Board Editor Piece Placement Improvement?

TonyRotella commented 7 years ago

I'd suggest change it from a "drag and drop" to a "click and click", e.g. you click on the pawn, and then you can place 8 pawns with 8 clicks on the appropriate squares. Then click on the knight, add two knights with two clicks, etc.

arex1337 commented 7 years ago

Oh please make the cursor itself the piece :-P

Another idea would be that you click an empty square without releasing the button, a menu of pieces popup near the cursor, and you let go of the mouse button while hovering over the piece you want on that square.

Not sure if any of these comments (of mine) make any sense.

fobos531 commented 7 years ago

All of these suggestions are pretty good, honestly would like to see any of them since they are definitely an improvement over the current implementation.

BrandonE commented 7 years ago

I am working on this. My current plan is to add two icons to the spare piece section for the board editor: a pointer and a trash can. Clicking on an icon or piece will select it.

When the pointer is selected, you will be able to drag and drop pieces on the board like you can currently.
When a piece is selected, that piece will drop as you hold the mouse button down and move across the board. This way, if you wanted to fill up the board with pawns, you could do so with a single click. I like @arex1337's idea of making the cursor match the piece, so I will try to do that as well.
When the trash can is selected, pieces will be deleted as you hold the mouse button down and move across the board. Similarly, you could also delete as many pieces as you wanted with a single click.

My fond memories of Game Maker definitely gave me some inspiration. :)

Branch

Early Screenshot:

If anyone can find SVGs for the new icons that better match the pieces, let me know. Hopefully, we could have it so that they look alright regardless of the piece set preferences.

ornicar commented 7 years ago

I agree, except for the pointer button. Pretty sure it's not necessary.

Clicking on a spare piece changes the cursor and multiple drops. Dragging a spare piece keeps the current behavior.

ornicar commented 7 years ago

trash = <i data-icon="q">

more on https://lichess1.org/assets/font72/icons-reference.html

BrandonE commented 7 years ago

I like the idea of keeping the behavior of dragging a spare piece. The pointer button is meant for dragging pieces on the game board itself. I'm not sure how we'd be able to distinguish dragging an existing piece from dropping a different piece on top of it without the pointer button. We could make it so that you only drop pieces on empty squares, but having the pointer button and selecting a piece instead gives you the flexibility to overwrite any square's contents with a different piece without having to remove the existing piece first. If you want to shuffle existing pieces around the board, you can still do that with the pointer button.

BrandonE commented 7 years ago

Pull requests!

lila chessground

lichess-org / lila

Board Editor Piece Placement Improvement? #2632