I've been interested in MoI for a while and got around to installing and playing around with the trial version. I can see how the UI is designed to work well with a pen, I was able to run it on my Surface 3 and the pen interface seems quite nice. It is a bit sluggish on the Surface 3 (non-pro) but still usable.

My interests are along the lines of being able to extend MoI. I see that you can write JavaScript + HTML to add new commands and even some simple user interfaces. Is it possible to write extensions in other languages? The IDL file looks like it is COM, can I do out-of-proc COM automation to add my own features? Or is it possible to have JavaScript call code written in another language? I've not played around with what is possible beyond downloading and looking at a few sample extensions.

The license agreement for the trial prohibits reverse engineering or modifying the program. Does the purchased version contain the some prohibition? I couldn't find a link to the purchased version's license agreement. As many of the commands are JavaScript + HTML, i'm wondering if I am allowed to tweak them as I need, or if that is verboten. I get that it wouldn't be supported and could be lost with upgrades, I'm more wondering if it would be allowed / legal or not.

Regardless of these answers, i'm betting i'll end up buying it. I've done some 3d printing work with polygonal modelers and was frustrated that their booleans mess everything up. Booleans are so useful for thinking about the design of an object; they need to be a primary tool rather than a last resort. So NURBS and solid geometry seems a good match for what I need and I am impressed at how easy MoI is to learn and what can be done with only a few commands.

Dave morrill wrote an external addition using Python or ruby or something.....

I cant speak to how far you can "deconstruct" someone else's program.

It was Python. I just found it here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3341.1

-Martin

That's it!

But don't follow any links to David's domain and such. He shut it all down and left.

The defunct links will be, a road you don't want to go down, for lack of a better description.

Hi dferyance, welcome to MoI!

> Is it possible to write extensions in other languages? The IDL file looks like it is COM, can I do
> out-of-proc COM automation to add my own features?

I'm sorry but no it's not easy to do so, everything is focused on using JavaScript for the scripting language. The IDL file is for using COM but it's only used internally and not exposed to other processes. Also the next v4 version of MoI doesn't use COM internally anymore, it's now a cross platform code base. I'm not sure what method Dave Morrill set up for using Python, he must have used some JavaScript code for glue.

Just in general extensibility is not a major focus area for MoI as of yet, I do want to put more effort into that in the future but only after more "end user" focused features are finished. Both documenting and supporting extensibility takes a lot of work.


> The license agreement for the trial prohibits reverse engineering or modifying the program. Does
> the purchased version contain the some prohibition? I couldn't find a link to the purchased version's
> license agreement. As many of the commands are JavaScript + HTML, i'm wondering if I am allowed
> to tweak them as I need, or if that is verboten. I get that it wouldn't be supported and could be lost
> with upgrades, I'm more wondering if it would be allowed / legal or not.

I've attached the retail version's license key here, it's virtually the same as the trial. But really the intent is just to not modify any binaries, you can modify any of the JavaScript and HTML files as much as you want.

- Michael

Thanks Michael and everyone else for the answers. Yeah, one of the first things I look at with anything new is how much I can modify and tweak it. But having JavaScript available is still a useful mechanism. I ended up playing around with the trial more with a few ideas and decided I like it enough that I ordered it. So hopefully I'll be able to be successful using it for my own designs. If I end up with enough time I hope to experiment with my own script plugins.