Hi Michael.

In essence, all I'm querying is why the second and third (X,Y and Z spacing stages) 'move on' without a right-click or by pressing the Done button. Please look at my video to see what I mean.

http://screencast.com/t/QYy15lOuZIc

A preview feature would be very nice to have for those occasions where an array is called for in perhaps a decorative way, where spacing and number are decided by eye rather than by a specific number and measurement. However, that isn't what I'm asking for at this time - I'm just thinking about the thing in my first paragraph.

The last part of my screencast shows a 2D array system that's part of one of my CAM programs and it works pretty well for me - again, I'm not asking you to build it into MoI or anything, it's just there for interest's sake.


Cheers.
Martin (2).

Hi Martin,

> In essence, all I'm querying is why the second and third (X,Y and Z spacing stages) 'move on'
> without a right-click or by pressing the Done button. Please look at my video to
> see what I mean.

It's because those steps are following the same workflow as the Rectangle drawing command.

If you go to Draw curve > Rectangle > Corner, then place the corner point you'll see the same kind of prompt for entering in both a width and height and once you have filled in both of those that's enough information to finish the rectangle and the rectangle command ends. This eliminates an extra step that would otherwise be needed - with the current workflow for rectangle drawing if you want to create a rectangle of width 10 and height 20 you type in 10, then push tab then type 20 and push enter and it's done, you don't need another additional step for pressing "Done" on top of that.

Since the ArrayGrid is basically drawing a rectangle there, it is set up to try and maintain the same behavior as the regular rectangle drawing command.

It's possible to modify the array behavior by editing the ArrayGrid command script file to make it behave like you want though - in a text editor like Notepad, go to the \commands sub-folder inside of MoI's main installation folder (you will need to right-click on Notepad and use "Run as administrator" if you're using a recent version of Windows since Windows now prevents modification to stuff in \Program Files by default) and open up the ArrayGrid.js file. Go to line number 158 which has this:

			if ( HaveWidth && HaveHeight )
				break;

and either delete those lines or "comment them out" by putting 2 backslashes in front of both lines like this:

			//if ( HaveWidth && HaveHeight )
			//	break;

Once you have done that then I think you should get the behavior that you're asking about where it won't proceed automatically once both width and height have been entered numerically (as opposed to entered by clicking points with the mouse for a spacing rectangle). But you will now have an inconsistent behavior between the regular rectangle drawing command and this area.

- Michael

Thanks for that, Michael.

It's just what I wanted, I've now got the option to check and edit the numbers before finalising the array - the extra mouse click isn't an inconvenience for me.

A preview feature would be nice at some time in the future, provided you could find a good way to implement it and your workload eases a little.


Much appreciated.
Martin (2).