I find I use the draw curve/draw solid and the construct/transform menus most the time to create geometry and then use the edit/view/select menu afterwards for adjustments. The problem is that the edit/view/select menu is between the two other menus, and since only two menus can be open at a time, Im constantly having to maximize the two menus two go back and forth between them. I think it would be good to put the edit/view/select menu on the bottom instead of the middle so as to be able to keep the other two menus open at the same time.

You might also want to consider making a Maya type of hotbox menus for really quick access and to give more viewport space. Also an option for a text only menu would keep all the menus open all the time.

Hi Arquebus, thanks for the feedback!

It's a fairly complex area to make the UI editable on the fly like that. There's just a lot of work involved to do it well (like by drag/drop, docking, etc) so that probably won't happen very soon, but I would like to try it eventually.

However, if you don't mind editing a text file in notepad, you can edit the UI definition files to set it up the way you want in the current beta.

To do this, start up notepad and open the file SidePane.htm, which is in the \ui subfolder under MoI's main folder in \Program files.

The file is fairly straightforward, there are different elements for different palettes and buttons.

In your case, you want to find this section:

<moi:PaletteHeader id="EditViewSelectHeader" ...>
<... some stuff inside here ...>
</moi:PaletteHeader>
<moi:PaletteBody>
<.... some stuff inside here ....>
</moi:PaletteBody>

There's a total of 61 lines of stuff that makes up the edit/view/select menu. Just cut it from there and paste it at the end of the file before the closing </body> tag. After you do that, the UI will have the edit/view/select menu at the bottom like you want the next time you run MoI.

The only problem with this is that you'll have to repeat this with every new install, so you may want to copy these directions somewhere that you can get back to later on.


> You might also want to consider making a Maya type of hotbox menus
> for really quick access and to give more viewport space. Also an option
> for a text only menu would keep all the menus open all the time.

I do want to add some options for stuff like this, especially icon only / text only options for the UI, but I just didn't have time to get that in for V1.

Actually removing the icons is another thing you can do manually by editing the SidePane.htm file as well - to do this find the section near the top that has this:

moi\:CommandButton
{
padding-top:0.15em;
padding-bottom:0.15em;
}

and edit it to say this instead:

moi\:CommandButton
{
padding-top:0.15em;
padding-bottom:0.15em;
image-width:0px;
image-height:0px;
}

That will remove the icons from the side pane and only leave the text label. One cool thing is that it will leave the icons for just the little pop-up menu thing like the options under Boolean, etc..


The UI is actually extremely malleable, just not by a mouse-oriented drag/drop type method yet.

- Michael

That's neat. So I guess it's also possible to edit that file to separate a few tabs. My screen is 1024px high, and I'd like to have one or two more tabs open at the same time.

Hi Anthony, yes that's possible, it would be kind of a more fine-tuned edit than just a big cut and paste.

You'd need to create a new

<moi:PaletteHeader ...>
</moi:PaletteHeader>
<moi:PaletteBody>
</moi:PaletteBody>

section, and fill it in each part with stuff sliced out from the other header and body section.

It's probably a good idea to save a backup before editing it. Let me know if you get stuck on it - if something is not working right you can post the file here and I can fix it up, you basically need to make sure that things match like an opening tag should match with a closing tag. If you forget to put in a closing tag for example things can get messed up pretty easily.

- Michael

I was able to separate the construct and transform tabs. But the select tab gave some problems because I either ran out of vertical screen space or something else. In any case it doesn't roll-down even if some other tabs are rolled-up. It's not really a problem, though.

Hi Anthony, a fixed up version with a working select is attached here.

It wasn't working because the old Select body stuff was still up in the old spot, making 2 elements with the same "SelectTabContent" id.

A couple of things in that mechanism are linked by id names, duplicate ids kind of messes it up.

I'm glad you were able to morph the UI more to your liking!

- Michael

Michael, just a quick note the side pane rearrangement is sweet :) Thanks

Here you go, try this version (make sure to back up your old version first).

Everything works, the question is how long can you stand to use it? ;)

- Michael

LOL :)

Thanks for the fixup, Michael. I "zigged when I should have zagged," or in my case "copied when I should have cut." Now I have the interface just as I wanted.

PS: now I hate the marquee tag even more than before. And I didn't think that was possible. :)

If there was only a <marqueeblink>.... That would be the coolest EVER!!! ;)