Hi Grendel, it's a great looking final result! I'm glad that it finally completed, it must have crunched away on those threads for quite some time, those are rather brutal to process.

It will probably be quite a while before I can do anything to speed up the booleans, but there is a ridiculously huge speedup coming for mesh export in the next beta though.

- Michael

Give it hell Brian...everyone gets a little better trying something outside our comfort range.


"ridiculously huge" I love the sound of that. Some of my file sizes run at 90mb .3dm so I'm looking forward to that. Sometimes I'll wait 10-15 minutes for meshing on large assemblies so that is going to be great. Is it possible to multi-core the boolean calculations as well?

> Is it possible to multi-core the boolean calculations as well?

It's theoretically possible... But difficult in practice unfortunately. It would require quite a few changes to the geometry library code, which creates a big problem for maitenance such as applying bug fixes or other updates from the core library.

I don't have that problem with the mesher since that part is all my own code.


There are also going to be some other big speed optimizations in the next beta for the dynamic feedback during transforms, like when you are moving the mouse around when dragging or mirroring objects, etc... This should also help out quite a lot when working on a heavy model.


You probably already know this, but just in case the other thing that can currently help a lot with heavier files is to go to Options / View / Meshing parameters, and set "Mesh angle" to something like 20 degrees, and uncheck "Add detail to inflections". That produces a much less dense display mesh which won't look quite as nice on the screen but it will conserve a whole bunch of memory and reduce display mesh calculation time.

The next beta will not quite have the display mesher working on multiple cores yet, only the file export mesher at first. But it won't take too much to get multi core going for the display meshing as well in a bit.

- Michael

Looks great Grendel !
What grade of stainless steel are you guys using for these subsea components ?

Just one thing about the threads, I find it unusual to have an assembly model showing detailed threads, especially if it is a working model. I work on large assemblies every day and we never show a detailed thread, it's always symbolic, so the bolt or screw/hole is just a plain shaft/hole with dashed circles at the top and bottom representing the thread, is this a visual thing for the customer ?

Just curious.
~Danny~

Yes it's for a training and they prefer to see the physical threads, they look a lot better in an exploded view as well. I use Solidworks at work and I never model them either, just a callout or a bitmap representation.

Michael ...

I sounds like the next beta may be soon ??? :)

Happy New Year.

eric

Do either of you allow fly's on your wall? (Turn around and look... That would be me!!!)

Hi Eric,

> I sounds like the next beta may be soon ??? :)

It's going well but still kind of in the middle of fixing up the meshing improvements, it will probably be another week or so before that is all complete.

Then I think I'll put out another beta with these performance improvements, but I won't have the object properties stuff finished up quite yet for this one. These performance improvements have taken a lot more time than I had thought so probably object colors which I had thought previously would be in this next beta actually won't be until the next one after.

- Michael

Hi Michael ...

Thanks for responding. I am excited about your progress with MoI. I can only imagine the amount of work it must take.

I am looking forward to object properties but am content to wait until that's ready.

Thanks for all your work and your patient and thorough help to all of us.

cheers,
eric

Grendel

I started with a circle (which would be a sphere) and just let the mind run free on this preliminary sketch idea.
What great fun as the mind works!

The practical side of getting all the threading/exploded views of parts--wow--have I got some work ahead of me to refine.

PS the practicality of the idea is irrelevant!

Michael

Having all the sections Draw/Draw Solid etc open all at the one time at the right ( and with my Brian foot layout!) really, really is a high priority I suggest.
Hope it can be prioritised. I mumble/grumble here all the time!

Brian

Hi Brian,

> Having all the sections Draw/Draw Solid etc open all at
> the one time at the right ( and with my Brian foot layout!)
> really, really is a high priority I suggest.

Actually the main priority during initial UI development was pretty much the complete reverse of that - to have a UI design that did not cause all things to be open simultaneously, since that tends to cause a lot of scalability problems.

By scalability I mean that there would not then be a natural way to add additional palettes in the future without having a big impact on the main UI.

In the future I would like to tune this up by having a kind of drag/drop UI arrangement type system, but unfortunately that will take quite a large amount of work to make that happen.

Because it will take a large amount of work to accomplish it, that unfortunately makes it very difficult to place it at a high priority, it would currently displace too many other much more frequently requested things.

That will probably be more like a v3 or even v4 type thing.

- Michael

Michael

You make me cry into my glass of Coopers! (V4---STRUTH!)--it's after noon--think I need to drown my sorrows with another stubby!

I think yours is a perspective from people who live on the upsidedown world from here---whereas , here, the day starts hours a head of you lot!

Ohhh!----the frustration!

Brian

Where are those tissues?

