Polygonal tiling applet

Instructions

Disclaimer: Not designed for touchscreens. Not tested on touchscreens.

Tested on Firefox and Google Chrome.

Description

The applet allows testing tilings with one polygonal tile that can be rotated into N possible orientations, and can also be flipped.

Controls

Basic ones More

Overlap is not prevented

There is no overlap checking implemented.

Magnet (snapping)

The vertices of the tiles are magnetized. You can change the range of the magnet with the appropriate field.

More technically: the vertices of the already placed tiles are used to snap the current tile being placed: the closest vertex pair is determined then if their distance is below some threshold, the tile in hand is translated so that this pair matches. The threshold value can be adjusted in the corresponding input field.

Custom polygon

The monotile can be changed into any polygon traced by a single closed polygonal line: use the "Load shape" button. The file should be a text file containing a list of the shape vertices in the form [[0,1.23],[3.1,13],[-3.14,2.505]] for instance. Be careful that the rotation centre will be [0,0]. You can recentre the cursor to the barycenter of the tile with the "Recentre shape" button. Another file type understood by the app is {"nbAngles":12,"shape":[[0,1.23],[3.1,13],[-3.14,2.505]]} where nbAngles denotes a recommended value of the number N of orientations, that will be set when you load the tile.

Saving/Loading tilings

Saves a data file containing tile shape, number N of orientations, position and colour of tiles.