Talk:Slices Intro

Sword (talk) 21:49, 25 April 2017 (PDT)Sword I would like to have simple tutorials with animated GIFs to show what slices do and how they work. If a user sees a slice moving they can understand that slices can do that. If they see a slice displaying information or acting as a button, they can do that. Hopefully, they will have a link to an appropriate tutorial teaching them how to do that.

Though not necessarily for the "quick-start" these are some of the ideas for slice tutorials. I hope to cover plotscripting briefly as well, eventually. Ambitious, I know.

The easiest slices to learn are Rectangle/Ellipse, Text and Sprite. They are primarily for display purposes. They would be the starting topics.

- It would make a good plotscripting tutorial to put data in a string and display it in a text slice.

- Another one would be putting sprite/rectangle/ellipse slices as moving objects on the screen that act as objects, such as moving hazards (bullets, retracting spikes, traps, etc.) that harm or kill the player.

- Another simple tutorial would be putting a slice on an NPC or hero walkabout, for example, a quest indicator, such as a speech bubble, exclamation mark or arrow/pointer.

Grid, Scroll, Select, Panel are slightly complicated, but they all have unique and useful functions. We would need to tackle them one-by-one. - Scroll : Used to navigate content hidden from the current view A good tutorial would be a scrolling list, or having a slice scroll on/off the screen

- Select : Used to switch between slices in a mutually exclusive fashion Lots of good ideas for select slices. Really fancy them for buttons, switches and things like that. A good tutorial would be visual indicator of a switch or quest status with multiple states.

- Panel : Useful when you want to dynamically alter the positions of 2 slices, (or groups of slices) relative to each other. I use them when I'm feeling too lazy to create a grid with just 2 cells. That's bad, right? Sometimes I nest multiple panel slices for a faux grid. Would be great for a HUD and for other stuff. Still learning about them. Using panel slices helps to stop child slices from overlapping (each other) when conditions are right. Nifty!

- Grid : Reasonably complicated to "jump" to a cell, but really useful in displaying and arranging slices. They can only create uniformly spaced rows and columns as far as I'm aware, but it's not a big deal, one can use multiple grids. Not sure of a tutorial, but having them arrange images with text attached in a grid is a simple exercise. They should use containers to keep multiple slices in a single cell.

Container is the most simple slice, and is useful for treating a group of slices like one unit. Can show it off in the other tutorials.

Bob the Hamster (talk) 11:07, 26 April 2017 (PDT): Animated gifs showing how slices move and change sounds like a great idea!