Rotating bitmaps

John Secker

Is there any way to get a bitmap fill to rotate along with the entity it forms part of, when you do a "Move, Scale, Rotate"? My problem is that I am drawing fields filled with rows of crops and I want the rows to remain parallel with the field sides. When I draw the field as a rectangle filled with a suitable bitmap, all is fine - the rows of the bitmap line up "horizontally". However I want to move my rectangular field so that the boundaries no longer run North/South and East/West on the map. When I rotate the entity, the rows of crops retain their East/West alignment, which looks very wrong.

I have the nasty feeling that I can't do what I want to, or at least not easily. All the entities on a map will share the same source bitmap, I guess, so it can't be straight for one field and rotated for another. Is there a way of doing what I am trying to do? It can't be an unusual problem - angled rooms in dungeons, for example. So maybe there is a simple way, but I have not been able to find it. Any help or ideas would be appreciated.

Monsen

Shaded polygons can do this. After drawing a polygon, right click the Polygon button and select Shaded polygon, then select the polygon you wish to turn into a shaded poly. Set the initial angle and pitch to whatever you wish (setting both to 0 is a good starting point). Now the fill rotates with the polygon.

Note that when you make it shaded, it is also affected by the global sun, which means that the color will lighten or darken (this is based on the pitch of the polygon, and it's rotational value compared to the position of the sun). If you don't use the global sun in your drawing, you can turn off this shading by right clicking the display speed settings button, selecting global sun, and place a checkmark in the "disable shading" option. This will still cause the fill to rotate with the poly, but it will no longer be shaded based on angle/position in relation to the sun.

John Secker

Fabulous - thank you so much. That has worked perfectly - and I also realise that there is a huge amount of functionality hidden away behind right clicks on various buttons. But the real key is knowing that something is possible.