Hey again :)

This is a little behaviour of MoI that has gotten in the way frequently (but I've only just remembered to post about it now).

Take the following example:



I have selected the horizontal line, and now I want to move it (by its center).

So I hover over the center of the Horizontal line, but then, when I click and drag it, instead of moving my current selection (the obvious behaviour which I want, because dragging is moving, not selecting), it will instead deselect my current object and select and move the other, unselected vertical line.

So my suggestion for behaviour is as follows:

If you click (but don't drag) an object - it will select/deselect that object (like current behaviour).

If you drag an object - it will not change your selection at all, but just move the currently selected ojbect(s). And if you have nothing selected, then it will select that object and begin moving it (as it also does presently).

Cheers!

Hi NightCabbage, check out this previous thread for a discussion on this:

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3629.1


Yes, this is intentional behavior - if you drag on an unselected object selection will shift to it alone. This is to enable doing quick tweaks of individual objects or control points without having to do a lot of deselecting in between each drag.

Here's an example from that previous thread that shows why it is set up this way:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3629.14


The solution to your problem here is to use the Transform > Move command instead of dragging - Move is not focused on that kind of "quick tweaking" action like Drag is, once you launch Move it will not alter the selection so you will not have any problem grabbing the midpoint of that line as the base point if you use Move.


Unfortunately not changing the selection at all during drag would have some pretty major bad side effects. For instance here is a pretty simple case where there are 3 selected circles and now you move your mouse over the 4th unselected one and drag it:



If it worked like you are describing here with no selection changes on drag, that means that when you dragged the unselected circle nothing would happen to it at all and instead the other 3 circles far away from your mouse would actually be the ones that moved...

You'd also end up with an extra deselection step needed after adjusting control points and stuff like that, some other example are given in that thread above.


So for this case, what you had run into is actually correct behavior because it makes dragging work better for "quick tweaking" type activities. If the behavior gets in your way you need to use the Transform > Move command instead which will solve the problem.

- Michael

I guess it all comes down to how you use the program...

I (personally) like the idea of having to select an object before drag move will work on it (unless you have no selection, then it would select and move the object)

(and if you drag that 4th, unselected circle, with my way, nothing would happen at all - only dragging a selected object would make it move)

Could there be an option for this perhaps? I use MoI pretty much every day and find this counter-intuitive for me :)

So to clarify:

a) You have nothing selected. You drag an unselected object. It will select and move.

b) You have one or more objects selected. You drag a selected object. The selected object(s) will move.

c) You have one or more objects selected. You drag an unselected object. Nothing will happen.

Hi NightCabbage, yes it might be possible to have that as an option in v3.

One thing that may be somewhat of a complication is the c) behavior though:


> c) You have one or more objects selected. You drag an
> unselected object. Nothing will happen.

This means that dragging would diverge quite a bit from clicking - right now there is a kind of symmetry between clicking to select an object and dragging on an object - in both cases the active object which was highlighted with a halo around it gets affected in some way.

But in the case that you're talking about here would mean doing things much differently between a click and a drag.


The other complication is in the situation that you showed initially where you have a selected and unselected object and trying to pick at a spot where they actually cross over each other. That makes it pretty easy to actually drag on the unselected one unless there was some kind of priority or extra gravity given to the selected one. Right now the gravity is actually given to the unselected one to make it easier to select things by clicking, so that's again an area where there is some conflict between what click selection is trying to do versus what this modified kind of drag would be trying to do.


At any rate, currently you probably would benefit from setting up a keyboard shortcut for the Move command so you could trigger it easily when you wanted this behavior - it works like you are describing where it just takes in the current selection and does not modify it like dragging does.

- Michael

Yeah I'm ging to use 'M' for now and that should be ok :)