> You could in theory acheive the same thing with an xyz
> value that auto fills all values the same as the first
> entered, but then lets the next values be changed. That
> would do both birds but just might not fit with the sleek
> interface.
Hmmm, I guess that would be possible for sphere, but what about for cylinder and cone where there are 2 values of radius + height ?
It is actually not very hard to tweak the UI, the actual code for the bounding box editor can be applied to spheres.
I've attached a custom version of the size editor that will show x: y: z: for everything except for a line, so that should let you get your version set up to do what you want. Copy the attached EditSizeMenu.htm over top of the old one to get it set up like that. There is currently a bug where the "Radius" display in the top-level panel (the spot where you click to open the edit menu) does not update properly if you edit an radiused object by x,y,z values, but it is just a display glitch the actual edit itself works fine. I'll fix that up but in the meantime you'll need to unselect and reselect the object to get the correct display there.
> The keyboard comment was refering to the auotcad
> or rhino type fields where you can call command and
> give parameters in one shot. Kindof like
> "Cyl 6 2 12,20 2 6 Enter" Bam!
Sort of... But actually you don't normally type in a single long line like that in the UI in rhino or autocad - each time you hit space it is the same as enter so the command prompt will change and your line will clear after each of those space values.
For most things MoI's auto-focus mechanism that I was mentioning earlier actually makes things work pretty much the same way with MoI except for that very first initial word that launches the command.
Like for instance in MoI if you want to do a line from 5,2 to 6,9 start the line command, then you can type everything after that, pretty much the same as autocad or rhino after the command has started. You can even use a lot of the same kind of type-in point notation that autocad supports, like @2,2 for relative values (although r2,2 is kind of easier to remember unless you've used autocad a whole lot), polar coordinates like 5<45, etc...
There is one kind of big problem with the fully command-line focused input mechanism ( aside from it being kind of archaic geeky ;) ) which is that it is pretty much based on having only one type of numeric input available at a time.
Like in Rhino if you go to draw a rectangle you don't actually get any numeric feedback at all about the width and height of the rectangle you are currently drawing with your mouse on the screen. You can type in a width and then after that a height but you don't get feedback about those values with mouse moves.
When you draw a rectangle in MoI, you get a more dialog-box like UI in that upper corner which is not limited to only one single numeric input at a time, that lets it have a richer amount of feedback which for rectangle for example lets you see width and height values update while you move your mouse around.
That's pretty much the example that early off killed off any thought about doing a command-line interface as the primary UI for MoI.
- Michael
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