have you noticed that when creating a circle, if you select by diam. the vertical option appears before you pick first point but if you select by center the vertical option only appears after first point is selected. no big deal but i thought i'd mention it. if there's a reason for this i'm sorry to bother you with it.

Hi xrok1, there's no real reason - they just happen to work differently... Which one do you think is better?

Sometimes I try to wait until an option can have a visible effect before showing it, so for this case that would mean delaying showing the vertical option for Circles / Diam until after the first point is picked, so that when clicking on vertical you could see the circle update. Does that sound good?

- Michael

i actually like seeing all the options ahead of time(when a tool is chosen), since you can't go back and change it after the fact (no history), if you miss seeing it especially when you're getting familiar with the interface it can cause extra work. imagine using booleans if the boolean type options were'nt show till after you selected objects; seems counter productive to go back and choose options after the fact. IMO anyway.

BTW its really great that comments on this forum never go unanswered. that shows real dedication on your part and will sell your product as much as the program itself i'm sure. Kudos!

i was also wondering if you could possibly host steph3d's vid's on your site and ask him if they could be downloadable. i think they're great but with a slow internet connection a real pain to stream, and would be great to have them on my HD for instance reference.

One more thing i noticed i would like to mention is that it would be great to have a realtime preview with the text tool, right now since i have to apply the text before i can see it, i need to try seetings apply then delete and try again till i get what i like.

Booleans don't actually have any "options" - when you push Boolean and it pops out those 4 choices, that launches a different command for each one, then when each command is running there aren't anything like checkboxes or other kinds of controls that go in the upper-right options area...

I just try in general not to flood the UI with too much stuff at once, so if there is ever a chance to hide stuff or delay it until some other point that's what I kind of lean towards...

I guess in this case it isn't really much of an issue though.


re: Steph's videos - I'll have to get Pilou to ask him if he wants me to host them. I'm not sure how easy they are to download for offline viewing though since they are in flash format, you kind of have to get a package of several files including a local web page that acts as the viewer.

- Michael

re: Text realtime preview - I do want to try for that eventually, it was difficult enough that I just didn't have time to work on it for V1.

It kind of needs a somewhat fancy caching system so I can avoid recalculating previous letters when you are typing.

One thing that might be easier is to have just a wireframe preview in this particular case, instead of actually building the actual resulting solids as the preview like everything else normally does.

- Michael

as far as text i agree that a wire would be good enough representation to see size and placement.

as far as my example about booleans, i guess it wasn't a good example because what i meant was if you only had a bool button and had to select objects before individual bool "types" showed up, i guess i wasn't refering to individual options; kind of an extreme example to try and make a point.

did you ever consider a preview button so that things like text and bool's could be seen before clicking done and having to undo and start again if results aren't what was expected? maybe this could be an interim fix for ver1 until the realtime preview is coded for ver2. sort of a pre-emptive history?

Hi xrok1, mostly I've tried to avoid having a special preview button and just dynamically do the preview whenever you change options.

So for instance for text I will just show the preview as you type automatically. (Once I get a chance to work on it some more).

For some commands it is not easy to do this though, because offering a preview means that you have to stay inside the command, and that usually means there is an extra step required to end the command by pushing "Done".

So take boolean union for example. Right now you can select 2 spheres, then push Boolean / Union, and it then calculates the boolean and finishes without you needing to push any more buttons or anything, you just move straight into the next command that you want to do.

To offer a preview would mean there would have to be a "showing preview" stage with a Done button, and you would have to push Done or right click there as an extra step before the union command would finish.

For some things it is just easiest to not have a preview and instead you just use undo if you don't like what happened...

- Michael

well, thanks for the replies, its your software and i trust your decisions from what i've seen so far. once again awsome program keep up the good work and i can't wait to see what comes next.