Hi Michael,

Many thanks for the new beta, much appreciated.

I've done some quick tests on MacOS:

• Appdata commands folder: works!

• Separation of Alt and Command keyboard shortcuts: works! Great!

• Extrude responsiveness: better now!

• Alt+RMB view manipulation: works! I'm very pleased with this, many thanks! I can now fully synchronise MoI's viewport navigation with the navigation in ZBrush. Now let's hope Wacom soon fixes the driver issue that causes a viewport to become inactive until left-clicked.

— My only remark is that after the initialisation of any object, shape or solid, the realtime size manipulation in the viewport feels slightly unresponsive / laggy. This is the first time I notice that, but I can't say with full certainty if it was better in the previous beta. It might also have something to do with the latest High Sierra AMD graphics drivers update.

— One last, very minor reminder: the viewport indicator text labels (Front, Left, etc.) are still tiny on a Retina display.

Thanks,

Metin

———————

visualization • illustration • animation • 3D (print) design — https://metinseven.com

Hi Michael ...

After I experimented some more yesterday I did an incremental save. This morning I cannot duplicate the problem. I rotated it many times ... sometimes fast and sometimes slowly ... up, down and about. No problem.

It's a mystery to me. I'll let you know if this happens again.

cheers,
eric

Persisting ... I tried an older 'save' and cannot duplicate the problem.
cheers,
eric

Hi eric,

> Persisting ... I tried an older 'save' and cannot duplicate the problem.

It's likely to be some bug in the display driver that only manifests intermittently. If you run into it again probably try rebooting your machine to let the video driver start totally fresh again and keep on the lookout for new driver releases which will hopefully fix it up. Or on Windows 10 it looks like there is a shortcut for resetting the video driver by using the key combination: Ctrl+Win+Shift+B , that would be more convenient than rebooting.

If it starts happening frequently you might also want to try installing an older driver to see if that works better until a newer driver is available.

Another thing that I'll do is add in an option for the next beta to make MoI use OpenGL on Windows rather than Direct3D11 as it currently does. Usually the Direct3D drivers are much more robust than OpenGL but maybe you've got a case where it happens to be the reverse.

- Michael

Hi Michael
>> One other note on the new node editor trackpad support - I think it's not good to set: this.canvas_moved = true;
>> in the trackpadgestureHandler, over here at least it makes it a little difficult to get the context menu on a 2 finger right-click
>> because if you move even the slightest amount while doing the right click this.canvas_moved = true; gets set and then that's used to ignore the context menu event.

Yes, you're right. I removed this command. Thank you.

Hello Michael!

If I have understood correctly, V4 is built upon a new Webkit, or whatever Webview it's based on.

So my question is : Does Moi V4 support jQuery and Local Storage via for example PouchDB
(PouchDB is a lightweight implementation of CouchDB, the famous No-Sql database)

It would be amazing if now we could leverage on that technologies!!

With jQuery and PouchDB we could for example write some powerful plugin especially dedicated to analyze and store all info of any 3dm file,
or we could write some powerful search engine strictly tied to the metadata of the objects in a 3dm file.

I stay tuned :)

Marco (mkdm)

Thanks Michael ...
It is also possible that I did not get the newest driver properly installed the first time I downloaded it. It only works if Java is installed. Java install will only work on Internet Explorer and not on Chrome (my usual browser). Late last night I managed to get Java installed and then reinstalled the Nvidea driver. That may have been the solution ... certainly no display problem today.
Cheers and thanks again,
eric

Hi Marco, yes it uses QtWebKit. Several modules that aren't used by MoI itself though are disabled in order to reduce binary size. I'm not sure about local storage but probably it's disabled. jQuery should work though.

- Michael

Hi eric, that's great I hope it stays working! Please let me know if it starts happening again though.

Thanks, - Michael

@You : "...jQuery should work though..."

Excellent!!! ASAP I will try to see if and how it works.

@You : "...to reduce binary size...I'm not sure about local storage but probably it's disabled..."

I remember that some time ago you already answered about this matter of binary size, but I didn't understand why is so important this aspect.
I ask this only from the point of view of a software developer.
Let's say that if you enable the QtWebKit module that handle local storage, you will increase the binary size of Moi of about, let's say, some megabyte.
This increment could in some way degrade the performance of Moi's CAD engine ?
If this is not the case I think that it could be great if you could give us the chance to write a new "family" of plugins that could leverage on "No-Sql database/local storage"

What do you think ?
Is it feasible ?

Thanks. I stay tuned.

Marco (mkdm)

Hi Marco,

> I remember that some time ago you already answered about this matter of binary
> size, but I didn't understand why is so important this aspect.
> I ask this only from the point of view of a software developer.

It's just a general attribute of high quality software - that it's lean and doesn't take a long time to download and install, doesn't take up a whole lot of disk space, doesn't take a long time to start up, etc...


> What do you think ?
> Is it feasible ?

It might be feasible to turn it on in the future if MoI needs to use a database store for storing history information. But it's very likely that it would use SQLite and not a No-sql engine.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I think i maybe found possible memory leak/bug in latest beta.

What i did is i scaled up that model i sent you hour ago and i scaled it 100x (to be bigger) but my export settings OBJ left on last used when object was smaller so i had angle set to 3 and divide to larger than 2 so Moi started generating poly-count, it took minute or so and it was processed to 22% and it already used 38GB of System RAM so i concluded it won't have enough ram to finish operation and then I canceled export. BUT my MOI is even 5 minutes later still not properly responding properly and GUI is slow and staggering, Memory usage oscillated from initial 38GB at processing back to 1 GB and then go up to 5GB (now is at 7GB while i type this message so it's been 8 minutes since i clicked cancel and popup window closed) but my CPU usage is still 1-2% (1 core used at full/max).

