Facilities of the Mad Selector Plugin
Intended for Quark 5.11 (works with 5.10)
The Mad Selector plugin is oriented towards making it easier to
select the stuff you want, tho it has tended to spread into
the related area of organizing the group structure. It puts
three main items onto the face, poly, group and entity menus
(not all available for all menus):
- Extend Selection
- Containing Groups
- Move in Tree
This appears as a submenu for faces, and an item for polys and groups.
The face submenu has subitems `To Adjacent Faces' and `To Linked
Faces'. The first extends the current selection to faces that
are exactly coplanar to the selected face, and share an edge with
it, and likewise to further faces adjecent to these in the same
way. So that if the floor of a room is selected, and there is
a say a pillar whose bottom is flush with the top of the floor,
the bottom face of the pillar will join the multi-selection with
the floor. -- if it works, which it doesn't always, for reasons
I haven't figured out.
Extend Selection to Linked Faces on the other hand just extends the
selection to other faces that are linked with the currently selected
one, as described in the description of the
Tag Side plugin.
For groups and polys, there is currently only extend selection from
the currently selected poly to faces that are adjacent to faces
in that group or poly, so that if you drag the poly, these faces
will be dragged along with it (I think it's better to drag faces
instead of whole polys, but when I took this off the menu someone
wanted it back, so here it is again).
This is for manipulating group structure, and other stuff. When
you click it, for a face, poly, group or entity (brush or point),
you get a submenu consisting of the groups etc. that contain
what you've clicked, on starting with the item itself at the
top and going down to worldspawn. Then when the mouse is over
one of these, the chosen object, we'll say, you get a further
submenu with four options:
- Zoom - zooms the map view to the chosen object.
- Select - selects that object, and also opens the tree view
to the chosen object.
- Restrict - this has the effect of `restricting' the map view
to the chosen object. Things not inside that object are greyed out,
and can't be selected. I find this convenient if for example
you want to work on the faces of a complex brush & don't want to
waste time clicking past the floor and other stuff of the room it's
in. To reverse restriction of selection, use the Unrestrict
Selection item on the command and background menus (the one that
appears when the mouse isn't over anything selectable in the map),
or choose `worldspawn' from the Containing Objects submenu.
- Mark - the chosen object is `marked' for further options in
the `Containing Groups' submenu. Marking is similar in conception
to tagging, but the marked object is not drawn in any special way,
and the difference between the ideas is supposed to be that marking
is basically for reorganizing the tree structure rather than
positioning things in the map.
One wart is that things aren't drawn right in the 3d window when
selection is restricted; I've got some delphi code that draws
only the stuff in the restriction correctly, but something else
is wrong with the source I have so that certain models and textures
aren't rendered correctly. Hopefully this will all be sorted out
in Q5.11.
These are the items that actually reorganize the tree-structure.
This appears as a submenu for entities, groups and polys, but
as a single item, `Lift to Marked Group', for faces. This
item will cause the selected face to become a member whatever
group has been marked, so giving two-click face-sharing.
For the others, the Move in Tree menu contains three items:
- Insert marked into this
- Insert marked over this
- Insert this into marked
Into and over refer to positions in the tree-view, and when the
commands are enabled, `marked' is selected be the name of whatever
is actually marked.