LDCad 1.5 Alpha 1 (win+linux)

[Roland Melkert]

Thanks

All comments stay OK and at the correct place, no lines are reordered, no meta information is lost

Only lines you actually changed during editing will be reformatted all others will use the cached original line string. So you might loose (some) indenting etc on type 1 lines, although I'm considering making improvements on that front too

And a second side note: the source window currently uses separate formatting (more efficient for OpenGL prepping) code so it will format all lines uniformly (indenting wise etc) but only for display purposes.

* I'd prefer if a double-click on line "0 STEP" does "Go to that STEP"
* double click on a submodel reference line should open that submodel
* double click breaks the selection which is annoying - can you distinguish between click and double click so double click does not do "click" action?

I'll implement this, I've been thinking to drop the current double click to open props anyway as it contradicts the 3D double click behavior.

* also, it would be nice to have a number of step shown, for example an icon at the beginning of the line (i.e. white ellipsis with a step number)
* an indicator/icon showing the piece on this line is hiddenl

I was thinking about adding icons to indicate grouping/hiding but thought it would take up to much space like the col/exp indent does while no submodels are used. I could however gray out hidden lines.

* a hot key with a function scrolling the source window at the position of the current step (of current (sub)model)

'Scroll to selection', and 'follow selection' will be available in Alpha 2.

* highlight the current step in the source window (lighter background etc.)

I was thinking about adding an option to limit the rendered source to the 'current step' or 'up to current step'.

* ROTSTEP support: double click opening a subwindow where one can rotate the model and a radio-button "absolute/relative turn".

Once things are a bit more stable/finished I was planning to fully support some thirdparty meta highlighting and property wise. First on the list are the LPub ones.

* "color arrows hot keys": using 'p' in move mode one can see a cross of arrows and the "toolbox arrow" in the third direction. I wish those arrows were colored (red, green blue) and there were hotkeys for move in red, green and blue directions. This speeds up the final positioning of the brick. These keys should work regardless of the mode (move/rotation), CTRL+those keys for rotations around those color arrows.

New in 1.5 is the option to do keyboard move's while the pin is in rotation mode by using ctrl+arrows. You can also disable the projection mapping so up/down is always the y-axis etc. I like the color coding suggestion might take that up in a future version.

* local grid ('o' key) improvement: local grid is a big help in many cases but it works only for a center of brick and default direction. The great improvement would be to be able to set local grid to place+direction of defined special points, like points of snap. For example a side stud of 'headlight brick', rotation/snap point of hinges etc.
* next question would be how to specify the same for the other ("placed") piece. But I do not have any idea how the UI should look like for that.

Yes using the snap info pos/ori would be nice to have indeed, but like you say it's difficult to implement gui (indication) wise. Although I'm thinking tab key for controlling it would probably work.


Thanks for your input.