Drawing a panel that behaves like lead
Nessie does not draw shapes. It draws the lines between them, and works out the pieces from what those lines enclose. That one difference explains most of what feels unfamiliar at first, and all of what makes it faster once it clicks.
A panel is a subdivision, not a pile of shapes
In a normal drawing tool a panel is thirty independent shapes that happen to sit next to each other. Nudge one and you have a gap. In real stained glass that is not what a panel is: every lead line is shared by exactly two pieces, or by one piece and the outside.
So Nessie stores the lines and the corners, and derives the pieces every time it draws. Draw a line across a piece and you now have two pieces, because the regions either side of it are what a piece is. There is no split command because splitting is just drawing.
- Drag a corner and every piece touching it comes too, because they are all holding the same corner.
- Drag a line and only that line moves, and its ends run along whatever they were attached to, which is how you widen one piece without distorting its neighbors.
- Delete a line and the two pieces either side become one.
Drawing catches onto what is already there
Most stray lines come from a line stopping a fraction short of the one it was meant to meet, or running a fraction past it. Nessie pulls the point you are drawing onto a nearby corner first, then onto a nearby line, before falling back to the grid, and rings the point when it catches.
- The catch applies to the line and pen tools, and to a corner being dragged.
- It does not apply to the shape tools, where the grid is what you want.
- Coordinates snap to a micron; points within 0.05 mm of each other are treated as the same point. Precision and tolerance are separate on purpose: conflating them is how a 100 mm box ends up 99.99 mm.
Lines that are not glass lines
Two kinds of line do not cut anything, and both are deliberate.
- 1A guide is a line with no cameSet a line's method to guide and it is held out of the arrangement entirely: it does not split anything, encloses nothing, appears in no cut list, and is never reported as a problem. It still catches the snap, which is the entire reason to draw one.
- 2A draft line divides nothing yetA line that does not close a region is drawn faint and dashed. That is information, not a fault: drawing the leaves of a tree means drawing a lot of lines that are not pieces yet. Check explains them and will select or remove them all for you.
Tidy loose lines repeats until the design is clean, because removing one stub often exposes the next.
Every line answers for itself
Real panels are not one width throughout, so each line names a kind: what it is made of and how wide. Four come as standard, named for what they are for rather than what they are made of, so changing a width never makes a name a lie.
- With lines selected, a chip changes them. With nothing selected, a chip sets what gets drawn next.
- Keys 1 to 9 do the same, and the status bar always says what the next line will be.
- The guide kind's method cannot be changed, so a panel cannot lose its pieces to a mis-click.