... before shifting into the suggestions forum:

SUGGESTIONS/MUSINGS

ViaCAD is often an intriguing, sometimes confusing, but powerful application. I keep trying to show it off, but there is soooo damned much resistance because ACAD and Rhino are "well-known".

This is really pissing me off, and i want so badly to form a team to show that it's possible to design and a large naval vessel, get steel weights (weight estimates), centers/moments, and more.

But, to really snuff out and shut up some of these naysayers i know that in my heart one way to do it is to stick it in there faces after VCP or Shark demonstrate:

-- a more ACAD-like layer management
-- less wonky (baffling?) dimensions and text insertion/management
-- dockable and refinable tool palettes
-- external references
-- part library


SCRIPTING

Scripting of some sort (nothing terribly fancy, but something that is along the lines of action/example recording) that would vastly speed up creation of placing stiffeners, girders, and stringers (easy enough by using the stations, buttocks, and waterlines provided by the .dxf or other files generated in any decent hydrodynamis package like delftship...). It would be nice to in advance click on some lines, define or teach VC the desired result to within some amount of acceptable error (if exacting precision is not crucial), and then reproduce the steps i do. I say this because there have been times when extrusions wouldn't work in one method, but worked perfectly fine by an alternative method from the same tool.

Think of this: You want to draw walls in various directions (l/r or front/back) from plane to plane (floors). Easy enough, but it would be nice to insert lines, and click them by association and have the script do the rest (draw/extrde to desired thickness) after all the association clickings are done. Then, a preview-before-commit could be a nice touch.

LAYERS MANAGEMENT ENHANCEMENTS

Also, really nice would be a means of copying and pasting layers from one location in the tree to another, when layers grow but are basically copies of a parent layer. This would probably need a single or string of (prefix? suffix?) letters to be incremented/decremented when copied/moved in the heirarchy.

Xrefs...paperspace/print management would be great and a necessity when dealing with externally referenced files.


CRASH RECOVERY

Crash recovery with auditing would be crucial, too, as people want to know that the recovered file is reliable, current, and so on.


IMPORTED GRAPHICS MANAGEMENT

Particularly interesting to me is my recent accpetance of using imported graphics to speed up drawing via copying and adjusting of lines rather than measure/draw transference of information. But, it would be nice to "tag" the photo's parts

CUTAWAYS

As for cutaways/see-throughs, more options could be used. Say a sphere is desired. Set the center, the diameter, and then indicate geometry (on a pop-up list, layers, colors, items, a listing of whatever the app allows the user to use as an organization/presentation restricter) to use for dictating what the sphere/cube/ellipse will "clip".

3D LASER SCAN MODEL INTEGRATION

After getting some training in a 3D laser modeling application (due to eula, i won't name the company, but it's reputable and not young nor fly-by-night...), i had a sickening feeling that (whatever it cost) that company made a terrible decision to link their app ONLY to their own viewer and only to autocad. If 3d scans images (jpeg) with the attendant 3-points-of-information per pixel were importable to ANY CAD app, then models could be imported to VC 2D/3D/VCP/Shark. Nicely, VC can give the distance from point to point for drawn geometry. But, the app i trained in (if i understand correctly) can NOT give a correct/accurate measurement of distance between two pipes UNLESS the pipes are BOTH going in the SAME direction. I'm thinking WTH???? If this 3D image were JPG and contained a 0,0,0 overlay of the spatial model's x/y/z per scan pixel, VC could probably import that information and the user's company could save SHLOADS of money AND get accurate distances for geometry or objects oriented in any direction.

JUMP POINTS

Something else i'd like to think would be kewl.... user-defined jump points. It would mimic but not be everything a fly-by or walk through would be. But, it would be nice to set up a path by clicks or by actually drawing in sticks/nodes with instructions:

-- Start point
-- intermediary stop point with duration, camera direction instructions (look up, down, around, zoom in or out, focus/dwell on this name plate, back up, open the door (using a script that targets the "pins" in the hinges of the door and the mounting brackets, rotate the door in x degree increments every 2 or every x of a second, and then walk/fly on to the next stick/torch/bread crumb....

Or, at least, let these markers respond to mouse wheel scrolls clicks to jump the user to the next point, and allow program-like "break points" so ad-hoc changes direction of travel could be supported.