Yea, it would have been good if the two alpha values where linked. I ran into that confusion myself before my time as a Trimbler. Wrote up an article on it: http://www.thomthom.net/thoughts/2012/03/the-secrets-of-sketchups-materials/
We have an issue filed for that.

@tig said:

I have fixed the issue with the group.definition method...

That is most bizarre and unexpected!
I´m on vacation for the moment so I can´t dig in right this moment. Ping me next week will you, to remind me?

@driven said:

does 'check for update' work?
or is it not in that pipeline yet?
john

It won´t be pushed to existing users like most of our normal maintenance releases has been. This is because if you where affected you would not have been able to update because SketchUp would crash upon launch. If you where able to start SketchUp then you have no need for this update.
This is more of a hotfix than a maintenance release.

@tig said:

We are actually doing a favor to any users who were having problems installing v2015 in its initial format, and to the tardy SketchUp/Trimble guys - by announcing their updated version, which has been available since the end of last week, but which Trimble have failed to publicize thus far !

The issue was not installer crash - it was a crash upon launching SketchUp once it had been installed. This was happening on certain custom locations such as root of a drive or unicode paths. The patch prevent the crash and let SketchUp work in the root of a drive. Though installing to unicode paths will still fail to load the Ruby StdLib so some extensions might not work.

@tommyk said:

@adamb said:

Pretty, but whats the use case?

If people wanted to distinguish some component types from others, for example. Or maybe a plugin could show a graphical overview of all the objects in a model to reflect some attribute, or something?

You could do this with a custom Ruby Tool with the current API though. That is unless you want to display the graphical overview all time time.

I used the wrong - hat... So for the sake of making it right - with my Trimble hat: Yes we are watching.

Grouping and exploding will be very slow. And add_group with existing entities has been prone to erros and crashes.

In my CleanUp extension I merge coplanar faces and all I do is erase the shared edges between coplanar faces. When you do one of the faces is erased and one remains. So if you need a handle to the new face just check them after you erase the edges.

@driven said:

isn't it faster to test for true

> def self.decimal_separator
>     [1.1].length ==  2  ?  ',' | '.'
> end#def

john

You never know for sure until you profile the code. And in Ruby you get many surprises. That being said - unless you have a noticeable performance issue there is little need to pre-optimize.

@gábor said:

The downloadable SDK pack itself contains an XML exporter example. It is a good start to examine that.

This is what I'd recommend as well.

The C SDK is for reading and writing SKP files. If you need to convert to another file format you need the C SDK then convert to the target file format manually.

TT_Lib2 needed an update to be compatible with SU2014 and SU2015. Update to the latest version and you should be good to go.

In SU2014 we updated the Ruby core from 1.8 to 2.0 which required a lot of extensions to be updated. In SU2015 we added a 64bit version which require some extensions to be updated if you where using the 64bit version of SketchUp (No change needed for the 32bit version.)

I like it when questions are already answered before I get to them. Job well done.

@pixero said:

I get this when trying to start SU2015,64bit with Julia Eneroths Texture positioning plugin installed:

That looks to be related to Ruby 2.0 - meaning SU2014. What version do you have?

Ok - now I can reproduce this:

DefinitionList.load Timing Tests
> SketchUp Version; 14.1.1282
> File; C;/Users/Thomas/Desktop/bed2p.skp
> 0.623036
> 0.566034
> 0.561033
> 0.560033
> 0.566032
> 0.565037
> 0.569028
> 0.567033
> 0.558033
> 0.597035
> Average; 0.5732334000000001

DefinitionList.load Timing Tests
> SketchUp Version; 15.0.9350
> File; C;/Users/Thomas/Desktop/bed2p.skp
> 1.236068
> 1.278074
> 1.295075
> 1.286072
> 1.284073
> 1.28907
> 1.289079
> 1.281074
> 1.275078
> 1.276078
> Average; 1.2789741000000001

I'll forward this to the team. It looks to be related to the classifier system as after I removed the IFC schema and saved a new file:

DefinitionList.load Timing Tests
> SketchUp Version; 14.1.1282
> File; C;/Users/Thomas/Desktop/bed2p2.skp
> 0.008995
> 0.006996
> 0.008
> 0.008001
> 0.008006
> 0.008997
> 0.008996
> 0.007997
> 0.009
> 0.008001
> Average; 0.0082989

DefinitionList.load Timing Tests
> SketchUp Version; 15.0.9350
> File; C;/Users/Thomas/Desktop/bed2p2.skp
> 0.008005
> 0.005998
> 0.008
> 0.007
> 0.008005
> 0.006996
> 0.006
> 0.007
> 0.006
> 0.007
> Average; 0.007000400000000001

The profiler will tell us exactly what it is. Thanks for the report.

Well, actually, I'm not sure what SU does when you import... Need to check that. But it could be that we load the schema.

Yup!

I still don't see any difference. Do you have a sample model to share?

Ah, you where removing elements from the collection you iterated - that will usually always cause problems with any collection. You want to make an array copy of the collection first and iterate that instead.

