LDCad 2.0 GUI Thoughts

[Roland Melkert]

Thanks for the positive feedback

- some number localization errors due to the "." vs ",". I have English as UI language, but Romania as region, under KDE. So comma is for decimal.

This could be a bug. All gui fields should accept both the "." and the ",". Files always use the ".". during writing, but (i think, need to confirm) will also accept "," during reading.

- I have needed several times to compare models, so I would like so much having few instances of LDCad at once, at least 2, not switching from one model to another. I use two displays too, would help me a lot to have one LDCad open on each. Also, I don't like the idea of working exclusively in fullscreen. Sometimes it is useful to consult some original manual during building virtually and I like to switch.

You can disable the instance protection by editing/creating LDCad.cfg
This file is located in /etc under linux if you ran setup.sh
Or create it in the same folder as the main executable if you use the archive version as is. But name it the same as the exe with .cfg appended to it.

To disable instances add

Code:

[options]
useSingleInstance=false

to it (make sure [options] is not already in there, if so place in the existing block.

- sometimes snapping is hard, especially when needing angles (for instance 9398 chassy around the battery). I still can't find the right way, rotating after calcualting the angles is not real snapping.

You can rotate the parts while dragging to get them closer to the needed angle using the arrow pgup/down keys. Hold down ctrl to use 45 deg stepping.
That said snapping is far from perfect I'm hoping to make some improvements in 2.0 though.

- I'd like more palette views, I use more than 6 categories for technic. I also need to be careful to avoid paticular printed parts (like technic beam 3 with "40 1977 - 2017" text etc.). These should be somewhere else or be possible to filter them out.

This is currently hardcoded but it will highly likely be variable in 2.0. The initial though about 6 was the fact most humans can remember about 6 or 7 things items in short term memory, or so have I been told

- Setting submodels centers it's a mistery to me, I can't make it clearly, sometimes they remain with some center away from the submodel itself...

Whatever is at 0,0,0 is the center of the model. The easiest way yo change it is to select a part (in non nested mode) you think should be the center then use ctrl+a en shift+c

- I'd like to have a compatible parts list export for all the model or submodels, I use stud.io for that in a convoluted way (sending it to them, not publishing, adding it to the wishlist, making the parts list there etc..)

1.6c will have a very simple tab separated values export for part bin group content, but you would probably need to convert it after.

- a powerful feature would be a function to relate parts in a way that moves them when needed when a different part is chosen in place of some part of the model... but this is complicated even to define...

Do you mean automatic animation or grouping? The later is already available even in nested mode.