MoI makes clean geometry!

Michael,
I slept on this a bit and thought I would bring it up again.

doing it that way may make your ui unpredictable. I used your question method on myself. "What happens if someone chooses 6 decimal places?"

It does break the basic continuity from function to function. My only initial problem was that .54 displays as .54, but .5407 displays as .54 and I would need to edit to be sure.

I think you had it right with keeping that number simple and only have the larger value in the edit popup, but that label could have some king of an "identifier" that means there are further digits in the realm of the decimal options. Does that make more sense? so like color or a character. Somthing like .54>

Burr

[EDIT] A possible try I was thinking of also was to make that decimal display in the label only work off of "1 digit" to the left of the decimal (possibly even "no digits" on the left). Again with 12 inch parts the thousanth value is less of a factor but with the 1 inch and .25 inch stuff it can become apparent.

Hi Burr, sorry I don't think I'm quite following you on this last one.

> I used your question method on myself. "What happens if
> someone chooses 6 decimal places?"

I guess I'm not quite sure what part of the UI you are referring to now - are you talking about the "3 values on a single line" part that is displayed on the top level UI, or do you mean the fields in the Edit size popup menu that is displayed when you click on that size info?

If you install that patch above for the edit size popup (update your install's EditSizeMenu.htm with the attached version above) then that part should behave pretty predictably when you set 6 decimal places in the options, it should just display 6 decimal places there with the patch installed same as any other regular field that you see.

The one that has all 3 values on a single line is a special case and it just cannot adhere to the exact same standard as the regular fields do. But with that other previous update in place it will pay attention to your custom number of decimal places set for numbers less than 100.


> but that label could have some king of an "identifier" that
> means there are further digits in the realm of the decimal
> options. Does that make more sense? so like color or a
> character. Somthing like .54>

When you have moved things with the mouse you'll pretty much have values like 0.542598218938321 as the actual number in nearly all situations unless you've used something like grid snap. So basically that special character would be displaying pretty much all the time...


I'm kind of confused now - I thought the above patches would get your display set up how you needed with the 4 decimal places showing in that size area like you were wanting initially, is that not working right?

- Michael

Hi Michael,
It works exactly how you set it up to work and I was just re-thinking a longer impact on your UI.

Let me clarify.

>>I guess I'm not quite sure what part of the UI you are referring to now - are you talking about the "3 values on a single line" part that is displayed on the top level UI, ?>>>

Yes. Talking about the "Label" with 3 values on one line. You made it do exactly as we discussed, but after fooling around a bit, larger values or setting that even higher decimal setting (six places) will truncate that number. Was thinking you may want to avoid this.

>>>>If you install that patch above for the edit size popup (update your install's EditSizeMenu.htm with the attached version above) then that part should behave pretty predictably when you set 6 decimal places in the options, it should just display 6 decimal places there with the patch installed same as any other regular field that you see.>>>>

Yes that patch is perfect and actually desireable in all situations. So it now supports the higher decimal settings.

>>>>The one that has all 3 values on a single line is a special case and it just cannot adhere to the exact same standard as the regular fields do. But with that other previous update in place it will pay attention to your custom number of decimal places set for numbers less than 100.>>>

Yes, this is what I am refering to now. You set it up to do what I wanted, but then I noticed the truncated numbers with higher values and thought you may not want this and am trying to propose an alternative that deals with the situation I presented. Which leads to the last part and the cruxt of my new presentation.

>>>>>When you have moved things with the mouse you'll pretty much have values like 0.542598218938321 as the actual number in nearly all situations unless you've used something like grid snap. So basically that special character would be displaying pretty much all the time...>>>>

That really is it and I am suggesting a revert from my original request. Having the UI be clean with only 2 decimal places like you have set up really does work. My particular problem was when I use that label up there (The one with 3 lines on it) to gather my object properties, it will display .54 even if the value is .53476 or something. With the new setup you made that displays all the decimal places, if I create somthing that is .54 then the display only shows the 2 decimals. no real need for any others.

So really all I need in the display label is an indicator that the value is something other than "Round". Hence the .54> THen I would know that it needs an edit popup to get the 6 decimal precision. The edit popup handles these numbers quite well.