@window.controls.to_aeach

DefinitionList.load Performance Tests:

Test snippet:

<span class="syntaxdefault">skp </span><span class="syntaxkeyword">=</span><span class="syntaxdefault"> Sketchup</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">find_support_file</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">(</span><span class="syntaxstring">'Car Sedan.skp'</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">,</span><span class="syntaxdefault"> </span><span class="syntaxstring">'Components/Components Sampler'</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">)<br /></span><span class="syntaxdefault">puts </span><span class="syntaxstring">"DefinitionList.load Timing Tests"<br /></span><span class="syntaxdefault">puts </span><span class="syntaxstring">"> SketchUp Version; #{Sketchup.version}"<br /></span><span class="syntaxdefault">total </span><span class="syntaxkeyword">=</span><span class="syntaxdefault"> 0.0<br />iterations </span><span class="syntaxkeyword">=</span><span class="syntaxdefault"> 10<br />iterations</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">times </span><span class="syntaxkeyword">{</span><span class="syntaxdefault"> </span><span class="syntaxkeyword">|</span><span class="syntaxdefault">i</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">|<br /></span><span class="syntaxdefault">  GC</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">start<br />  start_time </span><span class="syntaxkeyword">=</span><span class="syntaxdefault"> Time</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">now<br />  definition </span><span class="syntaxkeyword">=</span><span class="syntaxdefault"> Sketchup</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">active_model</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">definitions</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">load</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">(</span><span class="syntaxdefault">skp</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">)<br /></span><span class="syntaxdefault">  elapsed </span><span class="syntaxkeyword">=</span><span class="syntaxdefault"> Time</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">now </span><span class="syntaxkeyword">-</span><span class="syntaxdefault"> start_time<br />  total </span><span class="syntaxkeyword">+=</span><span class="syntaxdefault"> elapsed<br />  puts </span><span class="syntaxstring">"> #{elapsed}; #{elapsed}"<br /></span><span class="syntaxdefault">  Sketchup</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">active_model</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">start_operation</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">(</span><span class="syntaxstring">"Remove Definition"</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">)<br /></span><span class="syntaxdefault">  definition</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">entities</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">clear</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">!<br /></span><span class="syntaxdefault">  Sketchup</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">active_model</span><span class="syntaxkeyword">.</span><span class="syntaxdefault">commit_operation<br /></span><span class="syntaxkeyword">}<br /></span><span class="syntaxdefault">puts </span><span class="syntaxstring">"> Average; #{total / iterations.to_f}"<br /></span><span class="syntaxcomment"># require File.join(ENV['HOME'] || ENV['HOMEPATH'], 'Desktop', 'definition_list_load_test.rb')<br />&nbsp;</span><span class="syntaxdefault"></span>

DefinitionList.load Timing Tests
> SketchUp Version; 15.0.9350
> 0.023006; 0.023006
> 0.037007; 0.037007
> 0.036002; 0.036002
> 0.034998; 0.034998
> 0.035001; 0.035001
> 0.035001; 0.035001
> 0.036999; 0.036999
> 0.035999; 0.035999
> 0.035002; 0.035002
> 0.035997; 0.035997
> Average; 0.034501199999999996

DefinitionList.load Timing Tests
> SketchUp Version; 14.1.1282
> 0.033001; 0.033001
> 0.034001; 0.034001
> 0.032002; 0.032002
> 0.034003; 0.034003
> 0.032001; 0.032001
> 0.033003; 0.033003
> 0.032002; 0.032002
> 0.031001; 0.031001
> 0.030007; 0.030007
> 0.032006; 0.032006
> Average; 0.032302700000000004

DefinitionList.load Timing Tests
> SketchUp Version; 13.0.4812
> 0.038; 0.038
> 0.033; 0.033
> 0.033; 0.033
> 0.03; 0.03
> 0.03; 0.03
> 0.03; 0.03
> 0.03; 0.03
> 0.03; 0.03
> 0.03; 0.03
> 0.03; 0.03
> Average; 0.0314

DefinitionList.load Timing Tests
> SketchUp Version; 8.0.16846
> 0.054; 0.054
> 0.04; 0.04
> 0.04; 0.04
> 0.045; 0.045
> 0.04; 0.04
> 0.04; 0.04
> 0.04; 0.04
> 0.04; 0.04
> 0.041; 0.041
> 0.04; 0.04
> Average; 0.042

DefinitionList.load Timing Tests
> SketchUp Version; 7.1.6860
> 0.035; 0.035
> 0.048; 0.048
> 0.043; 0.043
> 0.042; 0.042
> 0.043; 0.043
> 0.046; 0.046
> 0.043; 0.043
> 0.043; 0.043
> 0.042; 0.042
> 0.043; 0.043
> Average; 0.0428

I'm not seeing any performance regression - looks rather consistent on this end.. I'm not sure why you are seeing a difference on your system.

@dan rathbun said:

But I'm not sure if it is really safe to change entities collections outside the current context?

That should be ok. One just need to keep in mind that the current open context apply a transformation that affect 3d points.