WildTools Developments

[Alfred Scott]

I've just uploaded another copy. I've been fighting with the 3D screws in Nuts & Bolts.

Alfred

[DavidScottOrkney]

Hi Alfred,

I think I may have found a wee bug in the regular polygon tool.
It seems to work fine in interactive mode but not when constrained to a fixed dimension. When using this mode you just see a blue circle with the diameter specified but clicking in the drawing does nothing.

Thanks for checking.

David

[Alfred Scott]

David,

I’m delighted to deal with something other than 3D screws... but without looking at it here, I suspect the fixed size is bogus/corrupt in some way, so try changing the size.

Alfred

[Alfred Scott]

David,

All is normal here. The blue circle is a nonprinting guide indicating the size, either inside or outside the polygon.

I’m at a loss to understand what the problem might be. Maybe a quick click problem. Try clicking and moving the mouse slowly.

Alfred

[DavidScottOrkney]

Hi Alfred,

It works at 1:1 scale but there's definitely something funny going on when working to 1:50 scale and in millimetres.

I've sent you a screen recording by email.

David

[Joe Mattei]

May I ask? Are Three-Dee Screws what is holding up a formal offering of a finished Wildtools? Or will many of us be in our coffins before an appropriate FINISHED version of Wildtools is available? Or is Wildtools never going to have a completed release because that means it might have to be bug free? I guess I wonder why finish it, when you can make a lot of excuses about why it doesn't work and crashes your computer constantly.

[Alfred Scott]

Joe,

I did recently discover a glitch in one of the tools and I fixed it, but otherwise it’s completely reliable, as is the current shipping version which you can download from www.seqair.com.

Alfred

[Derek]

Hi Joe,

I thought you had already gone?!

Finally a note from the software cave... Todd, you just lost a whole bunch of users!

Obviously you weren't referring to yourself. Thanks for sticking around in our community.

Cheers,
Derek

[Alfred Scott]

For some time in the last year, I’ve dealt with a curious ‘crash’ in the Pen tool in WildTools where PowerCADD had a safety mechanism when drawing a Bezier and it encountered a NAN (not a number) in the Bezier, so it set the value to zero (or NULL for a pointer to an address in memory — which is a very bad thing).

It made no sense and for the life of me I couldn’t imagine how this could happen. I have an extra iMac in my office, so I downloaded the current shipping version from the website and tested it. It did not crash. How could this be? It was the exact same programming! I haven’t changed the Pen tool in many years.

I took note of the compile date of the shipping version, then used Time Machine to wind the Pen tool programming back to the same date, then I went through the programming and compared the two files, which should have been identical, and somewhere in there I found the problem.

Because I have an ‘essential tremor’ in my hands, I try to avoid typing and instead use copy and paste.

PowerCADD has a RecoverObject() routine which lets you destroy an object in the drawing when you are finished with it. And right there in the middle of the Pen tool programming I had a call to RecoverObject() in the middle of a series of steps! I can only guess that I had inadvertently pasted this in the wrong file because my hands were shaking.

It’s like putting a hand grenade in the middle of things! Just a plain old screwup.

Easy to fix, just delete the line and recompile.

Joe, I suspect this is what you have encountered. Easy fix. Just download the current development version.

Alfred

[Paul H]

Alfred, the simple transparency of your last post demonstrates your deep curiosity, quality of both results and service and I find it inspiring. Thank you.