Combine Spline Tool. Angle Between Lines Tool

Spline have a new tool that is used to combine two coincident splines. It is useful if you will work with multiple splines or you split an already existing spline and you found (later) that you want to be again in one piece.
A tool to chose the angle between lines (this tool is a bit unpolished, so may change a little in future).
A preview is shown below:

Updater - Part IV

The updater now does a file compression. This means that NaroCAD downloads the compressed files, makes an uncompressing and continues with its job. By downloading compressed files, the download is 3-4 times smaller. One other advantage is that NaroCAD can detect if the file was downloaded correctly by trying to uncompress. If it works, the download was successful. If not, the uncompressing will fail. This way, it’s much easier to determine if a file was downloaded correctly or not. While this change is definitely good for the user, it also benefits us, because it doesn’t take so much time to upload NaroCAD and makes testing the updater a bit faster.

Spline Tools Improvements

Split Spline is a new tool. It will preview the points you defined your spline so you can split in parts. Spline tools have a fast-access buttons (this view right under ribbon control) will make much faster to access without going to contextual spline menu over and over (you may try for example to define an interpolated spline, then try to split and then go back to interpolated spline and you will understand right away what I'm talking about :) ).
Interpolated Spline and Control Point spline have two small improvements:
- pressing shift for a point on a spline will delete it. This is useful if you made a point that was defined on a wrong coordinate and you don't want to remake it
- if you start dragging a point, you can insert the coordinate from command line, so you may can work right away and fix it later.
The editing component of spline is not yet finished, but expect more goodies in this area.

See a small demo here:

Spline Undo/Redo Fixes

Spline have a representation that was prone to Undo/Redo errors as there is a need for custom logic for having a dynamic sized shape. This logic is fixed
Also I've did the skeleton work for Split Spline tool but this will be described (most likely) in the next blog post.

Block Plane Enhancement

Block Plane is smarter: if you will select a face like on XOY, YOZ or ZOX plane, the view will also follow suit (for example if you picked XOY design, the view will switch to Top), so you can start doing designs right away.
Hinter is also shown live how it works as it can be seen here:

TreeView Assert Fix and Solver Quick Enablement

TreeView can assert (and crash) sometimes with an assertion. This assertion is made to not introduce twice the same element. Right now even if an element is introduced twice, the event is logged but will not crash NaroCAD.
Solver options are exposed from the main interface to be one click away. One other change is that (excluding this screenshot that was a development photo) is changed to be named Hinter. In this way I will not use erroneously interchangeably those two words.

Updater - Part III

I managed to solve all the problems related to downloading the needed files. The main problem was that I made too many tests after downloading the files, so many that the integrity of files was never ok. I also made a cool trick while fixing these problems. NaroCAD will not only download the newer files, but will also check if the current files are still valid. Because I couldn’t use the hash code for many of the files, I checked the file lengths (in case they even exist on disk). What does this mean? Let’s say that the user “accidentally” deletes the help files, some NaroCAD icons, and more. If NaroCAD needs update and still has enough files to start, the update will verify that even the unchanged files still exist on disk and that they have the correct size. This way, the updater will automatically download those files for you, and will fix and update NaroCAD at the next start-up. Even if you have the latest version, and “accidentally” delete some files that are not critical to NaroCAD at start-up, just change the version number from the Version file to a lower one. NaroCAD will try an update and will heal itself :) Don’t worry if the internet connection is lost during that process. NaroCAD will try again at the next start-up, not from scratch, but it will continue from where it had left off.