Symbols

Board list

Each Hybrix symbol belongs to at most one board board. On the left side of the BOARDS screen, click the BOARDS tab to view the list of your project's boards:

The "Boards" tab

If you click on a board to select it, its contents are shown in the workspace. In the above example, the currently selected board is named MAIN_SCREEN.

Symbol tree view

To view the nesting tree of symbols, click on the SYMBOLS tab. At the top of this tab, a label says "BOARD: MAIN_SCREEN" to remind us which board we're looking at:

The "Symbols" tab showing the tree of symbols

In the tree, symbols appear as their text title. The title is the symbol name (for example MAIN_SCENE), of for an unnamed symbol, the name of its symbol type in parentheses (for example (DECO_LINE)).

You can select symbols by clicking in symbol title in the tree, or by clicking directly on the symbol in the workspace. When a symbol is selected, its title is highlighted, and the workspace shows a dotted selection box.

The tree view's hierarchy determines two important properties of symbols:

• Display order: Child symbols are displayed in front of their parent. Symbols higher in the tree view appear in front of lower symbols.
• Coordinate system: When you move a parent symbol, its children move with it. In the (X,Y) coordinate system, child symbol locations can be measured relative to their parent.

Tree view actions

• You can expand and collapse subtrees by clicking the ▼ and ► symbols.

• By dragging and dropping items in the tree, you can reorder symbols and change their parent/child relationships.

  The symbol type restricts which symbols can be children of other symbols, as well as whether a symbol is allowed as a top-level symbol on the board.

• You can click the padlock icon to lock a symbol, temporarily preventing it from being accidentally selected or moved.

• You can click the eyelashes icon to hide a symbol, removing it temporarily, or making it easier to select surrounding symbols.

  While a symbol is hidden, its DATA definitions are NOT emitted; it will disappear from your program as well.

Property pane

When a symbol is selected, its data and configuration can be viewed in the property pane on the right side of the BOARDS screen:

The property pane, showing properties of the MAIN_SCENE symbol

The property pane has three main sections:

Symbol options

The property pane's top panel shows options that are the same for every symbol, as well as figure options.

In the example screenshot above, we see:

• The "VIEW" button, which helps us find the symbol by centering its figure in the workspace
• The symbol type (S_SCENE in the example) - determined when the symbol is created.
• The symbol name (MAIN_SCENE in the example).
• A checkbox for emitting a symbol picks variable. This requires a symbol name, which determines the VAR name.
• The figure properties, which depend on the figure type. Since S_SCENE is a tilemap, we can choose the background color, tilemap, and tileset.
• The underlay checkbox, which causes the child to appear behind its parent symbol; normally children appear in front of their parent.
• The "CAPTION" button, which allows an informational text caption to be displayed next to the symbol on the board. The caption can be emitted using a figure caption field.

Custom fields

A given symbol type can include various fields that you create. Editors for these custom fields appear in panels below the property pane's top panel. Custom fields can have arbitrary names; to avoid confusion with the system labels, custom field names are use yellow color.

For example, the yellow X and Y shown below are user-defined metric fields, whereas the blue X, Y are standard system labels from the geometry panel.

Custom fields RESPONSE, MY_NOTES, X, and Y

Geometry panel

The property panel's bottom panel is called the geometry panel. It shows the location (X, Y) and dimensions (width, height) of the selected symbol, measured in pixels. The location is in absolute units, with (0,0) at the center of the board.