I´ve more then once looked for a centerpoint for squares and rectangles too 1
centerpoint is a good idea !

Hi Michael if you have big arc and try to snap to its center point you have to look for it!!
for circle its ok you can zoom out and try put the mouse in the midel off circle to snap to its center

Hi lyes, I guess I'm not sure I understand - you previously wrote:

> just small grey or black cross is good enough

You should already be seeing a small gray cross. It will show up if you get your mouse in the general area of the center point, the default is that markers are displayed for snap points within 100 pixels of your mouse.

You can adjust the radius if you want inside of moi.ini, under the [Drawing Aids] section, look for this entry:
ObjectSnapMarkerDisplayRadius=100


Here is a screenshot of what you should be seeing with an arc:



That's a small gray cross, right? Are you not seeing those markers yourself?

- Michael

The only time I dont see it is when I dont have a command selected. Could he just be wanting the ability to see it with no command selected? Or possibly in a complicated model finding that point could get cluttered? so the ability to define it?

Just trying to follow along.

Maybe with the new styles the ability for that point to take on the styles property?

HI Michaeal yes is like Burman said is ability to see the center pt off circle and arc ( grey cross ) without selecting it .
2: is when you selecte circle and arc the possibylity to move it from its center pt without calling the comand move

my be the problem is in the screen 22" (1920x1080)

Hi Burr, yeah I think that probably lyes would be the one to answer your questions there for sure.


> The only time I dont see it is when I dont have a command selected.

Yeah, it will only show up when there is a pointpicker running, when such things as object snaps are active.


> Could he just be wanting the ability to see it with no command selected?

Well, that was one part that he was talking about earlier, I thought we were on to a slightly different topic but maybe not...

I guess the part that may have confused me is this one:

Normally I use that term "snapping" for things that control the pointpicker, such as grid snap, object snap, and straight snap.


Anyway, those little gray X target markers are in there for this purpose of making it easier to home in on particular snap points that may otherwise be a bit difficult to target.

- Michael

Hi lyes,

> HI Michaeal yes is like Burman said is ability to see the center pt
> off circle and arc ( grey cross ) without selecting it .

You mean always displayed under all circumstances, regardless of whether you are in a command that can actually do something to the center point or not?

I've intentionally tried to only make those center points show up when they can actually be used for something, so that's why they show up only when you are picking a point and you have object snaps enabled.

Otherwise if they were to show up all the time, your screen could get pretty filled up with a bunch of things that don't really have any purpose for what you are currently doing...


> 2: is when you selecte circle and arc the possibylity to
> move it from its center pt without calling the comand move

Yeah, I understand this one - this is different than snapping, this would be a new "grip" same as the scaling and rotation grips on the edit frame currently.

I do want to experiment with adding this in the future. I'm not quite sure exactly when, I am a little worried about making grips that can possibly overlay to the interior of the object.

The current grips stay all around the outside of the currently selected object which is a pretty nice thing, it keeps them away from taking up clickable space from the inside of the object.

A center grip would not be like that anymore, it would be over top of the object instead of only around it, so it would possibly cause some interference problems that the current grips do not cause. Maybe that will not cause much of a problem, but maybe it will.

That means that it may take some experimentation to see how that works.

Sometimes experimentation can take extra time, so I'm not quite sure right now exactly when I will be able to get to this one, it is possible not until v3 since I am trying to wrap up v2 right now so it is not a great time for new experiments right at this time, the new object organization tools are pretty much taking all the effort in that area right now.

- Michael

Hi lyes

> my be the problem is in the screen 22" (1920x1080)

It's possible those markers are too small for your screen.

There are some things you can do to adjust them though.

In moi.ini under the [Drawing Aids] section, there are some settings you can alter:

ObjectSnapMarkerOpacity=80
ObjectSnapMarkerDisplayRadius=100

The opacity is a value from 0 (totally transparent) to 255 (totally opaque) - if you increase this to have a higher opacity value the maker will become more substantial and darker on the screen which may be good for you.

Also the display radius is the radius in pixels around the mouse - markers that are within this radius of the mouse cursor will be displayed. You may want to increase that value if the current radius is too small on your screen.

Finally, the little X marker itself is an image named "OsnapMarker.png" which is in the \ui subfolder inside of MoI's main installation folder. It is a pretty small 7x7 image, if you replace this image with a larger sized one that should make those markers bigger too.

