Just talked about it with a new Rhino user and made me think that this straight-forward feature makes a lot of sense, seems natural and would be good to have in Rhino:
-when window-selecting in a parallel views, once hitting the border of the screen (not viewport) with the cursor it would make Rhino auto-scroll the viewport, maintaining the selection window origin area.
Currently for long selections like that I use viewport non-uniform scaling which takes much more steps and seems way too complicated for new users.
This might be very tricky to make work. I think there are many technical issues. The main one is that the selection rectangle is only in screen space until you let up on the button.
You can test this by starting a selection in a parallel view and then with the left button down use the arrow keys to pan… you’ll notice that the selection rectangle stays in the same place on the screen.
I have noticed that the selection rectangle is in the screen space only (panning with arrow keys, or zooming in/out). So of course I realize it would require some major technical change. The question is - is there any benefit of window-selection staying only in screen space? In the past whenever it happen to me I looked at it as disadvantage that I can live with. But the new auto-scroll functionality I suggest I think makes a lot of sense, and if it meant the overhaul of general how window-select reacts to viewport changes while selecting, maybe that would not be bad idea.
Mostly it is a question of resources. Picking is a major chunk of code that impacts nearly every command. Usually it not a good idea to make a major change like that unless there is a huge improvement that results.
I think there are other place to better apply our limit development resources.
Got it. Of course if I was to choose between auto-scroll and native sub-d, improved make2D or display speed performance, I would not think twice… just a suggestion in case it was not so crazy to implement. I have been using Rhino daily for so long and happily that this suggestion coming from new user was a fresh ‘aha!’ moment so I thought I’d share.
I added this to the wishlist. Right now mouse wheel zoom updates the selection window corner while zooming, so you can try using that while dragging a selection rectangle.
However, window picking code currently ignores objects outside or even partially outside the viewport, so only objects that are fully visible in the viewport can be window selected.
Thanks @mikko, I have noticed the scroll-wheel zoom makes the window-selection stay in place… didn’t realize it will not select object not visible in Vport. With the auto-scroll of course it would need to select everything within the window-select rectangle, otherwise it defeats the purpose of adding that functionality.
Just looked at the WIP updated window-select behavior in parallel views - border autopan and rectangle not bound to the viewport space work great. Nice job ! thanks.