Intersection plane, what is your take?

This new feature added to the feature viewer. What is your take on it?

It does have it's uses. But it tends to get in the way or interferes with other Alpha objects on the screen. Most of the time it is difficult to see what it is even intersecting with if you have lots of object around you. This feature really needs to be a toggle. Not sure where to put it or what the short cut command would be. We already have the grid snap toggle. but there is very little room left in the edit panel.

The default value should be off.

Has there been a large public clamor for an intersection plane?

If one is going to have intersection planes, why just the center - why not be able to choose the center plane or one of the bounding box end planes or an arbitrarily selected face?

There is some way to turn it off, I assume?

Oh... huh, thats kindof neat. If your ruler is local mode in particular, you can see roughly when something is lining up with the prim you're moving. In global ruler mode you can just use the numbers, but thats not so easy when the prim is at a non-axis aligned rotation and you're moving in local ruler mode.

Yeah, should be able to turn it off though.

There wasn't a large public clamor for flexi prims... does that mean they shouldn't have been developed?

Development resources are scarce, everything that does get developed means that other things didn't.

If the resources used on flexi-prims could have been applied to something better, then flexi-prims shoudn't have been developed so that something better could have been.

Given that they exist, would it be good to be able to snap one object's intersection plane to another objects intersection plane?

Sure... but public clamor is not the be all and end all of the question of what should be developed, that's all I'm saying.
Snapping to another object's center would work. Maybe that's what you meant? I can't see what snapping to another plane would mean.

I'm just starting to wonder if this is a test for someting else to come. Boolean prims maybe? Cutting prims maybe? It just seems if one can produce an intersection plane across several objects that this same technology could be applied to a single object to cut a prim or Boolean two prims together. And this type of feature has been requested many times over in the feature suggestion area. hmmm.

I don't see how this intersection pane is supposed to work. For me it's just a glow of light along the perpendicular pane I'm moving my prim on. How am I supposed to see intersections with it? All it does is blurring my vision, covering what I want to look at in colored fog.

My opinion? Remove it. Please.

"Better" is relative though, as everyone out there have their own preferences and different values attached to the possible "could have been's". Perhaps Lindens could pick their development targets from the Feature Voting board thingie, but even that is skewed since it only stores opinions of these who actually managed to find out about the tool existence and found enough time to visit it, locate/enter desired feature and put votes into it.

It's basically damned if you do and damned if you don't. Whatever the Lindens choose to develop, it's a given someone out there is going to bitch about it.

I don't see ANYTHING that I'd call an "intersection plane". What should I be looking for? I've got VBO on, and I'm running on an nvidia 6800GS, so I think I should see any pretty effects, right?

This is a feature? I bug reported it, or rather tried to, the bug report mail queue was filed and it bounced it.

Here is a quick explanation of when editing an object it shows where the object will intersect all other surrounding objects. I'm guessing to help reduce the amount of camera movement you need to do when editing.

In the picture below you see while I'm editing the Box in the X direction that it's center is some what in line with the Cone and Sphere while it is no where near the Cylinder. If I want the get the box close to the same ZY plane as the Cylinder I would slide it forward till I see it intersect with the Cylinder. It does have it uses.
http://www.joe-brown.net/SecondLife/IntersectionPlane.jpg

The colors are not just random they chose them based on this.
ZY plane Blue + Green = Cyan (like in picture)
XY plane Red + Green = Yellow
XZ plane Red + Blue = Magenta.

Unfortunately if your objects happen to be these colors it can be next to near impossible to see the intersection plan at all. It does have it uses. In a way it cuts down camera movement. I don't have to swing the camera way up in the air then move the box in the X direction then swing it down to get a profile view. Or at least I shouldn't have to but have been doing it for so long I can't stop.

They can keep this feature for all I care. I like it some of the time but not all the time.

One thing this is very good for: learning about conic sections

That's not what I'm seeing. So I assume it's a bug on my system. I'll upload a screenshot when I get home for you to look at. Thanks!

Interesting. I haven't gotten the most recent First Look, so I haven't played around with it, but this looks actually rather useful.

I posted a video demoo on my website that shows how I'm seeing things right now:

http://zi.furhome.net/downloads/intersection_plane_demo.avi

Maybe this helps to identify the problem. I'm using the linux first look viewer here.

Wow, I definitely didn't see that at all when I tried the first look client. It was dark in my sim, so maybe the colors blended in, but I would have thought I'd see SOMETHING since I was looking for it. Maybe I need to send a bug report.

well Shoot Zi, I can't get the avi to play. Working on Windows 2000, XP and or MacBook Pro. Don't have the necessary codec or something. My computer just gives me a blank stare.

It's a plain divx file, vlc (Videolan Client, http://www.videolan.org/ ) should be able to play it fine.

Zi,
one more thing to try. Outside make sure you not surround by other prims or near Large prims. Or is it only happening near or iside large prims. It does look like a bug to me. But if it only happening. near certain items or certain place this is good info to include on the bug report. The more info the faster it can get fixed. I played with this some more I though maybe if the camera and you were on the inside of a prim it would show the plain inside. But it looks like if the camera is in the solid space of a prims it will exclude that object which is good. besides that I have no idea

Other possibility is that what you're seeing is the uncut intersection plane. That is, the client is showing the WHOLE thing instead of just what intersects an object.

yay! They have a toggle for intersection place or now called Cross Section.
Now in the Options for grid. Good place for it.

I was starting to miss it.