DeleD Community Edition

[AlexanderX]

This is the first time I'm using DeleD and it appears to be a very useful program!!
But I'd have a question: is there a way to view objects' points coordinates? I can view them exporting the project in X format, but is there a simpler way?
Thank you!

[Jeroen]

Hi there and welcome!

You can view the coordinates in the DMF files, of course, but do you want to view them inside the program too?

[AlexanderX]

No, it isn't necessary. I didn't know that coordinates are always integer numbers (also rotating objects, etc). So I can get them simply zooming a bit the view windows, positioning the cursor on the point and reading the values written in the window's caption (I thought that they were only an approximation).
Exuse me for the useless post and thanks for the quick reply!

[Jeroen]

Post like this one are never useless.

Anyway, in the near future, DeleD will most likely start saving coordinates as floats instead of integers. That's because a number of users are desiging very tiny objects/worlds and they need the accuracy of floating point numbers. In fact, DeleD already works with floats in the background, it just saves them as integers to the DMF.

[Daaark]

[Paul-Jan]

Precision is fun

1. We would theoretically be moving from integer precision to float precision here. The first float-integer accuracy miss kicks in somewhere around +/- 16777217. That's a lot more than 4096

2. In the current Integer-based solution, complex operations like rotation and such still already are float based. Actually, internally, we store the vertices as floats already, we just round them at specific points (load/save, some specific actions).

3. Precision is a relative thing. When modeling on such a big scale, you don't really notice something that 1 or 2 units off.

4. In the end, your graphics card works with single floats internally, so you don't get any more precision then that when you ultimately render your data.

While your remark is 100% correct (modelling with really big floats is unwise), it doesn't really apply to our situation. DeleD is definitely not loosing much precision when moving to floats (only some absolute precision in the 16777217 - 2gig range). The advantages of moving to float representation (i.e. getting rid of the precision problems at the sub-integer scale that comes really naturally when modeling) greatly outweigh this.

[Daaark]