Hi all,
Some updates from the wonderful world of tessellations.
After an already long journey on the topic, I felt it was time to tidy up and rationalise what I have learnt so far. I am proud to announce the next phase of these following open-source, volunteer-led projects:
- A new website: https://tessell.art
- Version 0.4.2 of the editor, available as a responsive, mobile-first web application at https://editor.tessell.art, as well as a desktop application bundled via Tauri for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The editor has been developed entirely with Scala.js / Laminar.
- Two foundation Scala libraries used by the editor:
As usual I am really interested in any kind of feedback.
2 Likes
I tried it out a little bit, very fun concept !
Here is my feedback:
- I found changing the colors of shapes frustrating, it takes too many steps, ideally it would work more like the paint bucket tool, where as long as its selected, clicking on any polygon re-colors it
- I found the eraser a bit confusing: you need to select the tool, then the polygon, then either its center or one of the edges, but that choice doesn’t seem to change anything ?
- I understood that the orange edges are the perimeter, but I don’t understand why there are also some on the inside ? This is how the preset penrose_P1.svg looks for me (I added the red circles):
- In the image above, I also didn’t understand what the greyed polygons mean
- There is a “select all squares”, but I didn’t understand what it does, as I was not able to use it for anything (for example bulk deleting)
That’s what I have spotted so far, thanks for making it !
Thanks for the feedback, really helpful, a fresh perspective from a new user is invaluable.
I will try to answer your points, rearranging them in a different order:
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and 4. greyed out means selected and for good (but possibly bad 
) measure the selected polygons have also a light orange border, probably confusing. If you deselect them, all these will disappear. Use the Deselect all button — or press Esc — to clear the selection. See Editor user guide — tessell.art
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If in the “SHAPES” palette you select a square, you get also “Select all squares” and “Fill all squares with…” buttons. In the Penrose case, they do nothing, simply because it contains no squares. But if you select a pentagon, or pick the shape of a “star”, you can use those buttons to select all the polygons of the given shape and change their color.
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There is not a “paint bucket” tool, usually it is intended to spread the color across similar regions with no boundaries, but here each polygon is enclosed. Nevertheless, I think I get what you mean, a “brush” tool that instead of selecting and then changing the color, just paints each polygon touched. It could be added. In my experience having the possibility to select all polygons of a given shape, or of a given color, and then changing the color of the whole lot tends to be more useful, but I see your point.
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Last: deleting / erasing. This is a real pain point. Not so much when you grow things, because you have the undo button. But when you want to delete already given tessellations, like the one you started with. The problem is that the deletion must be validated, otherwise you could end up with an invalid tessellation. And algorithmically is quite complicated, it must undo a lot of relations in a DCEL structure. So: for now there is no “bulk deleting”, you undo polygons one by one; or, and this is the reason for the different deletion points, you can delete (or merge) all the polygons sharing an edge or a vertex. Definitely an area where the user experience must be improved and where we could provide more powerful APIs from the dcel library.
If you feel like adding more comments or additional feedback to these or other issues, I will be truly happy to try to address them.
