A blank white square under your cursor indicates that your display is not set up to True Colour.

Cursor trouble is sometimes corrected by switching off the Fast Feedback feature (Window>Preferences>OpenGL pane). This does not slow down SU as much as switching off Hardware Acceleration does.

Also, some nonstandard mouse derivers (like Logitech's MouseWare or Microsofts Intellipoint) have been known to cause trouble with SU - using the standard Windows mouse driver sometimes helps.

Just suggestions

Anssi

I love 2, 3, 4 and 6 of the first series, and the greyscale ones of the second.

Cheers

Anssi

This is what happens to me if I have unchecked Guides from the View menu. They reappear when I turn them on.

Anssi

@thomthom said:

Only thing I've heard of is that some AMD based machines end up in an endless loop of BSOD and restart. Happened with my brother. You might want to check your hardware if you got an AMD machine.

I had that once with Win95-have relied on Intel chips since then.

Thanks everyone for the insights

Anssi

Windows Update is urging me to install XP Service Pack 3. Can it do any harm to my SU-ing? I remember that people installing what probably was the beta version had all kinds of trouble. Does everybody here already have it? I use the Finnish version of XP Home in my laptop so it may be a bit late coming to me (but somehow my other machine with XP Pro English has not pushed the upgrade yet).

Anssi

@jcdb said:

The first AutoCad version I used was Rel.9 DOS. Before that I used VersaCad. Many moons ago.

Version 2.5 was the first for me, back in 1986. I was brought an IBM AT in one box, a card with some additional memory in another, a monitor in a third, and ACAD on floppies in the fourth box. I had only used a word processor before. Training? No money for that. First I had to figure out how to install the OS on the enormous 40 Mb harddrive...

Anssi

That's exactly the same as I got into SU Gaieus, but when viewed with Autodesk Trueview (free download from Autodesk, and it converts ACAD files to older formats) there are things that look like a framework of beams in 3D.

Anssi

For me the download stopped at about 3,7 Mb, and I had to force-quit IE.

Anssi

As the circles in SU are in reality polygons, no very sophisticated geometrical operations can be performed with them with reasonable accuracy.

As to the quadrant question, when I need those, I make the circle with a number of segments divisible by four, that's the most accurate I can get. Note that the vertices (endpoints) of the circle are the only parts of it that lay on the perimeter of the circle. A half circle from a vertex to a vertex has the diameter right, but the angle of the perimeter to the diameter is less than 90 degrees...

Anssi

@rickw said:

I'll throw some items out there for a consensus "vote":

1a. [EDITED] V4 will cut an opening in a "wall", and a "wall" is determined by the maximum distance between two faces. I can hard-code a reasonable distance value (currently 16"/~40cm maximum), or I can make it user-defined.

1b. If user-defined, do you want to see it in the main dialog every time you use Windowizer, or would you prefer it to be located in a separate configuration dialog?

2. V4 groups the resulting window assembly. I can add an option to group or not group this, if desired (the group would be exploded if non-grouping was selected).

3. When multiple faces are selected for a Windowizer operation, should "undo" work on just the last window assembly created, or on all of them? For clarification: currently in v4, 10 faces selected to be Windowized would result in 10 separate actions, thus 10 separate "undo" actions. This could be an option as well, subjecting it to question 1b. (main dialog or separate configuration dialog?)

1a User-defined
1b Main dialog is OK - at least in the version I have it is still uncluttered enough
2 Grouping is OK, adding the option is OK too, but not absolutely necessary
3 Undo all in one go is IMO the way to go

Cheers

Anssi

AutoCad 2009 has a bug that may report a perfectly good file from an older version as corrupted, see Knowledgebase article at
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/item?siteID=123112&id=11328222&linkID=9240617
so the file might be all right in itself.

I would guess that what happens here is that SU is quite unable to import special objects created by Autodesk add-on applications like ADT, Autodesk Architecture and the like.
What puzzles me is that even the Exporting to Autocad function doesn't help. Did you try to save the "Exported" file to an older format like ACAD 2000 or 2004?

Edit: I opened the file with Autodesk TrueView 2008 and converted it into ACAD 2000 format. This imported into SU without a hitch, but all I got was a bunch of 2D I-beam cross sections. In the SU import report it listed that a lot of proxy objects were ignored. I wonder if your "Export to AutoCad" command ran as expected? The presence of those proxies would indicate to me that there are still special objects present.

Anssi

For me export quirks like incomplete files etc. often happen when I try to export to a network drive, and exporting to the desktop or a local folder then helps.

Anssi

Don't curse the SU inferencing, learn its quirks so it start working for you. One of the keys is to use Shift (locking) creatively with the inferences.

Anssi

Wonderful news!

Anssi

Note that the maximum texture image size allowed by SU is 1024 x 1024 pixels. Anything larger than that gets downsized, and often not very beautifully.

Anssi

Kevsterman,

You could also try turning off (unticking) Fast Feedback from the Preferences>OpenGL pane.

Also, some mouse drivers (like Logitech's or the Microsoft Intellipoint software) have not worked very well with many people, and the standard Windows driver seems to be more reliable.

Just fumbling

Anssi

Thanks very much Adam

This is something that I have to start keeping an eye on. The sluggishness of some of my quite small models could be caused by this "over-organizing".

Anssi

Note that there are some quite oddly-working 3DS export options. The "export standalone edges" option takes every visible SU edge and adds a thin slice of a face to the exported file. I understand this is meant to make it possibre to reproduce the SU look in other applications, but it makes smoothing and rendering the file a mess. This used to be checked by default, and confused a lot of people who did not know where to look (behind the Options button in the Export File dialog box).

Anssi

I have been fighting this too, especially as I like to use the mmb to pan in Acad, and the ability to constrain the panning with Shift. Now, it matters in which order you press:
Shift+MMB=lots of dirty words
MMB+Shift=panning constrained to vertical or horizontal.
Have to look into killing the Orbit command.

Anssi

I am a lazy person. I would just use the Offset tool

Anssi