I was also able to place a couple of text boxes but noticed that once they were on there and I went back using “duplicate” to place more baseplates, if the “duplicated image” appeared under one of the text boxes I couldn’t “grab” it to move it.
3. Is there a limit on how many “duplicates” you can do on a single baseplate? Seemed like there was after doing it 6 or 7 times, and I had to go back to the inventory bar to select.
4. The “Home” location seemed to move around whenever I refreshed. It would be useful for the designer to be able to adjust the “Home” location. Also, several times the screen went blank like it was doing some sort of auto refresh, and when it came back the “home” location moved every time?
5. Pretty sure the “UKN” 16×32 baseplates are the 9v single straights, so maybe change the label to “SS9” or change the description in the Inventory.
6. Under the baseplates, or maybe as a separate selection, we need the ability to be able to place a 32×32 MOC, a 16×32 MOC and a 16×16 MOC in the layout.
7. I’m pretty sure there was a “Scroll” button there yesterday to allow you to move the view of the layout on the screen, but it wasn’t there today (or I couldn’t find it). I had to reduce the “zoom” on the browser tool bar to be able to see lower portion of the layout even after I hid the Legend.
8. Print view still needs some work to be able to adjust size, margins, etc. Also, the Legend text on the print view is “very abbreviated”. Should go to what’s on the normal Enable Editing view.All for now! I think this is going to be a great tool!! Nice job!!!
For (6), I’d love to see MOC slots as a separate layer, as that opens up possibilities for easier signup functionality like different colors for empty vs occupied spaces so we can see at a glance where the open spots are physically.
For (6), I’d love to see MOC slots as a separate layer, as that opens up possibilities for easier signup functionality like different colors for empty vs occupied spaces so we can see at a glance where the open spots are physically.
Agree @gabevistica. One other footnote, I was able to place smaller baseplates “on top” of the LRC (Long Radius Curve) 4×4 block, which temporarily solved the issue you brought up the other day about that LRC box not being the actual baseplate footprint for those long radius corners.
I was able to place smaller baseplates “on top” of the LRC (Long Radius Curve) 4×4 block, which temporarily solved the issue you brought up the other day about that LRC box not being the actual baseplate footprint for those long radius corners.
Oh good! I’d be worried about them ending up swapped on page reload sometimes, though, and it makes it harder to remember (and consistently define) the plate layout for the curves.
…Which now that I think about it, the way we can reconfigure those 16×32 sections at each end would be really hard to properly capture. Maybe we should replace those with 16×16 plates so the curves are symmetric?
I pushed to prod instead of test and broke prod a few minutes ago – sorry.
So what you’re discussing is already in test. I attached a screenshot. I just haven’t built the front end for people to add their own MOCs/MILS yet. I manually inserted my wheat field into the db (actually used the front end to add inventory, but then in the db to assign owner). My current thinking is to rename ‘baseplates’ layer to ‘builds’ eventually, and have the dropdown box updated to include ‘member MOCs’ (stand alone stuff). I’m just trying to keep dev simple at this point…adding more/custom layers can be a later release.
But that is one of my priorities for the next week or so – to build out the front end so people can add their own MOCs to be inserted into the layout. Also worth mentioning that to solve that use case now is to add ‘member baseplates’ to denote who has a spot and the use of highlighting an area in lieu of actual dimensions.
You can also decide how you want to solve the use case of ’empty’/claimable spaces in a layout – you can put generic baseplates in a certain color (All RED baseplates are up for grabs) or just leave them blank and have people drop in their baseplate.
Realtime viewing of someone else editing is coming. For now you can at least see who else is viewing the layout. The next step would be to allow people to edit, either concurrently or passing a ‘token’ so only 1 person can edit at a time. TBD. Maybe even let the layout create decide how permissions works.
mobile and printing are planned for end of feb…before H&G.
and yeah, i put UNK, because I was confused at whether that was a duplicate entry…I don’t think it is now, so I put it to SS9. Thanks for clearing up my confusion.
Current acknowledged items to be addressed:
– duplicating
–many items/times
–maintaining original position
– objects hidden behind objects from other layers
– Bob’s Home moving around (first I’ve seen that, I’ll have to research). Maybe custom home solution
– Scroll/zoom buttons in the canvas view
– filtering/sorting of LUG Inventory seems to have disappeared (chatgpt is the worst…and best…) Like a racoon seeing shiny things when it finds an old version somewhere in it’s files. “OOOO! I’LL USE THIS ONE!”…Which now that I think about it, the way we can reconfigure those 16×32 sections at each end would be really hard to properly capture. Maybe we should replace those with 16×16 plates so the curves are symmetric?
that seems like a valid idea.
also reminds me that ‘custom baseplate dimension’ is on the ‘later’ list as well. work around is exactly what you said-just remember where you need to put a real baseplate over top of it for now.
Bob, if you drag with your right mouse button, you’ll pan the layout. the scroll wheel will zoom in and out too. I added buttons for it now though.
I incorporated the mocs layer now. there’s still a bug where the shortcode isn’t showing once it’s placed on the canvas.
I asked chatgpt to put together a quick user guide too.
Minor bug: layout descriptions don’t handle escaping ampersands (&) very well.
mobile version (read only) works great, I think. link is accessible in the layout list.
fixed duplication of multiple objects. That will help with laying a bunch of track lines.
added new annotations/features.
simplified to defaulting self to ‘members’ mocs and mils, rather than having a separate one for ‘my’ and another for ‘other’
few other tweaks. play around. let me know if you see anything wonky.
thinking about the ‘where did that just get placed???’ problem… I took a look at stud.io, and you have to click on an element, and then you have to click where you want it placed. Do we want that same experience? We have to click on a baseplate/moc to select it, and then wherever we click is where it goes?
I think I’d prefer the new object being placed at the center of my viewport and displayed on top of everything else (feature request for the future: “move forward/backward” and “send to front/back” buttons, like how elements in a powerpoint slide work).
Duplicating a layout doesn’t work, I get a 404 error 🙁
Zooming still works weirdly, seems like it tries to maintain the viewport’s position relative to “home” at all zoom levels, which gets difficult to use once you’re more than a few tables away. I’d prefer it maintain position relative to the current center of the viewport, or even relative to wherever the mouse pointer is at the moment of the zoom (though that’s probably harder to do).
Minor bug: measurement annotations with an inches amount of zero display ” instead of ‘ (e.g. 60ft0in displays as
60"instead of60', but 60ft1in is60' 1").And I know there’s an order to which layer is on top of which, but would rearranging the controls something like the attachment make it clearer for folks less used to layers?
And duplicating groups of 4 track baseplates just says “blocked” now, maybe the fix for this can be combined with the “new object” rework?
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