I need more decimal places in the Editor

[Jordan]

For my project (http://leadwerks.com/werkspace/index.php?/blog/12/entry-449-the-world-trade-center-project/) I'm having to work in Feet and Inches for accuracy, which of course produces some odd numbers for the placement of these meshes.

 

At the moment the editor only supports 2 decimal places for all text fields including the position coordinates, while the scene files themselves appear to support 10 figures, which is more than enough.

 

It's very important for me to be able to set my grid size to 1 foot, which is 0.3048 meters. As with grid snapping enabled this would allow me to drop most my assets in and fit them together perfectly. I also need to be able to change the coordinates of many meshes to figures with more than 2 decimal places. This would be a massive time saver.

 

The only workaround for the time being is for me to open the scene files in notepad, then proceed to find the correct meshes and enter in the correct coordinates. However this is quickly becoming unworkable with large scenes with many instanced meshes. It's becoming very hard to judge which meshes are which and is wasting hours of my time that I could be spending on making assets. Not only would being able to use more decimal places in the editor to allow me to set grid snapping to 1 foot and mean I wouldn't have to type coordinates in for every mesh, but it would also make it much much easier for me to enter coordinates when it was needed.

 

I wouldn't normally write so much for such a simple feature request, but I felt it was needed in order to convey how important this was for me. Can you give me any hope for this being changed any time soon?

[Josh]

The spinner control I wrote was pretty difficult to get right with decimals. Right now it is programmed to move in increments of 0.01. I'll see what I can do.

[macklebee]

Jordan, you could try rewriting the class.lua script to do position as three PROPERTY_FLOATs instead of a PROPERTY_VEC3. PROPERTY_FLOATs have the ability to add a "min,max,resolution" as an extra parameter. The resolution parameter will allow you to increase the number of decimal places. Also, if you open Editor.INI in notepad, you can change the GridSize to 0.3 and Major Gridlines to 3.0... while this might not be exact, it should get you closer than what you are now. Josh would need to give us the option of changing the resolution of these settings as well, since they appear to be using only 1 decimal place.

[Josh]

Does anyone use the little arrows next to the text fields in the vector controls? I could just get rid of them.

[macklebee]

Sometimes, but typically I just type in the number... would be easier if you could tab from control to control though to allow for quicker changes by keyboard without having to use the mouse

[Jordan]

I'll see what I can do.

 

Also, if you open Editor.INI in notepad, you can change the GridSize to 0.3 and Major Gridlines to 3.0... while this might not be exact, it should get you closer than what you are now.

Actually this was perfect, it worked better than you was expecting. I could set the grid size to 0.3048 and Major Grid lines to 3.048, and appears to be working great. I had forgotten about the ini file.

 

Does anyone use the little arrows next to the text fields in the vector controls? I could just get rid of them.

Personally I don't use them, always seems quicker to just type it in. Unless I only wish the change the value by 0.01 of course, but this is rare.

[macklebee]

Actually this was perfect, it worked better than you was expecting. I could set the grid size to 0.3048 and Major Grid lines to 3.048, and appears to be working great. I had forgotten about the ini file.

 

well, if you close out the editor and then open up the INI file again, you will see that it truncated the numbers to 1 decimal place even though it shows 5 or 6... So maybe it is letting you use the .3048 on start up and it doesn't overwrite to .30000 until shutdown... dunno... I didnt know exactly what it was doing, so thats why i suggested .3 and 3.0... but in any case, glad that it works for you!

[Jordan]

well, if you close out the editor and then open up the INI file again, you will see that it truncated the numbers to 1 decimal place even though it shows 5 or 6... So maybe it is letting you use the .3048 on start up and it doesn't overwrite to .30000 until shutdown... dunno... I didnt know exactly what it was doing, so thats why i suggested .3 and 3.0... but in any case, glad that it works for you!

This was true the first time, but after I changed it for a second time, the number become 0.304800004, not quite sure why an extra 0.000000004 is added on, but it's much better than being knocked down to 0.3.

[Josh]

It's complicated, but the way the Windows controls system is designed, it doesn't allow tab cycling up hierarchies...the subcontrols are laid out in panels with children, to control the way they resize. So I actually just happened to be dealing with this problem, and I am leaning towards removing the little up-down arrows for float values. That will allow you to type in one value, then tab to the next control.

[DaDonik]

Never used that little arrows. If it will increase the usability by being able to use TAB, thats a good trade imo.