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Dec 5, 2002, 4:12am

A long time back, we got part of a grouping system... the ability to select multiple objects. Some day, I would like to see a more complete grouping system, such as Beziér or NURBs enveloping. This suggestion is intended to outline a possible step in that direction.

What I would like to suggest is a way to turn a bounding box around an object or group of objects into a stretchable container.

Objects would not have this property by default. It would have to be added where needed as a separate grouping object. An envelope, encasing the object or objects that were selected at the time the envelope was created.

When selected, an envelope would not bring up an Object Properties dialog box, but rather an Edit Envelope dialog box. This idalog box would have options to allow you to have the corners of the envelope be able to move freely when dragged, or snap to significant nearby points such as the corners of a terrain cell, the bounding box of an object, or the corners of edge centers of another envelope. It would also have numerical controls for the envelope's height, width, and depth, and buttons that could be clicked to align or restore the locations of corners in various ways. An envelope could be copied to the clipboard, and later applied to another object or group, or pasted in contents and all to replace a selected object and bring up the Edit Envelope dialog box.

This is not something that I expect to be seeing in ActiveWorlds any time soon, but it would be great to see added eventually.

It would allow not only resizing, but reshaping of many standard objects when necessary to fit into places where making a new object would be more bother than it's worth, such as the case where the new object would be used only in one place. It would allow objects to be skewed to match the terrain, or modified to fit an incline on the bottom while keeping the top level. Originally the Edit Envelope dialog would only need to have a few controls and being able to move the corners individually would be sufficient to add a lot of power that builders now lack. Eventually, controls to rotate the envelope could be added, and perhaps even Beziér curve control points.

TechnoZeus

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