tetris@ and customizing your acts

tetris@

Used to customize the user interface (UI) of any given act. Helpful for making waveforms bigger, hiding controls you rarely use, or swapping color palettes on-the-fly.

Any changes made with tetris@ don’t change the act template by default, but instead allows you to add a choosable UI configuration for your act in the info menu. Shift-click on the title menu on any given act to choose from your stored tetris settings.

Controls

The act menu allows you to select which currently opened act you'd like to edit.

Toggling the keys button allows you to move UI elements using your directional keys

The four window number boxes let you move the act's window (location on your screen and screen size) and resize it to your liking. The logic follows X screen coordinate, Y screen coordinate, X window size, and Y window size. So X screen, Y screen, X window, Y window.

The object menu allows you to select which UI element to edit. A tip: use the clue window in conjunction with mouseover to find the name of the UI element you're looking for!

The blink button blinks selected objects when you select them, while the visible button hides selected objects from view. Toggling the no_hidden button hides all hidden objects from being selectable in the object menu.

Most remaining controls effect your selected UI element, as follows:

pos: X and Y coordinates of the UI element in the act window. 0, 0 is the top left of the act window, and when selecting a new UI element, you'll notice the X and Y coordinates update to reflect the UI element's actual position.

size: X and Y dimensions of the UI element. Likewise, updates upon being selected.

fontsize: the font size of any text within or related to the currently selected UI element.

dims: controls the dimensions of any interface using the deprecated ‘lcd’ Max object. You likely won’t be encountering this very often.

grid_size: controls the per-preset size of the preset grid. A higher number means bigger boxes but fewer of them, while a smaller number means smaller boxes but a higher amount of them.

colors: allows selection of specific UI element characteristics for fine-tuning your color palette. Listed options often alternate depending on the type of UI element selected (number box, slider, multislider, text toggle), but they often used similar abbreviated logic like bgcolor for background color, textcolor for text color, etc.

saturation: controls the depth or brightness of color

alpha: controls the selected color's transparency (note: transparent colors will show the background color of the entire act)

color scroll and color picker: use your mouse to select a new color for your UI element, or tap the color_picker button to get finer controls for things like RGB values and Hex codes

better colors (sel): assigns a random palette to your selected UI element better colors (all): assigns a random palette to all elements in the act.

revert (sel),(all): reverts changed colors to default values.

write: saves your color, size, and position changes as a choosable tetris setting. When opening a new copy of your edited act, shift-click the info menu to choose between all of your custom tetris@ settings!

write_default: overwrites the template settings of an act, permanently applying your tetris@ settings to all versions of your act going forward. Use this with caution!

Use Example

Let’s say you wanted to change the size and position of the waveform element of a flop object — specifically, you want to make it significantly larger and offset it to the right. Here’s how you’d go about it:

1. Creating a new flop act or using an existing one, select your target flop act from the act dropdown menu on tetris.
2. Click on the object menu, and scroll down until you find wf. Click on it to select your flop’s waveform for editing.
3. Try moving the X coordinate of the pos attribute. You’ll notice the waveform disappears outside the bounds of the window. Fix that by changing the value in the third window box to expand the boundaries of flop’s window.
4. Moving back to the pos controls, change the X to 184 and the Y to zero. flop’s waveform should now be offset to the top-right, but should still be the same size.
5. Change the values of the size controls until the waveform fills the remaining negative space in the act. Note: you might hit some value caps, so if the waveform can't fully expand to fill the window’s extra space, mess around with values until you find something that works for you.
6. Tap the write button to save your tetris@ preferences. Enter the name of your new preset and hit your ‘enter’ key to save.

Done! The next time you create a new flop act, shift-click on the right of the title menu to access and apply your new tetris@ preferences.