Hi Eric, yeah MoI won't create the line if you just "hover" the mouse over a point, you need to press and hold down the mouse and drag out a line if you want one.

Most other systems use the hovering method.

The hover method works pretty nice with very simple and sparse drawings, but once things get a bit more complex it can tend to fill your screen with so many snap zones that you no longer have any freedom of movement for placing points.

So that's one reason why MoI uses that "press and drag" gesture with the mouse to activate a line rather than just hovering. That way you have more control over when they are activated.


There is another reason though too, which is that MoI's method allows you to define a line by 2 points by where you started the drag from and where you released the mouse at. This allows for various additional kinds of snaps, like getting the point half-way (or at 1/3 increments, etc..) between any 2 existing points, mirroring a point to the other side of a centerline, capturing a distance and applying it to a different location, and many others.

See here for some more information on how all that works:
http://moi3d.com/1.0/docs/moi_command_reference10.htm#constructionlines

Much of that functionality is not possible with lines created in the "hover" type system since that makes a line that radiates out from only a single base point and does not have a distance component to it.

- Michael