Hi Marc,

> I understand that Moi's primary focus is 3d but over time I discovered that it's
> drawing engine is also superior for creating 2d geometry.
> No other applications is as responsive, fast and intuitive.

I'm glad that it is working well for you in 2d as well!

I do intend to expand the 2d capabilities over time as well, so this path should improve over time.

- Michael

oh great update! and on the features I am using the most right now too!

thanks!

Question: Is heaving multiple number of images, lets say one in front view and one in right view; does it increase the amount of memory consumption for the video card? Even if using only one view at a time?

Thank you for this latest and maybe last beta release :)

And finally.. have a great New Year and thanks for all your great work on Moi3D now in 2007, next year is gonna be a interesting one for sure. "The Year of Moi" as it'll be called will be printed in the historybooks for future generations to read. hehe

/ Magnus

Hi Val, I'm glad the update is helpful!

> Question: Is heaving multiple number of images, lets say one in front view
> and one in right view; does it increase the amount of memory consumption
> for the video card? Even if using only one view at a time?

Actually using only one view at a time (with separate images in each view) should help conserve video memory.

There is stuff built into the DirectX system so it can manage these textures that reside in video memory, and if video memory is getting cramped, it will chuck them all out to main system memory and then only load back the ones that are actually needed dynamically.

So the one for the non-active view will get chucked out in that situation and only put back in when it is actually used when that view is displayed later.

If you have a pretty low amount of video memory you should probably not try to use very high resolution images though.

- Michael

Thanks Magnus and everyone else! Happy New Year!

- Michael

Thanks Michael. And happy new year in 2 hours 1 minute!

>>>You can now hold down shift+control when selecting to make the initial click ignored and force a window type selection instead.

>This is a great idea!
>if only other applications would behave like that.

Hi Marc, you can do the same in Rhino using Alt key and dragging a selection window. -Petr

Hi Michael,

MoI seems to be faster while updating a view! Some improvements in a display engine?
Although, the executable file moi.exe put on weight during Christmas... hehe...

Petr

Hi Petr!

> MoI seems to be faster while updating a view! Some improvements in a display engine?

Hmmm.. I don't really remember any changes that would effect this.


> Although, the executable file moi.exe put on weight during Christmas... hehe...

Well it was so skinny that I figured it could use some fattening up!

That's due to the new icon - it includes a large 256x256 image in it for Vista, stored uncompressed so as not to confuse Win2k.

This one also has the curve fillet bug that you reported back a little bit ago fixed.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

>>Hmmm.. I don't really remember any changes that would effect this.
Maybe, a vacation and ice skating relaxed my eyes so everything seems very quick now :)

>>Alt+Ctrl+drag a window
Idea: Currently, there is no way of deselecting an objects by dragging a window. Alt+Ctrl+drag a window could do this(?).

Petr

Hi Petr,

> Idea: Currently, there is no way of deselecting an objects by dragging a
> window. Alt+Ctrl+drag a window could do this(?).

Right now Alt+Ctrl+drag inside of a viewport will do a zoom (move up and down). This is one of the alternative view key/mouse combos that are enabled to make MoI friendlier to people who spend most of their time in some other package, I think this one is a Maya shortcut...

Any idea of a different combo?

Currently a bunch of key combos are taken up for this kind of view manipulation compatability.

- Michael

ehm... sorry, Michael, I meant a new "Shift+Ctrl+dragging selection window" mechanism actually. Would it be possible to add that second function (deselecting selected objects by dragging a selection window) to this shortcut? -Petr

> ehm... sorry, Michael, I meant a new "Shift+Ctrl+dragging selection window"
> mechanism actually.

Right, but that combo that you were talking about Alt+Ctrl is already in use for zooming (for Maya compatibility).

I mean that if you hold down Alt+Ctrl and left drag up and down, right now it will do zooming.

To make it do deselection instead, I would have to remove the zooming function from that key combo and lose the Maya compatibility...

It kind of makes me uncomfortable to have so many of these different multi-key combos... It might be nice if there was only one way to force windowing and then some kind of option that could be triggered (pressing d??) to tweak it for deselection instead... But nothing really great immediately comes to mind.

Edit: Hmmm, maybe if you use Shift+Ctrl to initiate windowing, then let go of shift and keep only control down to make it do deselection? Do you think that is too tricky? The selection preview display will probably help, since if you forget which one it is you can just hold shift by itself (after the initial window has started) or control by itself until you see that you have got the right one.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

>>Right, but that combo that you were talking about Alt+Ctrl is already in use
>>for zooming (for Maya compatibility).

Yes, I know. It was a typing error. I didn't want to redefine that multi-key combo for zooming at all.

Generally speaking, why windowing cannot deselect a selected object(?) When I pick the selected object it gets unselected. So why couldn't dragging selection window (both solid and dashed area selection box) deselect previously selected objects?

..or....might it be possible to script an additional type of windowing and users could choose their own shortcut to initiate windowing which would work like - select unselected, deselect selected objects?


>>Hmmm, maybe if you use Shift+Ctrl to initiate windowing, then let go of shift and keep only control down to make it do deselection?
>>Do you think that is too tricky?

I think so...it would be for virtuoso only :)


Petr

Hi Petr,

> Generally speaking, why windowing cannot deselect a selected object(?) When
> I pick the selected object it gets unselected. So why couldn't dragging selection
> window (both solid and dashed area selection box) deselect previously selected objects?

It's because of targeting multiple objects - sometimes when you do a window, you may want to do several overlapping windows to help you build up your final selection.

If previously selected objects inside the window became unselected, it would interfere with this - objects in the areas intersected by multiple windows would keep flipping their selection state instead of all staying selected.


> ..or....might it be possible to script an additional type of windowing and users could
> choose their own shortcut to initiate windowing which would work like - select
> unselected, deselect selected objects?

This is probably not too hard, I can give it a try when I get back.

- Michael

Hi Petr,

Thanks for pointing this works also in Rhino.
Actually I found that in Xara (another well programmed software but for 2d vector illustration) there's a similar behavior, while pressing shift to add objects to selection, it ignores background objects when dragging a marquee.

It's small details that makes great tools!

Regards,

Marc

Hi Michael,

Ok. That sounds reasonable to me.

And how do you feel about the possibility to pass the location of moi.ini file as an argument to moi.exe? I know the people who prefer different color settings when working daytime versus at night or it would be useful to keep the complete default look...

I also wish to have a separate undo/redo stack for "viewport changes" like in Rhino (Home/End).

Petr

> And how do you feel about the possibility to pass the location of
> moi.ini file as an argument to moi.exe?

Sounds like a good idea - in fact so good that it should be working already! :)

If you have spaces in any part of the .ini file name, make sure to surround it with " " quotes.

You should also be able to use this to specify the .ini on a network share so that copies of MoI on different machines can all use the same settings file.

Let me know if it doesn't seem to be working as expected.


> I also wish to have a separate undo/redo stack for "viewport changes" like in Rhino (Home/End).

I've added this one to the wiki wishlist.

- Michael

Hmm... Is it necessary to include some switch like /ini= or -i ?

For example, this doesn't seem to work.

"C:\Program Files\MoI beta Dec-28-2007\moi.exe" c:\moi.ini


Petr

Hi Petr,

Oops - it is supposed to work like you have it there, but there is a bug messing it up. I have fixed it for the next (and probably final) patch which I am going to try and gather together tomorrow.

I also have things fixed up so that selection is restored if you do a cancel or undo. So for example if you select some edges and then run Fillet, and then cancel, the original edges will be selected again.

- Michael