Hi Brian, I know it's tough, sorry! ;)

The tricky part is that there are other priorities for the UI as well, for example to work well on many different resolution screens (not only just Brian's screen), and to be able to function well without forcing the need to scroll the UI up or down.

Having a panel where you sometimes need to do one click on a tab to activate a different palette is a whole lot better workflow than trying to scroll a big UI container up and down to find the right UI.

If MoI was designed to only run on just your monitor's resolution and not on any others, then it would be easier for me to have done some different things with the design and probably I would have separated things out by default (at least somewhat) more like you are talking about.

But I'm sorry - it is important for MoI to work well on a broader range of monitors, not only focused just on yours only! :)

The other thing you can do is edit the UI definition files - these are HTML files that are inside the \ui subfolder under MoI's main installation folder. These files control all the UI so if you edit them you can change the UI. If you really can't wait until v3 or v4 then that is an alternate way to get what you want right now.

- Michael

Maybe a survey of people who might, nowadays, use MoI on, less than , 17in Monitors?

Brian
NRN

Hi Brian,

> Maybe a survey of people who might, nowadays, use MoI on, less than , 17in Monitors?

I guess that would include nearly all laptop users?

It's pretty hard to get accurate information in a survey. To get accurate information I would probably need to do something like build a reporting mechanism into MoI so it could automatically send data about machine configuration back to me, but a lot of people seem to not like having those kinds of reporting mechanisms in their software though.

- Michael

People who use MoI on less than a 15inch screens then?

The problem is, only, in modifying, very slightly, the size of the icons!--refer back to the earlier example I produced where it was done (roughly)

Brian

When you are convinced --make your point--I was taught that--also!

"Having a panel where you sometimes need to do one click on a tab to activate a different palette is a whole lot better workflow than trying to scroll a big UI container up and down to find the right UI."

I would agree with this, its frustrating for me with other applications to have to scroll up and down palettes to see what is in them, seems kind of self defeating and disorientates the palette space.

The answer is to make a work space that is customizable, Sketchup is a very very good example of this, but I would agree that other things should have a higher priority, groups and layers for example!

I have the impression that you dont want to use right click menus but I think they will be almost essential to keep the organisation of palettes simple, no?


my demo runs out in a few days but I will be buying a copy very soon.

Hi Brian,

> People who use MoI on less than a 15inch screens then?

Again, many laptops have smaller than 15 inch screens.

For example just a very quick survey of new DELL laptops here - I count 5 out of 11 models on that page have a screen of less than 15 inches in size.

Actually smaller sized laptops are currently one of the most popular types.


re: Icon size - you can actually change the size of the icons without tweaking the UI files, for that go to Options / General and use the UI size slider to scale the UI to your preference.

- Michael

Hi Paul,

> The answer is to make a work space that is customizable,
> Sketchup is a very very good example of this, but I would
> agree that other things should have a higher priority, groups
> and layers for example!

Yeah easier customization would definitely help with that.

But it tends to be a difficult area to implement especially when the UI is different than the kind of "standard toolbar UI".

Early on in MoI's development I had to make a decision whether to spend a lot of time working on UI drag/drop type customization, or instead to work on developing just a single UI that was as good as I could make it, and I chose the latter. I would definitely make the same decision again. If I had forever to develop it, it would have been possible to do both, but my time is limited so I have to be careful which big projects I undertake. Now that the UI is really well defined it will probably help to make it more feasible to do a more targeted type of customization than it would have been trying to focus on customization earlier in MoI's lifetime.

Customization actually tends to be an area used by a fairly smallish number of users. For example in Microsoft Office, after gathering a substantial amount of data on how people use Office, they found out that less than 2% of Office sessions ran with any kind of customized UI:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/06/27/648269.aspx
That's one reason that made it possible for them to shift to a much different UI model in Office 2007 which actually has a lot in common with MoI, including actually losing a lot of customization type functions.


> I have the impression that you dont want to use right
> click menus but I think they will be almost essential to
> keep the organisation of palettes simple, no?

I think that I will be adding some right-clicks in some strategic areas for advanced commands. But it tends to make things pretty hidden so I try to avoid it a lot for basic functions.

In the future as I add more functions the plan is to mainly add new palettes, but that will be collapsed by default. To see what this will look like you can actually collapse a palette currently by clicking on its tab again after it is already active.

So there will be tabs like "Render", "Dim", "Analyze", etc... below the current palettes but with them being collapsed by default they won't add hardly any complexity to the top level UI.

- Michael

"re: Icon size - you can actually change the size of the icons without tweaking the UI files, for that go to Options / General and use the UI size slider to scale the UI to your preference."

I did not know that one was there! WOW!

And you say that having those parts separated so that they can be open at the same time-- is "difficult"?

Maybe I am missing something. (Running around in circles?)

Brian