Tile Availability and Loading

If you open up a project window, the tile menus will be populated by a subset of the tiles from your library. (See The Main Interface.)The basic idea is that the tiles that appear in those menus are the ones that are currenlty loaded. In fact, this is all that it means for a tile to be loaded; i.e., if a tile is loaded, then it appears in the tile menus at the top of a project.

Note

Actually, when Tactic loads a tile, it first makes sure that it can successfully load it in a container. If it can’t then the tile won’t be loaded.

When you first log in, Tactic automatically loads all of the tiles with the tag default. (See Special Tags.) So you can control your default set by adding or removing this tag from your tile modules.

You can manage the loaded tiles from the tile pane of your library. Loaded tiles have an up arrow. You can use the load menu to manually load and unload individual tiles. You can also reset the set of loaded tiles to just the tiles with the default tag. Any loaded tile is immediately available universally, across all of your open projects, or in any new project windows you open.

It’s also possible to load a tile from the The Tile Creator or The Module Viewer.

Note

If you load a tile, and an existing tile has the same name, then the old tile will be overwritten.

Warning

The name of a tile comes from the name of the tile class, not the name of the module. If you create your tiles using the Tile Creator, then the name of the module and the class will always be the same. However, if you use the module viewer, the name of the tile class need not be the same as the containing module. In fact, it is even possible to have multiple tile classes within a single module. This dates back to the early days when I was confused. If I was starting over, then each tile module would only have one tile class, and it would always have the same name.

Suppose you edit a previously loaded tile in the module viewer, then click “save and load.” In that case, any new versions of this tile will have the new version of the code. Existing tile instances in open projects will not be modified internally. However, the tile will turn a very ugly color to signal that the tile isn’t up to date. At that point, if you kill and reload the tile instance, then the tile will refresh itself using whatever current version of the code is.