Couple of comments:
If you set the small inertia of the moving up and down (shift and ctrl) movements are not smooth, twitches.
It is clear that the camera is controlled with the mouse, it is possible to hide the mouse cursor so that you can make a good video. The movement of the mouse is intuitive and without a cursor.

@unknownuser said:

TIG recently developed a very similar ruby

http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?p=346754#p346754

-Brodie

Thanks brodie, I initally wrote v1.0 in 30 minutes that simply flattened vertices to z=0, posted it to the forum, then noticed TIG's drop vertices. With v1.1 I thought I'd take the development in a different direction with Flatten to mean normal, which works similar to TIG's scripts but my focus is on replacing the Z vector with the average normal of all the faces selected. I don't want to butt heads with TIG as he's quite a deal more talented than I. 😳

In the next version I'm working on ways to preserve the edge conditions, so the script doesn't destroy four or more sided faces. The method I'm thinking of using considers edge conditions as 2 dimensional manifolds (so rotate along the border edge away from the border face's normal until you find a face that isn't in the selection). The normal determines the direction of rotation to avoid the angle_between not greater than 180 degrees issue. We rotate away from the normal to find the next face because there may be more than two faces sharing a border edge. This (hopefully) will remove interference by more than two faces sharing the same edge. This method also shows some promise for applications like correctly orienting faces and removing internal geometry on non-solid geometry, but more grey matter is required on my part. Hopefully all's not lost 😄

Just updated the code with a very quick fix.

In the previous version on PC, there was an error produced in the ruby console along the lines of "Directory Not Empty". In early beta versions the temporary folder name was created from a unique string using a timestamp. In the current version, consistent temporary folder names was implemented, so any previous directories needed to be deleted.. I've expanded the delete method in the script to search the subdirectories of the temporary folder if it exists and clear them out before deletion. This stops the error.

Also, when the temporary location was more than one folder deep (ie. my_script/instructor), the folder 'my_script' was not being created. V 1.0.1 searches each folder in your custom temporary path and creates the folder if it doesn't exist, removing this error.

This update is essential for proper implementation of Load Instructor.

@adamb said:

Dan: Its the other [way] around surely. The add_line is superfluous and added just to confirm the lines are sane. He wants to test the performance of the raytest you commented out..

Okie.. dokie. I didn't understand what he was trying for (it was late.) That was why I just commented out the lines and did not remove them.

The gist of what I meant was to init references (vars,) outside the loop, and limit creation of new ones inside the loop unless they are actaully necessary (ie, to be used in some way.) Ruby takes time to create references.

Ok SketchUp 2015 it doesn't want to load... giving me this error:

Error Loading File floating_camera.rb Error: #<SyntaxError: C:/Users/######/AppData/Roaming/SketchUp/SketchUp 2015/SketchUp/Plugins/floating_camera/mixin/load_instructor.rb:239: invalid multibyte escape: /^\x89PNG/ invalid multibyte escape: /^\xff\xd8\xff\xe0\x00\x10JFIF/ invalid multibyte escape: /^\xff\xd8\xff\xe0/ invalid multibyte escape: /^\xff\xd8\xff\xe1(.*){2}Exif/ C:/Users/######/AppData/Roaming/SketchUp/SketchUp 2015/SketchUp/Plugins/floating_camera/mixin/load_instructor.rb:366: syntax error, unexpected ':', expecting keyword_then or ',' or ';' or '\n' when 1: puts "file failed (invalid t... ^ C:/Users/######/AppData/Roaming/SketchUp/SketchUp 2015/SketchUp/Plugins/floating_camera/mixin/load_instructor.rb:367: syntax error, unexpected ':', expecting keyword_then or ',' or ';' or '\n' when 2: puts "file failed (unknown):... ^> C:/Program Files/SketchUp/SketchUp 2015/Tools/RubyStdLib/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:45:inrequire'
C:/Program Files/SketchUp/SketchUp 2015/Tools/RubyStdLib/rubygems/core_ext/kernel_require.rb:45:in require' C:/Users/######/AppData/Roaming/SketchUp/SketchUp 2015/SketchUp/Plugins/floating_camera.rb:49:in class:CameraFloatTool'
C:/Users/######/AppData/Roaming/SketchUp/SketchUp 2015/SketchUp/Plugins/floating_camera.rb:48:in <module:CControl>' C:/Users/######/AppData/Roaming/SketchUp/SketchUp 2015/SketchUp/Plugins/floating_camera.rb:45:in <top (required)>'`

The second argument is optional. It just didn't exist in older versions.