it’s been a long wait, but there’s finally a new GH2-a out today. There’s a few new components, but the main focus over these past few months was on Display and Documentation. There’s a lot of new content in the Help files (and a lot of new features for those creating documentation).
Display Settings and Display Rules have been completely reworked, both the front-ends and the back-ends. There are new in-depth topics in the documentation discussion both of these.
Several changes to the file writing code have been made in an attempt to reduce UI locks during autosaving. Changes to file writing/reading are always risky, please be on the lookout for new bugs in this area.
New components:
Dots From Text
Dots From Meta
Torus From Axis
Polygon Centre
Text From Cardinal
Text From Ordinal
Text From Roman
Crossing Pairs
Fragment List
Random Integer Tree
Random Number Tree
Scribble
We’ve also finally managed to add a bunch of hand-crafted component specifications to the documentation. Disable Automatic Content in the Help menu if you do not wish to see automatically generated content.
If you run into any issues with this build, please let us know in this topic.
The new documentation is great, but I have a suggestion, since the documentation tool is based on webview2, can you let users add custom plugins, so that you can take advantage of the browser’s translation function to facilitate the use of documents by multilingual users.
Hi @DavidRutten,
I’m really excited about the new version! However, I’ve noticed that a small bug from the previous version still persists. When you remove all the parameters on a component with variable input parameters, it no longer allows adding new ones.
Additionally, modifying an input parameter doesn’t record an undo step.
WebView2 is only used on Windows, so this wouldn’t be a cross-platform solution. Can you elaborate on this translation feature though? It seems none of us here know about it.
I added an html export button to the viewer toolbar which dumps the html in your current viewer into some custom file. Then if you have a browser set up to open that html file you can use whatever extensions you have installed.
Note I had a hard time finding an extension which performed full page translations of local content. No luck at all in Chrome or Brave, but the DeepL extension for Safari did seem to half work. Entire paragraphs are still in English, but the extensions not working properly is not my problem.
Oh good, the image dragging still works fine from the browser into Grasshopper:
Edit: I just realised it refuses to translate any paragraphs which contain inline <code></code> blocks. If that turns out to be a problem for all page translators then perhaps it makes sense to post-process the html to remove or change those tags.
“The latest version of Grasshopper2 is unable to load. What’s going on with the plugin (.rhp) I developed in the previous version? I also created a component using the default Grasshopper2 development template in Visual Studio 2022, but it still doesn’t work and cannot be loaded into the Grasshopper2 interface. What’s the issue? However, the previous version of Grasshopper2 is able to recognize my plugin.”
There were several breaking changes to the GH2 SDK. You’ll have to at least recompile your plugin against the latest source, and quite possibly change some of the code.
Did you get any errors while trying to load the plugin? Can you see any errors via the _G2PluginViewer command?
Please check my screenshot. I’m using the default development template, but the compiled plugin cannot be loaded. My computer system is Windows 10. You can also try creating a basic plugin using RhinoVisualStudioExtensions.
When do you expect the SDK to be stable? Developers need a stable version to proceed with development. I thought that with the release of RhinoVisualStudioExtensions, the SDK was basically in a stable state ready for development.
Yep, the base namespace was changed from Grasshopper to Grasshopper2 in this release. This had to be done to avoid conflicts when both Grasshopper 1.0 and Grasshopper 2.0 are loaded in scripting contexts.
The SDK will be stabilised when we move from alpha to beta. That transition marks the point of no more breaking changes, no more file format breaks and no more big new features.
Is there a component similar to Custom Preview yet?
When can we expect to see C# and Python script components?
How about Rhino tab for interacting with Rhino?
No, there’s currently no support at all for interacting with materials. You can change the colours of shapes in the viewport, but that’s about it.
@eirannejad is working on RhinoCode and the GH2 scripting components, however they require Rhino9 so when we add them to GH2 it’ll also mean GH2 will require Rhino9.
Maybe it requires a a rewrite to fit GH2, at least when it comes to DataTree handling.
The most important use cases here are interacting with Rhino objects (Model Object): querying, accessing User Text Attributes, creating annotations and so on.
Another thing: I can see some of the essential plugins being left behind when GH2 launches, like Metahopper (I am under the impression Andrew Heumann is not maintaining these anymore). I know someone can recreate them at least to some extent, but there are a couple of essential components/features I will miss. For example:
Metahopper: Bottleneck Navigator (easily see which components take the most time and so on)
TreeSloth: Propagate Ancestor (for DataTree manipulation in some cases)
The list must be very different for different users, but is it feasible to gather the most beloved components from old plugins that are no longer maintained, and maybe implement something similar natively? Like the key features people use on a regular basis.
I think that entire set of tools has to be rethought. A lot of these new types had to be added because there was no way to reliably store the additional information on vanilla Grasshopper values. But with meta data that’s no longer true. There are now going to be easier ways to design some of these interactions.
Also, that tab represents several years of hard work by @AndyPayne and @kike, who are now in charge of adding more features to GH1. I think we may have to actually set up a several day meeting between the three of us to hammer out a roadmap on how to get all this into GH2.
I want to create some lattice structures between curved surfaces. In Grasshopper 1, this was achieved using the Twisted Box, Blend Box, and Box Morph components. However, I can’t find similar tools in Grasshopper 2. Could you please let me know the current method to achieve this?
Normally I’d say just drag the GH1 components into GH2, but Twisted Box is a particularly tricky case. The data type doesn’t exist in GH2, and it seems to get interpreted as a list of points instead:
I’ll have a look to see how I can make the GH1 twisted box survive in GH2 without it turning into a different data type which the recipient components cannot handle. But at the moment it seems this is a case where GH1 interop components do not work.