I understand that for most users the smaller values would not be needed and haveing some kind of special character "Always there" may confuse the UI. Trying to think of a way to acheive the "notification of the larger decimal value" without the UI impacted detrimentally. Maybe even the 2 decimal number appears with a slightly darker box around it.

Does that make sense?

> if I create somthing that is .54 then the display only shows
> the 2 decimals. no real need for any others

Is this the underlying problem - that you're not sure when you see 0.54 somewhere whether it is 0.54 exactly, or if it has been rounded for display?

Would you like to have an option to have the trailing zeros displayed, so that this would display as 0.5400 instead of just 0.54 in that case?

That may help to clarify the number of decimal points used for a display at any particular time since you would see the same number of digits to the right of the decimal in all cases.

That could possibly eliminate any need for special colors or symbols because you would know how many decimals are being rounded to at any time just by seeing the number.

- Michael

>>>Is this the underlying problem - that you're not sure when you see 0.54 somewhere whether it is 0.54 exactly, or if it has been rounded for display?>>>

Yes. As it is now, I have to use the EditSizeMenu popup to check this. A quick visual indicator in that label (the one with 3 values on one line) is really what I am thinking about.

>>>Would you like to have an option to have the trailing zeros displayed, so that this would display as 0.5400 instead of just 0.54 in that case?>>>

Well, thats what you gave me now. I was just re-thinking the "Have to display all the digits" that I asked for and got. If you dont see an issue with this, then I have what I asked for.

>>>>That may help to clarify the number of decimal points used for a display at any particular time since you would see the same number of digits to the right of the decimal in all cases.>>>

Not that I dont know what decimal places I have set, just an indication that a particular object is not exactly .54 Yes this new display label does do that now, but was thinking that there may be a better way to indicate this than trying to cram in all the decimals on one line like I had originally asked for.

Hi Burr,

> Well, thats what you gave me now.

Not quite exactly - for example even with these updates above if you set your number of decimal places display to be 4 decimal places (under Options / General / Decimal display), and then create a rectangle and enter in a width of height of 5.45 for it, it will be displayed like this currently:



That's because MoI currently strips out any trailing zeros at the end of a numeric display just to try and make the display a little more compact and simple where possible.

But I can add an option to enable trailing zeros, which if enabled would then make a rectangle with 5.45 width and height display like this when 4 decimal places is set for the display:




When that option would be set, that may help to clarify the precision of any particular number you are looking at since it would not be shortened with the ending zeros removed if it was exact. That would then hopefully give you the same kind of information that you were looking for without using colors or special characters.

Would that help? I'm not completely sure if I have understood the entire thing correctly though.

- Michael

Thats not it Michael.

I do understand that that new number of an exact .54 displays as .54 even if my decimals are set to 6 or something. That is a proper way for it to be.

My issue "WAS" knowing when the trailing numbers were present.

You fixed this last night with the updated files you posted. The display now reads the decimals I choose and the edit popup now shows these also. Thanks!


________________________

The new post was me speculating that trying to display all the trailing numbers seemed like it may be problematic for your UI. Especially if the decimals were set to a larger value. Say six. The edit popup can handle this, but the display label gets crammed. (This is a natural occurance for what I had originally suggested)

I was just trying to brainstorm a better way to acheive the goal of knowing that .54 was really .540758. while leaving that display label at its old way of displaying a value of just 2 decimal places. Instead of trying the new way of displaying all the decimal places.

It's just food for thought and not to say it is not working for me.

I guess showing trailing zeros would not necessarily let you know that a value was exact, though.

For example if you had a value of 5.45001 and you have 4 decimal places set, it would display as 5.4500 .

But it should help to clarify the level of accuracy for any given number that is displayed though.

- Michael

Hi Burr, I see what you are getting at.

Really though, I just figure that if you want to set your display to 6 decimal places, it is a natural side effect for that one particular part of the UI to not be able to handle it all...

It seems to be pretty unusual for someone to want to set it to that high of a level, it is totally possible that no existing user actually has it set there for normal work! (if someone is reading this that does have it set that high, please speak up!)

So it's probably one of those things where it is a kind of theoretical problem that does not necessarily need to be solved since probably nobody is actually running into it...

- Michael

Actually just displaying .54 should mean exact! the way it is set up now.

