Dark Radiant Layers manager

[Lux]

The Layers manager is excellent and essential however I'm finding one aspect of it to be very clumsy.

 

If you have all layers turned on and would like to start creating geometry on one particular layer there is no way in one click to select that particular layer as the "default" or "current creation layer" (the one with the Star).

 

Currently the only way to get the layer you want to create geometry in to be "active" or "the one with the star" is to deselect all the others and the star sequentially cycles through (up or down) to an active layer.

 

Would be very nice here if either

 

1) There was an initial third column that you could one click the star to. As in, you want a certain layer to be the current geometry creation layer, you select a button to set it in one click.

2) Instead of adding a "star column" you could "right-click" the current star/check mark column for any particular layer and that one click would set that layer as the "starred" layer.

3) Or add a new orthagonal right-click entry in the layer section that says something like "set default >" and then calls a list of all layers that you can select. That would be 2 clicks but still way better.

 

As I mentioned above and I'm sure many of you are familiar with, the current implementation has you deselecting a bunch of layers just to move the star around to the layer you want.

 

Clearly the work around is to create the geometry and then select it and --> move to layer however this gets tedious when you're creating a bunch of geometry on a particular layer or switching between two-three layers and it would be very nice to just select the layer you want to be starred default creation layer.

 

Is this in the works already for DR or is there a simple way to perform this?

Edited June 15, 2013 by Lux

[grayman]

Hold down the CTRL key and click the name of the layer.

[Lux]

Ahh, thank you grayman!

[grayman]

np

 

Map on!

[AluminumHaste]

I did not know that......Thanks Gman!

[motorsep]

Is there a way to freeze all layers except the current one so that they are still visible, but non-selectable? (so that I only work with brushes/entities/lights on that active current layer)

[grayman]

I'm not aware of any way to do that.

 

If I'm going to work exclusively on the objects in a layer, I hide all the other layers.

[motorsep]

I'm not aware of any way to do that.

 

If I'm going to work exclusively on the objects in a layer, I hide all the other layers.

 

Well, how are you gonna gauge where to move objects if you don't see underlying geometry? What's the point of reference?

[grayman]

Well, I wouldn't. If I need a point of reference or need to see underlying geometry, I have the layer that geometry is in visible, select the object I want to change, and change it w/o accidently selecting objects from other layers.

[motorsep]

So basically layers act as custom filters that can hide/reveal multiple types of objects (afaik filters can only do that for same object type only), right?

[nbohr1more]

Yes.

 

Unlike the standard filters, layers can be a custom grouping of arbitrary objects that are only meaningful "as a collection" to you.

[motorsep]

Gotcha. I wonder if it would be possible to add feature to "freeze" layers (keep 'em visible, but not selectable) ? Again, if someone can point us in the right direction (on the massive code of DR), we will try to implement that.

[Springheel]

That would be a neat feature. Unfortunately, the number of people around here that know the DR code is small. Greebo and Orbweaver have done the lion's share of the work on it.

[motorsep]

I pm'ed Orbweaver, but I suppose he doesn't come here too often and as I recall this forum doesn't send out e-mail notifications when you get pm :/

 

Got response \o/ Sounds like it maybe a royal pain to deal with, but we will try our best.

Edited August 27, 2013 by motorsep