Advanced Camera Tool bad behaviour

Extensions
1

I think I mentioned this before - but not sure I posted it.

I was surprised to see that ACT (written by Trimble) does some questionable things - certainly not Best Practice for SketchUp plugins!

If you select an ACT Scene, when the camera view arrives at the viewpoint, ACT simply throws away any Tool you have selected and installs its own Tool to show the camera stats in the lower left corner of the display. If you’ve selected a tool like LightUp, then when you click on a ACT Scene, thats not so great…

The offending lines in the plugin are these:

  def frameChange(from_page, to_page, percent_done)
    if percent_done == 0.0
      # Make sure the camera tool is deactivated.
      Sketchup.active_model.select_tool(nil) if FilmCameraTool.active_tool
    end

    if percent_done == 1.0
      camera = CameraRep.get_camera_by_page_name(to_page.name, to_page.model)
      Sketchup.active_model.select_tool(FilmCameraTool.new(camera)) if camera
    end
  end

As you can see, it simply selects its FilmCameraTool.

Please can we have a public flogging for the author of this.

Adam

2

Some of these OEM plugins were written by people who no longer work for the OEM (currently Trimble.)

So, say flogging Scott for bugs in the DC code, would get us nowhere.

You’ll have to flog Trimble. Best to file a bug report, if the avenue exists.

3

I see another possible issue.

The plugin’s FilmCameraTool class is keeping track of whether it is the active tool. But each model has it’s own tool stack. On the Mac switching between models, may cause issues.

4

Yea, cleaning up all these old extensions is something we have on our list of things we want to address. They need to be better citizens.

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5

I believe it was written by someone at Google as one of his 20% endeavors. He even showed up at the last Basecamp. He was at Joshua’s presentation, of course.

1 Like