OIC, Burr hits self on head. You mean I would know if it were not exact because you could at least easily fit the 2 extra zeros!

Yes that works there but you did point out a possible confusion area where one may think that .5400 was then end of it and not edit his entity.

The original UI was very clean and sleak. The question is....Is there a way to visually let the user know that there are exteneded digits on that displayed number, without opening the EditSizeMenu popup? (That does handle it by the way, and you gave me a shortcut to launch it..Very nice, Just thinking of a quicker "visual clue".


For instance this:



Would tell me that the first 2 vaules are exactly as they are displayed, but that .54 actually had more data in the range of my decimal settings and I should further edit or review this with the EditSizeMenu popup. yet keeps your label unclutered with the huge values that Could be created by trying to display all the decimal places out front like that.

I posted myt last response while you were posting your last response.

I can accept your last answer as it does seem no other users are concerned with this area.

You have provided me a fix that works and am satisfied.

Thanks for all the time spent on this for me.

Burr

No problem Burr, I'm glad that this updated system works for what you need, that seems good enough for now! :)

I'm thinking that it still may be a good idea to add a "Show trailing zeros" option anyway, it fits in pretty well just to the side of the decimal display option here:




That will then give you some flexibility to decide if you want numbers displayed like 5.32 or 5.3200 , it is probably good to have this choice.

- Michael

So now what is the max of decimal point?

Thats perfect and I think that 4 trailing zeros is accurate enough for most stuff. :)

Thanks again

Hi Pilou,

> So now what is the max of decimal point?

You can find the max setting under Options / General / Decimal display - click the arrow for the dropdown there and look at the one on the bottom, that is the maximum one currently settable in the UI.

Is there a reason why you are concerned about the maximum number? I mean do you expect to need to set the display to have a large quantity of decimal points for some purpose?

- Michael

Just by curiosity :)
because something had amazing me : in Autocad you can draw the Solar system to the atom at Scale 1 !!!
it's just the number of decimal point (out and in)
I say "draw", not "print"! ;)
Terrific experience! Borgesian story!

of course you must name every object else your mouse whell will died before you click on Pluton! :)
And of course a system of objects is needing too :)

Ps Signature is some strange appears and disapears without reason!

Hi Pilou, even though it is possible to do stuff with such a high amount of fractions or high numeric values, there are a lot of problems that can tend to come up. That's because the basic mechanism that a computer uses to calculate "floating point" numbers only has a limited precision since the numbers have to fit within a limited amount of memory.

It is possible to increase the level of precision with a different kind of approach, but it is usually only done for specialized software because each high precision number starts to take up a lot of memory, and also operations are much slower because they won't use the computer's built in floating point hardware.

With the standard system of floating point numbers, there will be a kind of rounding effect if you try to use values like 0.000000000000000000001 or 1000000000000000000000.23511241251412312312312321 - things very large or very small. It can work, but accuracy gets lost during calculations as numbers snap to the "nearest representable number" for the amount of memory that the number has to use to hold its data.

Floating point numbers have the greatest accuracy when they are somewhat closer to the value of 1.

That doesn't mean that you can't use a range of numbers, if you are dealing with numbers in a range of like 1000000 to 0.0000001 the error level for basic operations is pretty small.

But when you start to talk about tiny fractions or huge numbers of a scale much larger than that, those are usually better to do with software that is set up with specialized types of operations in mind to try and avoid accuracy loss.

- Michael

Hi Pilou, also in MoI (and other solid modelers) there are also additional issues beyond just the basic accuracy of fundamental arithmetic - MoI and other solid modeling systems often need to calculate results to an approximated level of accuracy.

In MoI this is the fitting tolerance which is 0.001 units in size.

So when you do things like a boolean operation, when MoI calculates the intersection between 2 surfaces it will do some calculations where it continues to increase the accuracy of the result until it is at least 0.001 units from the "true" result. There are many operations for which the completely accurate result is just too heavy to calculate.

So operations that involve this kind of fitting process will not tend to work very well in a solid modeling program if you have objects that are greatly larger or greatly smaller than the fitting tolerance.

That's just another area that tends to make things like modeling a solar system at a scale of 1 to 1 not work very well with a solid modeling program.

Generally with MoI you should try to keep your numbers in a range of something like 0.01 to 3000.0 to get good results.

- Michael