@jim said:

My understanding is that at least some of the SketchupExtension instance methods are meant to be called by SketchUp rather than by plugins.

Yep.

If interested, just read comments in the new extensions.rb file in the Tools dir.

Found it. pushing the middle mouse button invokes the orbit tool. But it also suspends and resumes the currently active tool. By handling the resume method and calling view.invalidate, I can force it to redraw the screen every time the orbit tool finishes and returns to the drawing tool.

The behaviour with open components apparently pre-dates the SU ruby API. Tyler provided that bit of info.

I'm not a Mac user for years...
There is a MacOS portage of Qhull. There is some one to port the Qhull plugin on MacOS with it ?

@TIG: Mirror3_1 doesn't appear to accept input from the VCB. That's what is causing the problem. Just doing it by mouse click is easy because all the clicks generate IP's. But having to generate pt2 programatically allows only the creation of a Point3d, because InputPoint has no method for setting it's 3D coordinate.

I experienced that when I made my V-Ray Toy plugin. Due to the zooming, V-Ray would not match the SU viewport. Not until I took the ratio of the viewport's width/height and entered that as V-Ray's Zoom property.
And it has bothered me that it zooms in like that as I can't just simply convert existing views to have an aspect ratio. Though, I haven't looked further into the matter. I'm very interested in what comes out of this thread.
Btw, you have noticed that SU uses vertical Angle of View instead of horizontal?

Ok. thanks!

Thanks very much for your replies. I think, knowing that SU doesn't provide any inherent method for this kind of inference, that I can see how it might be done. I'll tinker around a bit; even if I never use it, it will be good to familiarize myself with this area of the Ruby API. Thanks again.

BTW, I mentioned earlier that passing two points to lock_inference does nothing different for me than one point. Any thoughts on that, as to what two points should do?

So I checked the instance methods, to see if the exposed methods correspond to the API. I'm not sure if it should or not, my ruby knowledge is thin here for sure (extending classes where methods may get called but are / aren't defined in the base class).
However, I checked the instance methods of every single observer class and they match the API exactly (some have additional methods, but all have at least what the API says. Except MaterialsObserver.

Sketchup;;MaterialsObserver.instance_methods ["MaterialUndoRedo", "onMaterialRemoveAll", "MaterialSetCurrent", "MaterialChange", "onMaterialAdd", "MaterialRefChange", "MaterialRemove"]

Sorry, but this is a serious "what the hell?!" moment. Most of the methods completely lack the "on" part. Yet, onMaterialChange does get called rarely, so the method is being used, even if the base material observer doesn't define it. Attempting to override "MaterialChange" instead of "onMaterialChange" never gets called.

Am I off base or is this a Google Fubar?
None of the other observers have any methods that don't start with "on", or differ at all from the API.

I have. It didn't have any effect. A previous post here implied that invalidate only works somehow in the context of a tool. Even if it did work outside of a tool, I don't think it would help here; you can use the mouse to move the 3D view around as much as you want (which assumably refreshes and invalidates the view repeatedly) and it doesn't fix it. So it's not an issue with updating the display, but more somehow updating the material, visually. As soon as you modify the geometry or make changes in the material dialog, the texture updates correctly, but not until then.

Hi
I have found something similar when my tool picks faces and then
tries to add them to the Sketchup.active_model.selection and display it:
Two faces has been picked from two different component instances..

selection.add face1 selection.add face2 view.invalidate

SelectionDisplayBug?