Surely this can’t be a surprise? Created in R8:
area_r8_2024Feb21a.gh (3.5 KB)
Opened in R7:
Hi @Joseph_Oster,
Thanks for the sample. I’ve logged the issue - https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-80567
I don’t know the backwards compatibility policy; seems like this should work.
– Dale
Yes, unless it was done deliberately. As a life-long programmer, I can’t understand this… No QA process at all? Or… The first time I tried R8, September 2023, I found this glaring flaw:
Two flaws actually:
-
baked without the hole and
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a weird construction plane default, as I recall.
In R8 (BETA) , it first appears to work the same way, until I click the “Update” (Bake) button. The untrimmed surface is baked, without the hole
Then it gets very weird - when I select the surface in Rhino, the construction plane tilts
Oh wait, that happens only when I click the baked surface in Perspective view. No, wait… when I move the selected surface in Top view, the gumball tilts when I stop moving and then all views are messed up.
I gave up on R8 then.
There were a lot of changes to GH for V8, including in the mass properties components. No doubt, some incompatibilities were introduced. I’ll wait for the developer to chime in.
– Dale
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Here is a work-around that clearly could be better integrated into R7 code. The same error message still happens, which is far from ideal, but you can ignore it because this cluster uses whatever version works. It looks the same on the outside in both R8 (where I wrote it) and R7:
The “magic” happens inside the cluster:
area_r8_2024Feb21b.gh (6.5 KB)
The new area component in R8 has optional outputs, which includes the error in both area and centroid. This makes it incompatible with the old Area component.
Hi, @DavidRutten, is there a way to remove the highlight effect from components and make them appear flat?
Removing the highlight in GH1 would improve the appearance of the components. Please consider adding an option to disable it.
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The CapsuleRenderer plugin (available via PackageManager) does a really good job of this. Unfortunately it does not appear to have been updated for Rhino 8. And yes, it would be great to have similar features natively in Grasshopper 1.
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I asked the author yesterday, he said the environment changed a lot from v7, the method he used to build Capsule Renderer not there anymore, he can do nothing about it.
I think the author will not fix the problem in near future.
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I added two global settings (no UI) for disabling/enabling the highlight bar and the shiny edges on capsules. Once the next Rhino8 service release goes out those will become available. You’ll either have to change the settings xml file by hand while Rhino is not running, or use the script in the attached file to toggle those settings.
CapsuleSettings.gh (12.0 KB)
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THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
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The optional outputs (6 of them!) are hidden by default and appear only when you zoom in close enough to use the “+” feature. I predict they will be ignored 99.99% of the time, so this incompatibility between R8 and R7 for a very commonly used component is only to accommodate a rarely used “enhancement”. Amazing. An extremely poor decision in my opinion.
Indeed, this is fantastic. Thanks so much David 
Another way to handle this would be a separate component called Area+ that offers the new outputs (6 of them!) for the very, very few who will use them and leave the standard Area component alone. This preserves compatibility with all earlier versions of GH without touching R7.
For practical reasons, compatibility is good No one expects new features to be supported in old versions but for most people, Area hasn’t changed.
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I just want be sure, you meant SR8.5, right? Because I didn’t see that in the latest Release Candidate.
Ah I think 8.6. The Rhino 8.5 branch has already been separated from the main development branch for a few weeks, and I didn’t do the whole backporting thing when I made that change. However as soon as 8.5 officially goes out, the simultaneous 8.6 release candidate should have that.
Grasshopper (especially if you use plugins) may have too many similar components, I understand your concerns about the obscurity of some outputs. I rather prefer enhancements to some basic components if they are logical. Althought I think compatibility is important, maybe I don’t value it as much because I don’t have to share GH definitions with others that often.
In my opinion, every component that has some outputs hidden should have some kind of symbol visible all the time, that would communicate it, not only when zoomed in. Maybe something subtle would fit, similar to the symbol of multithreaded components. Also, the default visibility of given component outputs could be configurable in user settings, but this might be an overkill.
There once was a discussion about the performance of some components and if I’m not mistaken this might be an implementation of it. The volume component should work much faster if we hide the centroid output.
Thank you! Now I feel the completion level of my life just upgraded two levels.
I know this thread is a bit outdated, but I just wanted to confirm that the Area and Volume components that changed in Rhino 8, have now been back ported to Rhino 7… so any file created in Rhino 8 with those components should open just fine in Rhino 7. You will need the latest service release of Rhino 7 for this to happen. I hope this helps.
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@Joseph_Oster I may have misspoken (I’m sorry). The components have been back ported to Rhino 7… but my understanding is that a new release has not been issued. Whenever that occurs, this problem will be fixed. Thanks for your understanding.