Continued developer absence

Apologies for my long periods of absence and poor attendance over the past few months, I've been reasonably busy with travelling, workshops and client visits.

I'll be at Siggraph in early August (New Orleans) and I'm throwing every available inch of development at this deadline. It's clear now that I won't be able to solve all reported bugs before then, but I would nevertheless like to release a new version in the upcoming week.

So I'd like to ask for a list of the most pertinent bugs/lacking features which need to be solved asap.

Goodwill,
David

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Robert McNeel & Associates

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Luis Fraguada on July 24, 2009 at 3:19pm

David,
Great to hear from you. I hope you are enjoying the work and the travel! Would love to be in New Orleans...

One thing which I have a feeling is asking too much in light of the smaller bugs which could prob be fixed before Siggraph...could we get a good hint or two at creating our own .gha? Meaning, the ability to compile our own components? I suppose .net is fine enough to leave it be for now, but it would be nice eventually.

There are a couple other things I had thought of...I will try to gather them, but really they are not too pressing. Thanks for saying hi...safe travels
luis

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on July 24, 2009 at 3:45pm

Luis,

I'll see what I can do. I started a document a while ago but never finished it since I changed the SDK and the damn thing expired.

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on July 24, 2009 at 4:13pm

This are some bugs that first come to mind since i deal with them frequently:
- Merge components not working properly with data trees.
- Bug when adding extra inputs to the 'sort' component.
- The 'list' option of scripting components sometimes gets deactivated.
- Surfaces are passed as onbrep instead of onsurface in scripting components.

Not so frequent bugs:
- Ocasionally the 'disable preview' button stops working. Not sure how to reproduce it.
- Close curve doesen't seem work with the curve on surface component.
- Ocasionally the explode curve component doesn't work. Right now i don't remember how to reproduce it.
- The number parameter only allowed me to paste around 2900 numbers at once in the 'manage number collection' window. (Copy/paste from a spreadsheet column).

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on July 24, 2009 at 4:46pm

Maybe most pertinent lacking features:
- Data tree management components, like flatten only the last branch with the previous one.

Some random features that i have missed more than once:
- Create a rectangles with intervals instead of numbers, just like the 'plane srf' component.
- Hmm, I'd swear there were more... I'll add them later when they come to mind.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on July 24, 2009 at 4:50pm

Hi Vicente,

- Merge components not working properly with data trees.
I'll make sure this one gets fixed.

- Bug when adding extra inputs to the 'sort' component.
Variable Parameter management is plagued by many bugs, I agree they are very important.

- The 'list' option of scripting components sometimes gets deactivated.
I fixed this one already.

- Surfaces are passed as onbrep instead of onsurface in scripting components.
I fixed this one already. In fact, I included all automatic data translation functions in the new script parameters, so it will even convert the data (if it can) if you supply some other type.

- Ocasionally the 'disable preview' button stops working. Not sure how to reproduce it.
I do know there was a problem with this but I think I fixed it a few releases ago. They may be other problems still.

- Close curve doesen't seem work with the curve on surface component.
I'll look into it.

- Ocasionally the explode curve component doesn't work. Right now i don't remember how to reproduce it.
Ok, if you have an example of a curve that doesn't explode let me know.

- The number parameter only allowed me to paste around 2900 numbers at once in the 'manage number collection' window. (Copy/paste from a spreadsheet column).
Hmm. I'll need to look into this. I'll check it out, thanks.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on July 24, 2009 at 4:53pm

- Data tree management components, like flatten only the last branch with the previous one.
There is a bunch of new DataTree components available. We'll see to what extend it covers the needs.

- Create a rectangles with intervals instead of numbers, just like the 'plane srf' component.
I probably won't make new components if there's still bugs to fix. Especially if you can accomplish the task already by stringing together existing components.

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on July 25, 2009 at 2:13am

The 'explode' component doesn't seem to explode degree 1 nurbs curves into single lines (the explode rhino command does), but it works properly if you _simplify the curve and convert it in rhino as an actual polyline. When the nurbs curve is referenced it says 'referenced polyline curve', so it does seem to detect is polyline-like and should be easy to explode, i guess. Or maybe there should be a polyline parameter just like the circle or arc parameters.

Nevertheless, you can still extract points on kinks and reconstruct the individual lines using other components.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on July 25, 2009 at 5:25am

Hi Vicente,

I fixed the Explode component to work with all curves that look like Polylines.

Permalink Reply by Dimitrie Stefanescu @idid on July 24, 2009 at 5:06pm

hey david! i second and strongly engourage louis' build our own gha request. Then we could all be happily adding features :)
actually, maybe just remove the reverse engineering part of the license agreement - it's a real bummer! i mean you can sneak peak but you can't build...

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on July 25, 2009 at 3:53am

Maybe this request is rather quick to implement, if it's not available somehow already:
- That referenced geometry pass their guid along, and be able to read it from a scripting component.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on July 25, 2009 at 6:48am

I added a GUID parameter and all appropriate data casting functions.
I also added Object Name referenced in addition to ID. So if you have a BRep in the document named "MyBox", and you feed a text panel with the text "MyBox" inside of it into a BRep parameter, it will find the object.

Example image

Permalink Reply by Luis Fraguada on July 25, 2009 at 4:51am

David,
One thing which I hesitate to bring up because at times I have a hard time reproducing it...
Sometimes while using the param viewer and usually with tree branch or tree item components, if I update the definition somehow, the param viewer output goes orange. To fix this, I just reconnect the input, but I have to do it each time something changes. Sometimes I have been able to fix it entirely by replacing the param viewer, but sometimes this does not work. This does not happen on 'simple' definitions, but usually its in big definitions. Sorry to not be able to provide a file, let me see if I can cook one up which shows this issue.

Also, could we get a scroll in the param viewer.

Oh, and as if there were not enough requests...any way to change the component view type (icon or text) by component? For the most part, I am fine with icons, but I would like to name a few here and there and see it on the component instead of making a note. Maybe the global switches you have now are fine, but just on the context menu give the option to change per component (though I note the context menu on the components is pretty extensive as it is!). Pretty petty, so not a huge deal.