LDCad 1.7 Alpha 1 (win+linux)

[Roland Melkert]

hen dragging a bezier handle, could we maybe shift+drag to simultaneously change the following/preceding handle also? This would allow symmetrical reshaping. (Idea stolen from Inkscape.)

I like this idea, i will look into it for the next next version (Alpha 3/Beta 1)

It would be very handy to have a 1-click rotation to that special value of 53.1301/36.8699 degrees (the 0.6 0.8 matrix), which is so central to Technic building. A grid stepping in this amount would be interesting, but I know these should really add up to 360, so maybe this is macro territory? Or maybe the manual rotation dialog could have radio buttons with these and certain other special angles (or even user-defined "favorite" angles)? <- [i]I think the "favorites" idea is my favorite so far.

Favorite angles could be an interesting feature. It could be done with macro's too tough as you can assign hotkeys to macro's.

This is very, very tiny…but maybe also trivial to fix. When opening the header dialog and switching to the "tags" tab, there is consistently a delay of 2-3 seconds while, I assume, the category and keywords lists are loaded. Maybe these lists should be loaded only when/if they are opened? because 99 times out of 100, I only go to that tab to set the file type (model, part, unofficial etc.) and don't need those drop-down lists at all.

I'll have to check but I'm fairly sure (some of) those lists are already loaded on demand. The issue is mainly caused by wxWidgets extremely slow list updates (even when you suppress screen updates), which might be addressed in one of their later builds.

If a ROTSTEP meta appears at the end of a file, could there be an option for LDCad not to add an extra step number? That way, if the last step of a model has a rotation (or cancels a previous rotation), we can use the ROTSTEP function to display it correctly without having an extra blank step at the end of the model.[/list]

This is mostly a LDraw format problem as the step meta indicates the END of a step so there are always (step meta count + 1) steps in a model.
The step must be counted or you wouldn't be able to navigate (back) to the last step.
Could hide it in view mode though, but not sure if that's really worth all the hassle.

If this is the case, I wonder if it would be possible (either as a user-configurable setting, or perhaps as an option in file cleanup) to comment out the type 1 lines between the BUILD_MOD BEGIN and BUILD_MOD END_MOD tags—in other words, the parts that exist in their temporary state? That way, the file that LDCad saves would contain no duplicate parts nor any helper parts, and thus be immediately viewable in LDView, Stud.io, etc. At the same time, LDCad would still display these commented lines during its own editing sessions.

There is a macro which does something very similar with the MLCad HIDE meta, maybe you can adapt that?

In fact, at the risk of wishful thinking, this sounds simple enough, and fixes such a long-standing problem, that maybe BUILD_MOD might be able to appear in the nearer future than other LPub metas…? (And it might even be possible to do with the existing BUFEXCHG commands, too…)

2.0 is very unlikely to be picked up anytime soon given I hardly get to work on 1.7 these days.

The main reason I started a 1.7 is because 2.0 is nowhere near where I wanted it to be.

it's basically just an pseudo HTML 'div' orientated GUI rendering engine at the moment.
   

Don't mind the childish look, it uses hand drawn 'test' textures.

That said the new LPub build mod meta are very interesting so I might support them in 1.7 beta 1/2 depending on how hard they are to implement.