Nudging points

[Markku]

I apologize for the rant in the beginning.

But since Xara is so fast in everything that it does and has real-time this-and-that, why is continuous node/point nudging without any preview? When you select nodes (with F4) and Shift+arrow nudge those points holding your arrow key and shift key continuously down you see nothing until you lift your fingers from the keys.

I need to nudge a lot and this gets on my nerves. Alternative method would be to drag with Ctrl-constraint on, but the problem with that is that when you drop the objects they mostly land on half pixels even if Grid snapping is on.

Do you have any work arounds?

[Egg Bramhill]

When you select nodes (with F4) and Shift+arrow nudge those points holding your arrow key and shift key continuously down you see nothing until you lift your fingers from the keys.

I can't reproduce that, the nodes update in real time for me.

See Here

[steve.ledger]

No problems here.
Can't find a setting that affects this either?

[Markku]

Thanks a lot for telling your findings. That helped me to to find a probable answer to the problem.

It seems to be about the number of objects on the page. I have about 1400 objects and reducing them to 200 brings back the responsiveness of the nudge.

I first though the page size was to blame, which was pretty big 8300 pixels but in the end that had no effect here.

Maybe if Xara will have 64 bit code in the future then this might be solved.

- Markku

[Soquili]

Strange but I do not have the problem when nudging points with many objects in the drawing.

Vista Ultimate 32bit edition.

[MarcT]

After doing a 700 items blend, the nudging get really far from 'live'
I guess it must depend on hardware.

Marc

[Markku]

Indeed Coco, but my PC should be up to it.

AMD 3.2 GHz, 8 GB RAM, Dual ATI Radeon with 2048 MB.

One could say the reason is that I have too many objects. But this amount of objs is normal for me and for anybody I guess.

This lagging problem might actually relate to the problem in v.4 which was that you could not keep the Name Gallery open because Xara was finger counting all the names and related objects thus making Xara really slow. So I'm suspecting they should continue to do some code optimizing.

[PhilM]

Hi Markku,

However powerful a computer is, or how fast and optimised Xtreme is, it will always be possible to create a document that is so complex that it can't be redrawn in the time between two clicks of the nudge key or, worse, the auto-repeat time of the keyboard if you're holding down a nudge key.

I think that is the basic problem you're having.

There are several things that you can do to mitigate the problem:
1. Turn the quality down temporarilly to improve the speed. The quality slider lets you control speed of rendering vs. quality of image.
2. Group parts of your drawing. Groups will be cached so that they render faster.
3. Divide your drawing up into Layers. Layers are also cached and so make the drawing faster to render but you can also turn layers off temporarilly so that the bit you're editing is faster to render.

I hope that helps.

BTW: We improved the speed of the name Gallery in version 5.1 so that it is much less sensitive to large documents now.

Phil

[Markku]

Thanks for the suggestions, Phil.

Strangely the quality setting makes no difference with the said case; even in wireframe mode I cannot see the progress as I keep the keys pressed down.

I'll try and see if I can group a bit more and also arrange stuff into layers.

The improvement you did to version 5.1 was considerable regarding the name gallery. One could really sense the difference.

All the best,
Markku