Menu
Cart

Home › Forums › AxoTools › AxoTools beta builds › 1-10-21 status

Viewing 7 posts - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • January 10, 2021 at 7:33 pm #4566
    Rick Johnson
    Keymaster

    You may want to set your plugins to check for updates daily. There should be another update tomorrow, January 11, which includes some recent improvements:

    • Dial controls on Windows would “stick” to the cursor even after the mouse was released. This is a bug in the developer libraries. Until this is fixed, once the cursor leaves the control area it’s read as a mouse up event. This only applies to Windows.
    • Pressing up or down key while changing fields in the Projection panel would move focus to the Transformations panel text field. Fixed.
    • Pressing up or down keys to change rotations would cause strange changes when using units other than points. Fixed.
    • Rotation items with a 0 value would sometimes be accidentally added to the list. This should be fixed, or at least much less likely to happen.
    • When objects have multiple rotations applied, the art seems to be accurately projected, but if movements are added with multiple rotations, the direction of the Z axis may be off by 180°. A workaround is to move by a negative value, but the bug comes and goes depending on the current projection. Ron has found some patterns in this behavior and is testing some equations to correct this.

    Question: Would you like to see a small button to toggle the value in the text field between positive and negative, for either rotations or distance?

    Thanks,
    Rick

    January 10, 2021 at 9:39 pm #4569
    chegr
    Participant

    Meanwhile, here are my observations so far:

    1. Units conversion seems to work almost flawlessly. I mean it works all the time, except the very first time I tweaked Stroke Widths: as soon as I entered the detail stroke value, 0.5mm, the outline one become 1000 time larger it seemed. I changed detail to 1mm and outline became 1000 larger again! I changed the outline manually and it stayed as I entered it and now the bug is gone.

    2. Actually, there is something else with units. Enter ‘0.25’ to that detail stroke field — it will add mm to it, OK. Place cursor after 2, press Backspace, hit Enter. Instead of adapting to 0.5mm we get 5mm. Please remember that I work with regional comma delimiter and it gets translated all right — whatever I enter, comma or dot, both got converted to comma-view, as Ai does everywhere for me. So it means it ignores integral part every time we change decimal.

    3. Dodecahedron looks amazing. I didn’t try to repeat it yet, but I’d need that several months before, when I needed to create a soccer ball, a truncated icosahedron! This would be a great tutorial and a example file.

    4. I wonder why you decided to stop displaying a part of the rotation circle as dashed, the same way as move axis. It used to provide valueable info on what direction would be positive,

    5. I wish that Add/Update button would actually say Add or Update, depending on what it would do — add one more position with values entered or update one selected to the right. Several times already I believed I will add, but instead modified and vice versa.

    6. When I use a duplication script (emailed to RJ) on any other object than a ‘transformation’ one — I get a copy below currently selected object, and this copy gets selected instead of the original. When this script is used for transformation object — I have both the original and the copy selected. Have no idea why yet.

    7. When you command Edit > Undo — all Axo commands are nameless. It’d be useful to see what is it that you would undo, like ‘Undo Project to … plane’

    8. For some reason hovering hints for ‘Project …’ buttons in Axo Project panel are displayed below the panel, I see only the part that is uncovered by it.

    As for the button you ask — nah, I think it matters little. I’d even say the panel is complex enough. Typing in minus is a common operation at the level of Axo users, I am sure of it.

    January 11, 2021 at 1:18 pm #4570
    Rick Johnson
    Keymaster

    Thanks Egor, that’s very helpful.

    1. I’m unable to reproduce this. Maybe it happens when the default value is initialized the first time the plugin is used, but I don’t think that’s the case for you. Are you working in a large-format document? There are some areas where large format support is sketchy. Let’s hope the bug stays gone…

    2. I can’t reproduce  the decimal bug, either, in Mac or Windows, but will watch for it.

    3. Ron might need some time to figure out how to curve those paths to fit on a soccer ball sphere. 😉

    4. The problem with the ellipse is that you can’t really tell which half of it is toward the front, so it can easily be interpreted as opposite what it should be. Maybe a better way will become obvious later, but at least for now you can see better the rotation arc and its inclination (providing the arc isn’t seen on edge).

    5. The Add/Update button now displays Add or Update as appropriate.

    6. Sorry, I can’t help with the duplication script. The CORE libraries I use have a duplicate function for art objects, but it doesn’t work correctly on what CORE calls “custom art” or Adobe calls “plugin art.” According to Adobe’s SDK, the contents of the object are not actually contained within the parent object, but in some other location in memory with pointers in the object. Duplicating it the way other art is duplicated resulted in two objects with their contents scrambled together, so I approached it by creating a new object, then copying the contents of the original, one by one, into the copy. These objects do help keep things “interesting.”

    7. The current build now changes the menus to undo/redo Projection as well as Transformation from their respective panels.

    8. The tip text displays OK for me with Illustrator 2021 and Windows 10. Does this happen intermittently for you or only occasionally? If I can find the conditions that cause it to happen I can submit a bug report to CORE, since only they can fix it. This may be somehow related to the problem of alerts sometimes popping up behind the splash screen on startup in Windows. I worked around that by making the plugin check for updates only after (and if) the plugin has actually run, delaying it to after startup.

    Thanks for your help!

    — Rick

    January 11, 2021 at 8:52 pm #4572
    chegr
    Participant

    I just posted a long message (without copying it first as I usually do) and it vanished 🙁

    January 12, 2021 at 1:26 am #4575
    Rick Johnson
    Keymaster

    Oh no! I hope this was a fluke, never to happen again! I’m so very sorry.

    January 12, 2021 at 7:04 am #4577
    chegr
    Participant

    More of it, when I tried to share it in short, with only 5 GIFs (direct links) it first tried to it them again and then said I tried to post if before. So it must have landed in SPAM or similar.

    January 12, 2021 at 10:50 am #4584
    Rick Johnson
    Keymaster

    I’m sorry, Egor, the whole forum software is new to me. There’s a plugin to allow inline images, but it doesn’t work at all in Safari on Mac. There’s also an anti-bot rule that you have to wait a few seconds between posts, but that shouldn’t affect uploading images (I’d think…).

    Maybe for a while it would be helpful to compose longer reports as an email to me, then copy/paste it into a post? I’m using bbPress, which is a very common platform, but if it continues to misbehave, I can change. Older posts may get lost, but it simply must be functional.

    If anyone has trouble with the forum, please let me know!

  • Author
    Posts
Viewing 7 posts - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.