Since you have that model (NDA) you might wanna try do that to see is it memory leak or some other kind of bug.

cheers

Thanks a lot Michael for your reply.

@You : "...It might be feasible to turn it on in the future if MoI needs to use a database store for storing history information..."

I understand your point of view. No problem.
Anyway I hope that some day you will decide to enable Local Storage. :)

@You : "...But it's very likely that it would use SQLite and not a No-sql engine..."

Two questions :

1) If I decide to use SQLite, can I access it directly from Moi's scripts/command ?
Is this solution good for both WIndows/Mac version of Moi ?
What I want to say is : if I decide to write a plugin that should manage a SqlLite database inside some commands/script written for Moi V4,
can I "write once - run everywhere" ? Here for "everywhere" I mean both Windows and Mac version of Moi.
Or for example, if I want to access a SQLite db from within a Moi script, I must run Moi in admin mode on Windows or do other kind of "trick" on Mac ?

2) SQLite or not, I think that at least I could work on a bunch of JSON files, used for storing all the data that I want to manage.
Same thoughts like question 1. In this case "write once - run everywhere" ?

Thanks a lot for your kind support.
I stay tuned.

Hi Lewis - I think Divide larger than of 2 is probably too small for your 100x scaled object, try like 20 or 10. Just at 5 it's generating 4 million polygons.

The strange behavior is probably from having memory get swapped out to disk, everything will grind to a halt and perform very poorly once that starts going.

It is possible to limit the amount of memory that MoI will use on Windows, there's a setting in moi.ini under:

[Settings]
MaxProcessMemoryUseGB=

If you set that to say 1/2 of your system ram that should make MoI fail when it reaches that level instead of having things bog down so much.

- Michael

Hi Marco,

> 1) If I decide to use SQLite, can I access it directly from Moi's scripts/command ?

MoI does not currently have anything specifically set up to use SQLite from scripts but it might be possible to write out text files with SQL statements using moi.filesystem.openFileStream() and then invoke the sqlite binary to read them using moi.filesystem.shellExecute().


> Is this solution good for both WIndows/Mac version of Moi ?

It might be - Mac has a version of sqlite built in, for Windows it would need to be deployed.


> What I want to say is : if I decide to write a plugin that should manage a SqlLite database inside
> some commands/script written for Moi V4, can I "write once - run everywhere" ? Here for
> "everywhere" I mean both Windows and Mac version of Moi.
> Or for example, if I want to access a SQLite db from within a Moi script, I must run Moi in
> admin mode on Windows or do other kind of "trick" on Mac ?

I'm not sure of the answers for these questions, it would probably take some experimentation and testing to determine these things.


> 2) SQLite or not, I think that at least I could work on a bunch of JSON files, used
> for storing all the data that I want to manage.
> Same thoughts like question 1. In this case "write once - run everywhere" ?

You can write a text file with cross platform support by using moi.filesystem.openFileStream(). There may be operating system
specific limits on where you can place them though, for example Windows restricts writing to the Program Files directory
unless the program is run with elevated privileges.

- Michael

Hi Metin, thanks for testing it!

>
> • Appdata commands folder: works!
>
> • Separation of Alt and Command keyboard shortcuts: works! Great!
>
> • Extrude responsiveness: better now!
>
> • Alt+RMB view manipulation: works! I'm very pleased with this, many thanks! I can now fully synchronise
> MoI's viewport navigation with the navigation in ZBrush. Now let's hope Wacom soon fixes the driver issue
> that causes a viewport to become inactive until left-clicked.

Great!


> — My only remark is that after the initialisation of any object, shape or solid, the realtime size manipulation
> in the viewport feels slightly unresponsive / laggy. This is the first time I notice that, but I can't say with full
> certainty if it was better in the previous beta. It might also have something to do with the latest High Sierra
> AMD graphics drivers update.

Could you please describe this in some more detail? I haven't seen anything like this over here yet.

Does it happen only when you've got some kind of complex model loaded or does it also happen starting with a blank scene?

And the size manipulation you're talking about is grabbing one of the edit frame corners and dragging it?


> — One last, very minor reminder: the viewport indicator text labels (Front, Left, etc.) are still
> tiny on a Retina display.

Yup, text display inside of viewports is the last remaining area that still needs work for getting back to full V3 functionality.


- Michael

Thank you very much Michael for your full explanation!!
Really much appreciated!

For the moment I think I'm going to get rid of SQLite and I will make some test with "JSON files + moi.filesystem.openFileStream()"

I will let you know my results :)

Thanks again and have a nice day.

Ciao!

Hi Michael,

Yes divide by 2 is too many polygons for sure (but settings are left as last used and once you open that window MOI starts generating with last used settings, maybe we should have "start" at Export obj window to avoid such issues of automatic generating up on opening ?). No it wasn't swapping (my machine has 128GB of RAM) it's just gone weird and i finally managed to close MOI after 10 minutes of memory chewing up and down :).

It's not big problem i just wanted to report in case you can simulate on your end.

Thanks

Hi Lewis, I can't quite simulate it exactly over here because I've only got 16GB, and when that gets filled up yes performance goes way downhill but that's just what I'd expect.

I think it's possible that the sluggish performance you were seeing is still related to a type of paging similar to swapping to disk. There are some other circumstances where that can happen other than just running out, like if you minimize a program's main window its working set is trimmed and then page faults will occur for any touched pages to bring them back to the active working set. (see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/293215/the-working-set-of-an-application-is-trimmed-when-its-top-level-window). When there is a really large amount of memory involved all these operations done by the OS take more time to finish.

- Michael

Yep swapping on HDD is always performance downhill, well i guess good thing is that it didn't crash anyway :).