Dear Thortspace … Can I make a tetrahedron of spheres in Thortspace?
Can I make a tetrahedron of spheres? I want to have four spheres with six connections, so that each sphere is connected to all other spheres. So far it looks like trying to connect a third one releases one of the previous ones.
Thanks for feedback, that’s a great question, and the answer is a qualified: “yes you can” — as I’m showing in the screenshot graphic below.
And this is what the same network looks like in “Neighbourhood View”.
So I say a “qualified” yes, because there are some things to know about Thortspace which may or may not be exactly as you would like them to be given what you have in mind.
The first issue to be aware of is that when you come to publish the spheres in this network (if you decide you want to do that) the Web Browser version of Thortspace currently only displays “Level one” connections between spheres — that is to say spheres that link directly to the “Current Sphere” (more about what the “Current Sphere” is further below).
So if you stick to using the App, you can see your tetrahedron working quite well (as above), but in the Browser, the same network looks like this (below):
You can still visit all the spheres, in just the same way; the only issue is that the Web Browser version of Thortspace does not display any Sphere Links that are not between the “Current Sphere” and a sphere that the “Current Sphere” is connected to.
So what is this “Current Sphere”?
In Thortspace the notion of a “Current Sphere” is fairly important. Most of the time, the “Current Sphere” is the sphere that is in the centre of your viewing window. If you’re in an App version of Thortspace and you’re editing Thorts on a sphere, the sphere where you are editing is your “Current Sphere”.
In order to make viewing and editing of the current sphere easier, a lot of the time Thortspace views your current sphere at a higher magnification than other spheres in your network. (An exception to this is when you are in “Neighbourhood View” more about which is further below.)
So part of the “qualification” to “can I create a tetrahedron of spheres” is that in the Normal View in Thortspace, one of your four spheres is usually going to be appearing to be bigger. There might also be variations to this if you resize one or more of your spheres to different sizes, but let’s not concern ourselves with that at the moment!
So what is “Neighbourhood View” then?
When you zoom out from your Current Sphere, the App version of Thortspace transitions to a view of the Current Sphere Network which shows all the spheres in the current network (up to Level Three spheres that are directly and indirectly connected to the Current Sphere) and all the connections between them.
In Neighbourhood View, the Thortspace App automatically positions all the spheres in this network onto a “Virtual Parent Sphere”. The algorithm for this automatic positioning may not be ideal for what you are wanting to see. Hopefully we will improve it before too long. However you can see in the screenshot above (the one labelled “A Tetrahedron-ish Network in Neighbourhood View”) what a tetrahedron network looks like in Neighbourhood View.
By the way, if you zoom out still further from Neighbourhood View, the Thortspace App will create a “Default Parent Sphere”. For more information about a “Default Parent Sphere” see roughly the second half the follow article:
The above article embeds the video below about linking spheres in Thortspace, but I’ll embed it here as well, for convenience.
Ok, so how do I make my Tetrahedral Network?
Well there’s actually a few ways, so I’m going to say the way which I think is easiest to follow.
Step 1
Create a sphere, lets call it “One” to make things easy to follow. I’m going to set my sphere colours and background, to make it easy for me to tell which sphere I’m on, but that is not a required step.
Step 2
Use the “Add Linked Sphere” button to add a linked sphere to it, and call it “Two”.
Step 3
Repeat Step 2, adding spheres “Three” and “Four”. I now have four spheres in total. Sphere One is my current sphere, and spheres Two, Three, and Four are directly linked to it. While I am on sphere One (ie. sphere One is my Current Sphere), I can drag spheres Two, Three and Four around to reposition them in respect to the content on sphere One and with respect to each other.
Step 4
Go to sphere Two. You might now see something like this:
Step 5
Open the spheres list on the Search Tab.
Drag-and-drop sphere Three and sphere Four from the spheres list onto your Current Sphere (sphere Two). I hope we’ll sort out a better way of doing this soon, but currently this is most straightforwards way to create a default link between two spheres that both already exist.
Sphere One is now linked to spheres Two Three and Four.
And Sphere Two is now linked to spheres One Three and Four. See below.
And Sphere Two is now linked to spheres One Three and Four.
We now have four spheres, and five links.
Step 6
The only thing we need to do now is link Sphere Three to Sphere Four. To do this we can either go to Sphere Three or Sphere Four, and then drag-and-drop whichever of those two spheres is not the Current Sphere from the sphere list to make the final connection (ie. repeating Step 5, but this time to connect Spheres Three and Sphere Four. You now have all four spheres connected to make your tetrahedron network.
Probably at this point you will want to visit each of the four spheres in turn, and tidy up the position of the linked spheres so that your network is consistently tetrahedron shape.
So anyway, thanks once again for the feedback and the question, and I hope that answers your question satisfactorily. I think Thortspace certainly comes close to being able to do what you want it to do, and we keep working everyday to make Thortspace better.
By all means add further questions, comments or further feedback in the comments below.
Here’s another way of creating a tetrahedron structure in Thortspace, but with Thorts instead of spheres:
