Having to slide the cursor to the ruler stinks!

Having to slide the cursor to the ruler, perpendicular to the direction of the change you want to make, every single time you want to make the snap to grid feature take effect, is a rotten, lousy, no-good way to do things, and the perpetrator of this foul crime against humanity should be put in the lowest depths of Hell, lower even than where the Democrats and Republicans are kept.

First things first, can you cut the part about "the perpetrator of this foul crime against humanity" etc in the future? You're in danger sounding like Eep Quirk :P

Now, honestly, when they released this feature of the rulers, I was overjoyed. Now if I'm in the middle of resizing something and forgot I had ruler mode on but didn't want it on, I don't have to drop what I'm doing to turn it off. I can just stay within the non-snapping section, and it won't snap. Going back to the old way (where it always snaps if you're in grid mode) would be a big step backward, because then I'd have to stop what I'm doing more often and turn off grid mode. This would result in building taking a lot longer.

I just wish there was a way to make it so that it didn't always snap when you use a plane-restricted drag triangle, but I can't think of a good way of doing that.

Well obviously there are two sides to it but I vote with Suezanne.

When you are raising a prim up and have to selct the up arrow, go up, then drag sideways a couple of inches and then drag up and down again.... its just seems wrong to me. you are drawing zig-zags in the air for no reason.

If you don't want the snap, you turn rulers off and most of the time you are working with either snap on or off, you dont ever hardly want snap on for one thing then off for another then back on for a third etc.

So merely to accomodate people too lazy or forgetfull to turn snap off, they have half "broken" snap for all those that habitually have it on.

The setup favours folks who dont use snap at all since if snap is off they are fine, and if it is on they are fine half the time anyway. For those of us that use snap, if its off we cant use it, and if its on, we can only use it (effectively) half the time. That's like 75% useability for non snappers vs. 25% useability for snappers. (excuse the statistical mangling)

Hrm... Just to balance things out... I do actually prefer the on-the-fly choice between snap and no-snap. Switching it on and off seems more awkward. Perhaps if there was a hotkey to toggle it on and off so I don't have to let go of the object I'm dragging to make the change.

That was the comedic relief part of the post.

Tiger Crossing made a nice post a good while back with a system that uses the Alt, Control, and Shift keys to provide easy access to different modes for operations such as press Alt to use snap, don't press Alt to not use snap.

They should just hire Tiger Crossing for the UI team. The new group options (whenever the heck they get around to implementing them), are almost identical to Tiger's earlier suggestions.

I was considering suggesting that LL should just say "Tiger, you tell us what the UI should be like and that's how we'll we make it."

If they ever offer, I might say yes, San Francisco or no.

I keep the rulers off, myself, almost always building with the grid on. It would be nice to have that system I worked out ages ago to do it all while dragging, though. But maybe when we gain the ability to edit the UI ourselves, things like that will be adjustable.

Many games let you remap the keys... No reason why SL can't. (And they can store it server-side too, so it works no matter what computer you log in from.)

Tiger, you CAN remap keys. There's a text file in the program directory that has key mappings in it.

As to the snap feature: just yesterday, I was sitting there thinking How brilliant! Finally, someone gives me a way to snap or not snap on the fly! I love it. But you're right, perhaps a 3-state button would be better: snap on, snap off, snap "new way".

99% of players will not (and perhaps should not) mess with configuration files of any sort. An interface would need to be built into the program itself before Second Life could really be considered to have remapable keys. They could be network-stored then as well.

But yeah, thanks for remidning me about the file. I'd forgotten about it. I rarely re-map my keys in games unless the defaults are just horrible. As I'm often instructing people in how to use SL's features, I'd rather not remap the keys here either, so I've got the same set-up they have. But it's something that should be addressed by the UI developer(s) at Linden Lab. Add it to the ToDo list.

Speak for yourself. That's just the thing, I do often want snap on for one operation and off for the next. It ends up being a lot of mouseclicks turning it off and on.

Try the G key.

La la laaaaa! Hmm... yes that does sound better!

Im with the first guy... I remember editing DOOM levels in MS-DOS and my grid snap worked fine. SL wants to innovate and try new things... yea well thats fine if it works... if it doesnt then dont push crap on us in the name of innovation.... The SL grid snap is totally wacked it used to work ok but now its flat out retarded....

If you cant figure this out... forget 3D games alltogethor Linden lab.

Pretty clearly there's a difference of opinion here. I know I'm not the only one who really likes the new grid system and didn't like the old grid system. Using absolutes like "crap" and "totally wacked" and "flat out retarded" just don't help when there are people other than you that also have valid opinions.

I like being able to flick between grid and no-grid. In fact I'd like to have it improved further... right now in some situations the dead band is insanely tiny... like diagonal resize in HUD objects. I'd like the dead band to always be at least a couple of centimeters no matter what the size of the prim.

I really think it works pretty darn well the way it is. First of all, everything is having to be edited in a perspective view which is hard enough as it but not really. Most of your Major 3D rendering software has at least four views. Well when you only have one perspective view it does make lining this up a just little hard. But after a while you get use to zipping the camera around to one side then quickly around the other. Personally for me, the day I found Grid snap and sub-unit snap I have never turned it off. They could add a short cut OH wait! there is a short cut "G". You can be in the middle of editing and hit G to turn them off. And if your chat bar is open hit enter to close it then hit G. You don't have drop what you are doing. Learn the tools you have.

Grid snap and the Rulers are not broken. If they are broken please be more specific. They all seem to line up just fine. Never had a problem with them. Learn to use Alt and Ctrl with the camera better that is all I have to say.

The only gripe I have with the grid snap is how objects snap to by their realitive center of mass. Don't get me wrong, that's pretty handy - but so was the old "snap to by root-prim" way as well. I'd like to see an option to use both in the future.

Other than that, I love the current system.

Having to slide the cursor to the rulers in order for grid snap to take effect isn't an example of something that is broken, it is an example of bad design. It is a a counter-intuitive motion, perpendicular to the direction of the desired action, that has to be repeated over and over, which could be eliminated completely with no loss of function but considerable reduction in user effort.

We had modal grid snap before we had the rulers. It was much less effort to use the grid then because you didn't have to slide to the rulers every time - when you wanted to use the grid you entered snap mode one time, made hundreds of gridsnapped alignments, then exited snap mode. It was an objectively more efficient way to do a large number of gridsnapped alignments.

It is not difficult to make an effective mode indicator.

Isn't that what the triangle "grid" draggers are for?

I use the grid rulers NOT to make a lot of gridsnapped alignments at once, but to mix grid and non-grid alignments, often in the same drag operation. I'll take an object, drag it to a certain position using the ruler... then keep dragging it a little more without the ruler to get a less precise and more organic spacing that's still *on average* on the grid. One drag might be a precise drag, the next eyeballed, then another precise or a semi-precise one.

It's objectively more efficient to do this if you don't have to change mode every time, especially when the edit window is minimized to keep it from covering up what I'm working on.

Oh my ... so that's how snapping to the grid works! I thought that when you check the box to enable it it starts snapping automatically ... just in a very subtle way that you don't really notice =/

I often build almost exclusively with the grid. It would be nice to have the option of either turning on "snap to grid always" or to have a key to hold down to force it to snap to the grid.

...and how would you fix it?
The only issue *I* see with it (and I had a class that tought good design) is that when my mouse is at the 83.5 mark (spacing at .5 m) the object is over at 83.0 (I've never tested if it's always in the same direction, but it's always felt "one or two notches to the left of my screen".

The triangles allow you to mess up an axis by mistake since they don't confine action to a single axis.

The triangles vanish, right now I am looking at a cube from a very normal angle and one triangle is not visible, but all three axes are. Having to move the camera needlessly to compensate for the poor design is inefficient.


The triangles are offset from the axis of the intended motion.

It's a moot point for me at the moment, the rubberbanding is so terrible, building something in SL would be more like torture than fun.

Sliding the cursor perpendicular to to a ruler is not the only possible way to tell the system you want the grid snap to take effect.

Pressing a key down would be a fine way to do it. Double sets of arrows heads on the axes, one for free action and one for snap action, would also work.


The introduction of the slide to the ruler method of making snap take effect ended my building fun. Not a single bit of fun making anything involving something like a floor or wall with regularly spaced objects.

I have been aligning things at work for 15 years now. If I had to do it with as stupid a system as Second Life uses I'd have quit my job long ago.

No, but it is a possible way and it works.
There are no spare keys. Control, alt, and shift already mean something.
It wouldn't work for ruler rotates.


You don't use "create copy" and click on a face for that?