Documentation

Plane9 is not a small program and as such it's also rather difficult to make it very simple. However someone long ago stumble uppon this very problem and was nice enough to invented the concept of documentation and you can't question the brilant idea of actually explaning how things work. So along the footsteps of this briliant inventor here is the documentation for Plane9. Hopefully the documentation can furfill it's purpose for existing and that is to maximize your understanding of the program. So you can enoy it more and with a bit of luck help you avoid baning your head against the keyboard and wondering what I was thinking when I wrote the program.

Just don't forget, practice makes perfect.

Editor

First of it's important that you understand the Terminology used. So please go and take at least a quick look. It will help you a lot. You can reposition the windows in the editor by clicking and draging either the windows tab or the title of the window. If you right click on the tab of the window you will also get a context menu.

Ports Window

The ports that can be set directly. If a value is currently connected it can't be changed and is dimmed. You can click and drag on a label to "scroll" the value. Hold down shift while doing so to decrease the scroll speed to 1/10. Hold down ctrl to increase the scroll speed by 10.

Some ports are expression ports. In them you can enter math expressions that should be evaluated. The system is very flexible so it has a page of its own.

The shader port is one powerfull beast. In it you can write custom cgfx shaders. The shaders runs on the graphics card and allows you to directly change the vertices and rendered pixels. The keywords used can be found on Nvidias homepage

Dag Window

Pan using middle mouse button or alt + left mouse button

Drag nodes by left clicking and moving the mouse

Right click on a port to bing up the context menu. Using it you can select a new node that should be added and connected to that port

Right click on the connections between the node to bring up a context menu where you can delete the connection

All ports are color coded to help you identify what ports that can be connected to each other.

Port type	Color
Bool
Int
Float
Color
Rect
Vector
String
Render
Object
Effect
Texture
Mesh

Explorer window

In this window you manage the scenes. Using the buttons on the top of the window you can, from left to right, Add a new scene, Delete the currently selected scene and lastly clone the currently selected scene

Note: The scenes that are under the branch called "Default (Read only)" are not actually read only. However any changes made to them will be lost when you upgrade the program to the next version.