- Michael

Hi Micheal thanks for your time

Hi lyes, currently a simple solution for that is to hide the other objects that are interfering with your point picking.

If you only have that arc visible, it should then be easy to tell which center point will belong to it since there will be only one.

But there are probably a couple of different things I can do in the future to improve this situation - having the center point show up as a grip when it is selected as we were previously discussing is one thing that would probably help since it would give you a way to identify it, and maybe showing some kind of highlight on the curve that has a center osnap active on it would also help.

But again, I'm not sure exactly when I will be able to do those, for now just hide the other things and that should let you complete that task pretty easily in the current version.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I can relate to lyes with center picking issues, especially when you have several arc enteties around each other not sharing the same center point it's a hit and miss situation.
It'll be nice to have something to zero in on the right acr center, maybe a mouse click key combination to pick the arc it self to snap to the center.
In regards to the object organisation stuff if you apply a style colour to an object/arc will the X marker inherit the same colour, this could help in identifing which center belongs to which arc.


Cheers

Hi Danny, yup I think it would definitely be a good area to tune up. I'm just not quite sure when I will be able to make that happen.

It may be a couple of months before I'll be able to focus on brand new features, right now I'm pretty much just trying to wrap up v2 and adding new features tends to be pretty much the opposite of "wrapping things up".

re: Using style for the marker - that is an interesting idea, but the marker is pretty small and faint, I'm not sure that it will be that distinct to use color for it, plus that would be of no help in the situation where you have not assigned any styles. Possibly some highlight around the arc that has its center targeted would have a more universal application.

For now there is a sure-fire way to solve the problem though, which is to hide other entities so that they are not cluttering things up.

- Michael

Michael, I didn't expect you to have a look at this right away, we know you have your priorities and it's good that you set yourself deadlines by setting a time limit on each beta.
Could you imagine the forum posts if the beta deadline was up and you didn't have the next one out yet :D

No probs, keep up the good work, it's well appreciated.

Cheers

There is another "One Man" app genius who has had 75 Beta updates (in 4 versions incl mac) since last September.

And, still, just as frustrating as waiting for Michaels beta update!

The customer is never satisfied!

Brian
(Will the Easter egg be under the cabbage in my garden on Monday?)

Hi Danny, I just like to mention if it may take me a while to get to something.

Otherwise what tends to happen is if I just say "I want to do that feature", people kind of append "for the next release" at the end of that automatically.

Then when the next release comes out they're sort of like "hey I thought this feature was going to be in this next release", and I'm like "well, I said I wanted to add it, but I didn't say it would happen right away", and they're like "Hmm, that's not what I remember...", and then I'm like "well, here I went back and dug up the discussion - here is the post where I said that I wanted to do it, notice it does not say when exactly", and they're like "oh ok", and then I'm like "hmm, maybe I better mention this more up front so that people won't assume that it will happen immediately"... :)

Mostly that's just to try and reduce extra discussion by providing more info up front, but in this case I guess it made for more discussion instead. I can't win! ;) ;)

- Michael

Hi Michael....

Why MoI V2 Beta take more than 5 minutes to boolean difference for the phone button ?
Is there any plan to improve this ?

Please find attached 3dm file.

My laptop configuration :

Hi Anis,

> Why MoI V2 Beta take more than 5 minutes to boolean
> difference for the phone button ?

Are you possibly running other CPU-intensive tasks on your machine at the same time?

I can't seem to repeat your problem over here - on my 5-year old system with a single 2.4GHz CPU, it takes 27 seconds to finish doing a Boolean Difference of all the buttons from the main phone body, using the Jan-19 v2 beta with the file you posted.

This system is pretty old now, and it was not even a high end machine at the time.

You may want to take a look at your system and make sure there isn't any bad software that may be running in the background taking up a lot of CPU time.

Another possibility is that your laptop may be running in a special "conserve power mode" where it runs at a slower CPU speed in order to prolong your battery life. You may want to plug in your laptop to a power source to possibly help avoid this.

- Michael

Hello Michael....

So the problem is not the software but my laptop yeah....
OK I will check what make it happen....

Thanks !!!

Hi Anis, maybe someone else will be able to test it on their machine and see if it also takes them such a long time.

But it seems strange that my old system finishes it 10 times faster than yours...

The booleans are a very CPU intensive calculation, so if you have other programs running in the background also taking a lot of CPU time, that could slow them down quite a bit. That's the main thing I would look for at first anyway.

- Michael