I've been seeing the following two problems in pretty much every model I've worked upon:

- Sometimes I'll be trying to select an edge within a solid, and as I'm mousing over the edge trying to get it to "light up" to select it, I'll suddenly see an edge somewhere off in another part of the solid "light up", even though it's nowhere near the mouse cursor.

- At other times, especially in the ortho views, I'll be trying to select a 2d shape, and it won't ever "light up". Sometimes zooming in
more helps, but usually I'll have to go to another view to try and select it there. Usually its the only object in the vicinity of the mouse cursor, so its not like there's too many objects for it to discriminate between.

Are these known problems?

Hi Dave, it's possible to have problems like this if your video driver has forced anti-aliasing to be turned on.

MoI uses the video card during one portion of the selection process, and if it anti-aliases the selection data it messes it up.

MoI requests to not have anti-aliasing for this process but some video cards will do it anyway if you have adjusted their driver settings to have it turned on automatically.

So please take a look at your video driver settings - if anti-aliasing is turned on automatically there for all programs, you can set up an exception for MoI.exe to have it "application controlled" instead of forced on, and that will likely solve the problem.

Please let me know if you still see the same problem after adjusting that.

- Michael

Michael,

I bet that's it! I've got Messiah installed, and it's just the opposite. It has major screen problems if anti-aliasing is not turned on. So I'll try and fiddle with the settings to see if I can find a happy compromise that satisfies both apps.

Thanks...

Hi Dave, also usually in the driver settings there is a way to associate certain settings with a particular .exe .

So if you do that, that would allow you to have the driver use different settings between Moi and Messiah.

- Michael

This http://www.projectmessiah.com/ ?

> This http://www.projectmessiah.com/ ?

Yes, that one. I remember giving you that information on one of the 3D-Coat forums. You must be everywhere :-)

Ah yes! I remember now :)
I am at any place where i had translated the prog :D

>Hi Dave, also usually in the driver settings there is a way to associate certain settings with a particular .exe .

>So if you do that, that would allow you to have the driver use different settings between Moi and Messiah.

Sounds great, but I haven't found a way to do that with my Radeon 1950XT card yet. For now, I just set the AA settings back to 'Let the application decide'. I'm using MoI a lot more at the moment than I am Messiah...

Hi Dave, hmmm it looks like ATI does not currently have that kind of per-application settings in the driver like Nvidia drivers have.

It looks like they do have a method under "Profiles" where you can set things up to switch between saved driver settings with a hotkey or with a menu item off the tray icon, that may be useful.

Did setting AA to 'Let the application decide' solve your selection problems?

- Michael

> Hi Dave, hmmm it looks like ATI does not currently have that kind of per-application settings in the driver like Nvidia drivers have.

Yeah, I didn't see any options like that either.

>It looks like they do have a method under "Profiles" where you can set things up to switch between saved driver settings with a hotkey or with a menu item off the tray icon, that may be useful.

I looked at that, but it didn't seem all that convenient to use, but maybe I'll look into it more if I start using both apps at the same time.

> Did setting AA to 'Let the application decide' solve your selection problems?

I think so. I have not had any selection 'glitches' since I changed the setting. So thanks again for cluing me in about what causes the problem.

BTW, I've got a little more than 40% of the Javascript API documented so far. Things are starting to bog down a bit as I get into API areas that are harder to test or guess at what they do. But overall I think I'm making good progress. I've run into several APIs that don't seem to do what they say they do, and a couple of others that cause consistent crashes. Should I be running these by you, or do you expect that to be the case for some of the things in the API?

I'm also spotting some things that I think are omissions from the API in terms of making the API generally useful to third party developers. I assume that in some cases you only put in support for things you knew you needed to handle from the script level, and left out support for things you could handle completely at the C/C++ level. It could also be that I haven't explored every nook and cranny yet as well. so maybe I've missed how to do something. In any case, the question is: are you interested in filling in the API gaps, if indeed there are any? If so, I'll start making a separate set of notes for those things that don't currently seem doable from the scripting level...

Hi Dave,

> I've run into several APIs that don't seem to do what they say
> they do, and a couple of others that cause consistent crashes.
> Should I be running these by you, or do you expect that to be
> the case for some of the things in the API?

It would be great to know about these. That's not too surprising that could happen if you were using a method in some different way from what other parts of MoI currently do.

But it is not expected that using a script method should crash MoI. Script errors or asserts possibly, but not crashes. A full on crash is likely to be a bug that should be fixed up in MoI.


> I'm also spotting some things that I think are omissions from
> the API in terms of making the API generally useful to third party
> developers. I assume that in some cases you only put in support for
> things you knew you needed to handle from the script level, and left
> out support for things you could handle completely at the C/C++ level.

Yeah the script API is not as comprehensive as the internal C++ api in certain areas, it's not really intended that scripts would do heavy calculations though, they're more used for controlling program flow, UI, and glue logic.

At some point in the future I'd like to set up a C++ SDK as well that would expose more detailed geometry stuff which could be used for doing custom heavier calculations. I'm not sure exactly when that will happen though, since it will require a lot of work.


> In any case, the question is: are you interested in filling in the API
> gaps, if indeed there are any?

Certainly! But some things may take a while before I can get to them, if they are relatively complex.

Generally I've been filling in more stuff in the script API as needed in order to make scripts for user-requested functions, like get the end point of a curve, stuff like that.

- Michael