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

Will the trailing zero's option reflect the options setting or just be hard coded at 4?

Hi Burr, it works in combination with the number of decimal places setting.

So for instance if you have Options / General / Decimal display: set to show 2 decimal places, if you enable "Show trailing zeros", you will get numbers displayed like 3.00 , 2.30 , etc..

If you are set up to show 4 decimal places and you enable "Show trailing zeros", you will get numbers displayed like 3.0000 , 2.3000 , etc...

This is all set up now for the next v2 beta.


When "Show trailing zeros" is un-checked (which will be the default initially) you will get numbers like: 3 2.3 , where any zeros to the right of the decimal point are removed (and the decimal point itself removed if it was going to be all zeros to the right) - this is the same as in previous versions.

- Michael

Thx for the very clear explanations as usual! :)