PowerCADD Forum

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

Alfred

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Hi Joe,

I thought you had already gone?!

Joe Mattei wrote: ↑

Fri Oct 16, 2020 10:40 am

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

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

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.