Hi Michael

I was just wondering if the Lock functionality could be chanaged a little?

Currently, if there is a locked object in front of an unlocked object, you can't select the unlocked object behind it.

Perhaps it could work like this?

- a locked object (and its components) cannot be selected

- a locked object is partially transparent (so you can see through it better)

- a locked object can still be used for selection points (same as present)

What do you think?

(currently the only way to select an object behind (or inside of) a locked object is by band boxing it. And even when it is selected, you can't see the yellow selection lines)

Hi NightCabbage, it's a great idea, but probably the key thing would be to have the transparency working.

Otherwise without being able to actually see what you are selecting there is the potential for some bad stuff to happen, for example imagine that you just click down and drag the mouse a little bit because you wanted to do window rectangle selection.

But instead of doing the area selection what actually happened is that you selected an object that you couldn't see and actually dragged it to a new spot.

So without being able to see what you were going to be selecting it could be a big problem.

I do want to add in some transparency at some point, but there will probably be a fair amount of work involved with that to do it well.

Selection is just generally a pretty sensitive area to mess with, it is easy for there to be bad side effects to things that seem like they would be helpful in other particular circumstances.

- Michael

Hi Michael

Oh, no - I meant that only the locked object would be partially transparent - all non-locked objects would be normal.

So because these partially transparent objects are locked, you can't select them anyway, so no mistakes could be made.

Also,, because they're only partially transparent, you can still seem them - it's just that you can also see other objects hiding behind them.

(unless I'm forgetting something?)

Hi NightCabbage, yes all of that make sense - the problem that I was describing would be what would happen if locked objects did not have transparency.

So the transparency part of what you were describing is a key thing.

Unfortunately it's not necessarily going to be a completely easy thing to add in support for object transparency, in addition to the work to just make the display work it may possibly open up various other issues.

For example if you have a non-locked object but it is set to be transparent, does that mean that selection should go through it and only hit opaque non-locked objects?

There will be various stuff like that which will need to be considered...

- Michael