I'd also like to be able to rotate the board while playing; sometimes when moving chars to a tile surrounded by other chars, you can't see the facing preview arrow. It can also be hard to see terrain attachments when large chars are standing in the way (like Greenfang). And I'd like a button during battle to display the terrain view (like in the board editor) so we're not having to right-click everything that looks different. And more importantly, so we're not surprised by things that didn't look different. And that would free up the right-click operation so we could use it to show LoS from the clicked tile.
I've just submitted a tweak whereby if you Ctrl-zoom (ie Ctrl-Right-Click, Ctrl-Shift-Click, Ctrl-Space, or Ctrl-Mousewheel) on a square then we also show LOS for that square. Should be in the next build.
The board is made of 2d squares. Rotating the board or turning your monitor upside down would have same effect. Try out the editor. Build a map and you will understand why your request is impossible
Yay! There's NO way a new player will figure this out. But yay! We have something to tell them when they come to the forum.
Here's an example of when it would be very useful to rotate the board (ignoring the fact that I'm just about to lose anyway). The direction I wanted to click for my spell is almost entirely covered by the dragon! There's was only around 1 pixel on each side that was clickable.
Rotating the board would be great, but as already stated in the thread by Haxplozid, the board is made out of 2D squares. This might not be as simple as some people believe, considering the squares themselves don't seem to rotate (at least not 360 degrees) properly in the editor...
What would be more helpful in that case is what a bunch of people have requested before: that the little tile to click be "clickable" even if a figure is in the way.
Fine, I will (yes, I'm getting a bit annoyed by everyone saying this is impossible). Tell me which of these images is the original. (Yeah, two obviously aren't because my image editor isn't very good. But it would be straightforward though tedious to recreate the board in each orientation.) The board and everything on it can and must be rotatable; it's only the junk on the table that doesn't rotate.
You would have to rebuild each map four times as you have done, then put some code in place to swap out the map and re-spawn all characters in their new orientation, add back all terrain effects etc. This is a non-trivial task and would take some non-zero amount of effort to code and test. This would only work for the 'official' maps, unless you force each custom map builder to do four versions of their map. That's a lot of time and effort to fix a problem that occasionally happens in some battles.
The rebuilding can be done on the fly: you just need to have each tile and decal link to its rotated 90 degrees clockwise version (rotate three times to get counterclockwise version). Manually rebuilding the board was to prove that those rotated versions already exist in the game. And I'd be happy to do that if you pick a small board for me to recreate (my board is huge and uses a ton of decals).
I really don't think it would be so difficult to rotate the game on-the-fly, as Kalin has described. I've rewritten game code to rotate stuff like that myself. Although, I'm not really sure that kind of rotation is the best way to solve the problem of covered buttons anyway - because each rotation would be sudden and somewhat disorientating for the player. It would be useful, but perhaps there's a better way. If the rotation could be smooth, so that the board could be seen in the process of turning, and perhaps even stopped at 45° or so, that would be really nice. But that would be much more difficult to do without 3D graphics. Civilization 4 has a similar problem with some graphics sometimes obscuring the view of things behind them, and that game has the option to smoothly rotate the board by 45°, quickly and temporarily, or indefinitely depending on which hotkeys are used. I've played that game a lot, and I reckon I could probably count the times I've used that feature on one hand; but it's still a pretty nice feature. But again, those are 3D graphics, so it's much easier to enable such a feature in that game.
The issue here is that any rotation would have to take into effect backdrop doodads, characters et c. If it's simple, it would be great - but as the devs have stated it's not. Guess the 2d tiles load individually rather than as a combined map, meaning it can't just rotate on a single command from the client?
And since the rotation is sudden, 90 degrees each, with no transition state inbetween, it will not feels right. Given the way all maps is laid out, it will easily disorientate the player as soon as he rotate in any direction.
Yes, rotation in 90 degree steps is probably easy to code (at least I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't be) but rotation at intermediate angles requires new graphics.
Just having a button that hides all pieces while held down would go a long way to solving everything. Then you can view terrain effects with a press and glance, or you can click on blocked tiles with a press and click.
