To start off... Michael, This thing is great! I can't say enough. The display is beautiful, the tools are coherent, and the interface makes me ache for a tablet pc. KUDOS!

Now for the real stuff... :)

"Please" for the next beta, when you unhide a group of objects/components, reselect them. So that we can easily manipulate the selection and rehide them. I think it would be a nice interim feature, until layers are implemented. From a certain line of reasoning it seems that hide/unhide should work that way anyhow, and it should be really quick to implement.

Also, coming from a CAD background, two items to mention... First, thanks for the AutoCAD style selection rectangles (fence/box depending on the direction you drag out the rectangle).

Second, I don't like the grid. I wish it would draw over objects which are behind/under it. It's pretty, it looks really nice, but I think it could provide a better visual cue as to where things lie in 3D space.

Now how about oddball things I've run into... It has crashed on me twice. It just dumped to the desktop. Both times I was doing booleans with two objects that had several coincident surfaces. It just thought for a long time, then left. :) Quite honestly, especially in a beta, I would rather it just dump out, as opposed to locking up :)
Win2K SP4
768 Meg
Radeon 7000 64M (Catalyst 5.8 driver - I know it's an older driver, but the newer catalyst control panels are bloated pieces of swine flesh. I don't know who, over there, makes the decisions on such things, but there is no reason to stack dependency upon dependency just to make a visual fiesta out of what should be a list of check boxes! Argh,... ARGH! it is such a sticking point with me. You never should have brought it up :) (Focus on the -> :) )

What would this whole thing be, without throwing in a question... Can you flip a surface, inside for out? For instance, I create a boolean object then separate it, rearrange the pieces, and re-join it... nevermind... in creating screenshots to illustrate my problem, I realized the problem was, and is, strictly mine :) (my edges weren't lining up. When they are lined up properly it works as it should)

I guess I still owe you a question... What price range are we looking at?

All in all, it's looking to be an awesome package. It is still evolving, yet it already feels polished, it's visually appealing, very functional, and setup is less than 4.5 Meg. I can't say enough!

Keep up the good work!

It's kind of an afterthought, but MoI might benefit from an input driver for this thing...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTi4zOdz09I

I'm glad you like it!

> "Please" for the next beta, when you unhide a group of objects/components,
> reselect them. So that we can easily manipulate the selection and rehide them.

I've set this up for the next beta, which will probably be a couple of weeks away. For the next beta after that I'm planning on doing a bit more work to hide so that when you unhide instead of just bringing back everything, it will temporarily show all the hidden objects and let you pick which ones you want to unhide, then when you are done picking only those particular ones will get shown. That should make it another notch more effective.


> First, thanks for the AutoCAD style selection rectangles (fence/box
> depending on the direction you drag out the rectangle).

You're welcome!


> Second, I don't like the grid. I wish it would draw over objects which
> are behind/under it. It's pretty, it looks really nice, but I think it could
> provide a better visual cue as to where things lie in 3D space.

I wanted to have an option to do what you're describing here, but it is actually a fair amount more work than what it seems like it should be. It gets a bit complicated because the grid can extend a far distance off into the background, so it kind of has to be handled in a few different slices. And then I've got a dashed line style on the grid lines which is kind of hard to maintain in a continuous pattern when things are sliced up. Not impossible, just a chunk of work. So these problems made me postpone having this option, I will probably be able to have it eventually but it will be a while.


> It has crashed on me twice. It just dumped to the desktop.

Can please you take a look in the c:\program files\MoI folder to see if there are any crash report files saved there? They are files like moi_report1.zip, moi_report2.zip. If there are any there, please e-mail them to me at moi@moi3d.com, they will contain some information that may help me analyze the cause of the crash.

They may not have been generated because normally there is supposed to be a dialog box that displays on a crash, but you didn't see that.


> Radeon 7000 64M (Catalyst 5.8 driver - I know it's an older driver

Apart from the driver, the card itself is rather old. It's just about the bare minimum for being able to run MoI very smoothly. It will work fine with not too complicated stuff, but it will become a bottleneck if you try to do anything more complex.

But one of the cool features of MoI is that all the anti-aliased curve drawing stuff functions well even on these older cards, which I'm sure you've noticed! :)


> I guess I still owe you a question... What price range are we looking at?

The plan is to have a pretty low end price, especially as CAD programs go. It's not completely set yet so I'm not quite ready to announce an actual figure. As a general range - a bit more than most shareware programs but a lot less than most CAD programs...

Thanks for all the kudos, I appreciate it!

- Michael