When are conditional lines needed?

[Travis Cobbs]

Cylindrical primitives have conditional lines at their ends with control points such that they assume a linear continuation of the shape. This is perfect when the shape is continuing as assumed, e.g. at rounded corners of rectangular objects (yellow and green lines).

When trying to avoid rotating primitives 45 degrees, the solution tend to be placing two 1-8 segments back to back. The conditional lines in the middle are on top of each other, but have different control points (turquoise lines). Neither conditional line is accurate and reviewers may point out "missing cond line". The solution is to add a third conditional line with correct control points.

However, other reviewers see this "superfluous" conditional line and demand it being removed. What is the best way?



PS. My personal preference is to launch a series of cyli without conditional lines at the ends.

Saying that two cyl primitives next to each other have inaccurate conditional lines is wrong, and adding an extra "correct" one is also wrong. The current conditional lines are the way they are on purpose, and the fact that two can be put next to each other and still produce correct output is intentional. The two conditional lines together produce an identical visual result to the single conditional lines used in the middle of the primitives. While it is true that having two is slightly inefficient, the alternative is to either create a whole new set of cylinder primitives, or to not use cylinder primitives at all in this case. IMO, neither option is preferable to what is currently done.

Granted, I guess I am biased, since if a new set of primitives were created, I would have to add code to LDView in order to support them in its primitive substitution. But even ignoring that, I feel that the effort required to support a whole new set far outweighs the tiny inefficiency introduced by the current set.

It would appear that reviewers placing holds for this situation need to be educated, but that shouldn't be too difficult.