Hi Michael,

Is it possible to have an entry in the object browser tab for unnamed objects?

Recently I lost things. I had hidden a lot of stuff by isolating the bits I was working on. When I unhid the things from the objects tab half of my objects were missing. For a while I thought I had coincidentally deleted them. Eventually I opened up the Types tab to see that some of the surfaces were still hidden. Of course these were the ones that were unnamed.

All objects are covered in the Types and Styles tabs, I would like that they should also be covered in the Objects one too. So the first time you create an object you get an entry in the Object tab which says 'unnamed'.

I don't see these objects as not having a name at all, but as having a default name of 'unnamed'. Or, to put it another way, they have not been named by me. They are objects, and they are there, so so they should really show up in the Objects tab. Yes?

I hope this is making sense :)

Hi Tony, I'm not really so sure about that...

What about later on with Groups, would you expect under the groups listing to see an entry for a group that was named "not a group"?

The "Objects" label is intended to be short for "Named objects"...

So I'm not sure about having unnamed objects show up in the section that is intended to display named objects.

I can understand that in some particular scenario like you are describing that it could possibly be useful. But it can be hard to justify having something that is odd in 99% of other uses just to cover some particular unusual case, this may possibly fall into that kind of category. But maybe not. I'll have to put it on the back burner and mull it over a bit.

- Michael

I think you made a script that will automatically iterate names on unamed objects. Would this work here?

Hi Burr, I think the one you're talking about is from here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3114.5

which is for renaming multiple objects with the same name into individual names with a number appended on to it.

- Michael

Yeah, that was the one. So not quite what I thought. But you could still use it after hiding all "named objects" then you could mass select all unnamed left and name them, then run that to individualize them....For now.

Hi Burr

Thanks for the link, I hadn't seen that one. Been away from MoI for a little while so I'm just catching up. Not quite what I was talking about though.

Hi Michael.

I think the problem here is in the tab label.

>> What about later on with Groups, would you expect under the groups listing to see an entry for a
>> group that was named "not a group"?

Regarding Groups. No I would not expect that. Because the tab title tells me it is going to show the groups, but if I haven't made any groups then I don't expect there to be anything in there.


>> The "Objects" label is intended to be short for "Named objects"...

But it isn't a list of objects at all, is it? It is really a list of names as there can be many, many objects in the file that don't show up in this tab. So, if it is a list of names that can be used as shortcuts for hiding and selecting objects then would not a more appropriate label of the tab be 'Object Names', or simply 'Names', not 'Objects'.

If the tab label was Names or Object Names and I haven't made any names then I wouldn't expect to see anything there.


>> I can understand that in some particular scenario...
I don't see this as a particular, personal scenario, but a regular one if you use the hide and isolate commands.

To see what I mean, please try this.
. Make some objects. The more the better.
. Name half of them with a few different names so you have something in the objects list.
. Now select everything and use the hide icon to hide them.
. Now make a few new objects. Imagine you are now working on this for some time.
. Now use the objects tab to show all your objects.
. Some are missing! Where are they? Did I accidentally delete them? All my objects are visible in the objects tab!

No, the answer is they are still hidden, even though everything is turned on in the objects tab. It seemed to me that the point of the objects tab was to list all the objects and that's what I was using it for. It never really occurred to me that it wasn't listing all the objects and unless you hide things using the normal hide command then you don't notice it. When it happens objects seem to have disappeared.

This is what happened to me. If your intention is to list names then I think you should consider changing the title of the tab to Names instead of Objects.

All the other scene browser tabs denote something is still hidden. Working with a combination of tabs, I can select and deslect anything in this setup.

Hi Tony, unfortunately often times stuff in the UI needs to be truncated in order to fit better, longer labels on things tend to cause problems especially when translated into some other languages.

That's why it is not unusual for labels to be shortened like that.

Just having "Names" for the title is probably not sustainable long term because there will at some point be other kinds of named things as well like named views, named cplanes, named drawing sheets, etc... So there definitely needs to be some emphasis in the label that it is about named _objects_ specifically.

The other thing that is meant to be a clue to this behavior is if you open it when you have no named objects, it looks like this:



So notice there that it specifically references named objects...


> But it isn't a list of objects at all, is it?

Yeah it's not a list of all objects, it is a list of named objects...


> It is really a list of names as there can be many, many objects
> in the file that don't show up in this tab.

Certainly, just like later on with Groups there will potentially be many objects in the model that have not been assigned to a group and so therefore will not show up in the groups section.

This is really no different than that - the intention of the Objects section is to let you have quick and easy access to objects that you have given a name...


> To see what I mean, please try this. <....>

But I don't see how this is going to be any different with Groups - in the future when there are groups and you decide to use groups to organize some of your objects and then create some new ones that are not grouped, you're going to see exactly the same thing that you are describing here...

The solution in both cases would be the same - use some other section like Types > All objects if you want to see the status of every single object in your scene rather than the status of some particular named objects which is what the Objects section does.

I mean the Objects section does not say "All Objects" on its label either...


You can actually edit the name if you want - the name comes from \ui\EnglishStrings.txt, line 643:

Scene browser objects section=Objects


You can edit that to say:

Scene browser objects section=Names


- Michael

Okay, I give in :)

>> You can actually edit the name if you want - the name comes from \ui\EnglishStrings.txt, line 643:

Yes, I did this already for myself. I just thought it was confusing so flagged it up.

No worries.

DOGPILE!!!!!!!!!! :o

Sorry Ash.