Hi Gavin - Jeff seems to be confused. There is a kind of primitive anti-aliased line calculator thing built into DirectX called ID3DXLine (it actually isn't quite built in directly to the D3D core, it is part of the supplemental D3DX library). Apparently he thinks that is what MoI is using... It's certainly not.
I spent about 4 months creating the custom curve display engine for MoI. It's definitely a special state-of-the-art thing, I don't think that it is actually matched in the display engine of any other CAD program out there, even $30,000+ ones.
I developed a custom engine to get greater speed, and also to get some special effects that weren't possible with the basic DX one.
Here is one example - mitered corners. Notice how the corners of this polyline are extended to meet in a sharp proper corner:
Another one is the selection halo that puts a kind of glow effect around the outside of a curve to let you know it will be selected if you click down:
You've already seen the subtle hidden-line effect.
Here is one of the early tests of the engine to give you an idea of what is possible:
The best thing is the blazing speed, quite a bit of the development time was spent in heavily optimizing.
I'm not personally aware of any CAD engine that comes close to this.
So "nothing special".... ? I definitely disagree! :)
- Michael
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