Hi Patrick, I've finally gotten to your last post here with the images in it.

> Goal: showing the faces of the cube in the Red Style

I think I understand now that when you say "showing" you don't mean the action of hiding or showing things like when you click on things to hide them or show them (changing their state I mean), you mean just the status display of the eye?

Then what about with the actions like clicking on items in "Types" - would you want that to also work in a similar restricted way so that once you only had red showing, clicking on Types/Curves would only show red curves only instead of all curves?

I think that would have some major negative consequences, because it would mean for example that you could not do an operation on all curves just by going immediately to "Types", you would have to first go through all styles to turn on all of them first, before the actions in "Types" would impact all objects.

That's potentially a lot of extra steps for some of the most simple actions like "show all curves" which are very easy to do currently.


Also, I think it would be pretty confusing if the status display was a separate thing from the actions. I mean it would not be good to show the eyes in Types by a kind of automatic filtering by styles, but then target different ones when you clicked on them. For predictable and simple operation, it should be the same items targeted whether it is for status display (how the eye is shown) or what is targeted by actions like clicking.

So really the key thing under the system that you are talking about would be to understand the consequences of how the actions would work, not just the status display alone...


I think what would be more feasible would be if you could do some kind of special action that would declare some item or set of items to be working as a "filter", which would then cause the kind of narrowing effect that you are talking about, for both status display and actions. But I don't think it would work to do it totally automatic, you would need to do something special to get a filter, the default is a lot easier to understand when Types / Curves just always means "All curves".

- Michael

Hi Patrick - just another note on this - for the next beta I've extended the "selection undo" mechanism to also cover hidden and locked states as well, and it works with the browser actions.

So this means that if you don't like the result of an action you just did with the browser, you can hit undo (either the button or Ctrl+Z) to revert it.

It is a kind of a special "shy" undo - it will only revert just the very last hide/show/select/unselect action, so that it doesn't get in the way of stepping through a longer list of geometry changes.

This selection undo is something that actually works in MoI v1 for other basic selection actions like say you have built up a selection and then you accidentally clicked out in space which deselected everything - in v1 you can hit undo in this situation to revert that selection change.

With the next v2 beta that same thing will now be available for reverting the last browser action in a similar way.

That should probably help quite a lot to reduce worries about possibly messing up your visibility or selection states by using the browser.

- Michael

Michael, thanks a lot for all the feedback! And for the script - that will settle my issues perfectly for the moment!

I don't have time to get back on everything now, and don't think it's a good idea either, as I don't want to get you off your work!

My conclusion from what I just read is
1. I'm probably just messing things up because i'm not used to the style behaviour yet - it's getting better though.. Using different programs at a time and hardly getting any sleep might have something to do with it :)

2. that we probably favour different style behaviour for different reasons. While you would like to have all curves selected when clicking on curves rather than only those that are currently visible, I would favour the opposite. But I'm modelling architecture on a large site for the moment. So when I'm working on one building and need the curves of that building, the last thing I want is selecting all the other curves in the scene... When working on a single objects I can imagine the other behaviour is more straightforward.

Selecting all the visible curves is as much predictable behaviour to me as selecting all the curves - and the first option is much more useful to me. If you need all the curves on a regular basis, you can make a group for easy selection. Otherwise I think you mainly need the geometry of the part you're modelling at the moment.

>But there will be an option in the next beta for you to switch to that other behavior
>of not showing objects when doing the selection action, if that makes more sense to you.

Well, that actually settles my problem! So thanks a lot, hope you didn't do all that effort especially for me. I'm pretty sure some architectural users will favour that behaviour so it's a good idea to test it out in the beta i think.

Sorry i didn't make myself more clear from the start, but i think in the end we understand each others points!

Thanks a ton for the VIP treatment, you take customer care to a whole new level!
a happy customer

Thx for the explanations ;)