All, We have put together a quick survey to help us understand how the Design / CAD portion of Mastercam is used. Those who fill it out will be entered into a drawing to win a hooded Mastercam sweatshirt. We will be giving a total of 5 sweatshirts away when the survey ends on December 15th. Go to our Web page and look under the What's New section or just hit the following link. http://websurveyor.net/wsb.dll/54372/CAD-Design.htm Thanks...

Matt, The box surrounding the "Group" doesn't appear until some sort of action takes place. If you just hit Enter when the focus is in the # field the box should appear. I am putting together a proposal to add a switch in Xform to turn the bounding box on/off for a "future" release. No promise or dates are implied by this.

Changing the activation weight by editing the config is working in my daily version of X2, i did not try X MR2. This option was added way back as a means to not have the speed of transform slow down when large numbers of entities were being manipulated or when solids were involved. We will not be adding an interface for this in X2 but we can consider it for a future version. In the mean time if you always want it on you will be able to set the Activation weight to 1.

Span - Hmmm, that one was a surprise. I'll check into it to get an estimate on development time. (We aren't ignoring the other ideas either)

David - The thought of cleaning up back-up files never came during the testing process. It's probably possible to do, as a little side-project to be used as a filler between big projects. (We already have a similar option for Regen files.) i have it stored away as something to be considered for later.

I am pretty sure that you will need an updated Moldplus for MR2. They have had the release for about a week already, so hopefully they will be able to provide the update quickly.

David - I see it, it's an unintended feature... Is there any reason we should change it? What do you all think?

The Defaults have one operation for each toolpath type that populates the dialog box the first time you use that toolpath type in a session. The operations library lets you have as many operations for a specific type (Drill, Contoru, Pocket, etc.) as you want. Each of those operations can have specific settings that you always use. These operations can be imported into the toolpath manager and then you assign geometry to them. You can save different operation parameters for each material you cut and recall them anytime you want them.

Allen - We don't have any sort of limit on Xform. Can you send the file to Tech Support or QC so we can look at it?

If you are running 1024x768 then things are pretty tight. It gets even worse if you are running with large fonts or large DPI. There are ways to control the information shown in the Toolpath Manager. Right-click, pick the display options and then turn off what you don't want to see. Remember, that when the TP Mgr is open and some of the information is wider than the screen a tool-tip displays when you cursor is over that particular item. We are looking into being able to handle the Operations Manager differently.

One of the big things about X is that you have a lot more control over the size of your working area. You can have just the toolbars you want, or none at all.

Hot keys for the chaining menu we added back in MR1. Hot keys for the AutoCursor are coming back in MR2... along with some other cool stuff. We made some mistakes and some assumptions and overlooked some things when we designed the X interface. Our Beta Sites warned us (flamed us sometimes ) about some things that we were not able to change right away, but all of this input is helping to continue to fine tune the interface. More is coming in X MR2, X2, and beyond. We just have to balance the tweaks with the cool new stuff like the HST toolpaths and ########### ###### ### ########## the ######### and #### for #############!

I think at first going from V-9 to X is sort of like trying to drink from a Firehose. Be patient and don't try to do too much in a hurry. Don't be afraid to continue working in V-9 during the transition period. At some point in the future you will be ready to make the switch, only you will know when that is. I think John's description is pretty typical of what i have wittnessed here on the forum and in talking to customers.

Lambert, Indiana, - Any relation to the Lambert Engine and Automobile company from the early 1900's?

X MR2 has an option to show the level descriptor across the bottom of the screen...

It is surprising how many complaints were generated by this little change. We tried to make everybody happy but, it insn't possible without making a new V-9 executable. So now V-9 works like it always did and in X it is an option.

It is best to leave the memory buffering at the default of 50%. In X all memory allocations are handled automatically so we don't have to worry about setting them like you had to do in previous versions.

A recent thread by TagrpSTi showed that quite a few are seat of the pants learners of software. That is understandable to me, since i tend to do the same thing. We'd like to get a little more information from you on this.

No, that one is permanently placed there.

I work here at CNC Software and i just wanted to confirm that we are not going to do any more development of V-9 code. Everything shifted over to the new products in 2005 right after the MR0105 release. Generally we expect the Dealers to be the first line of support to customers.

The list on the left contains the drop-down menu bars that are created with the buttons from the right side of the dialog box in the Commands window. You can drag the complete drop-down menu bars from the left into any other DDM, but you cannot drag and drop individual commands, they have to come from the commands area. I hope i made that clear...

This has been logged as a bug. We will target it for the next release.

It is being worked on right now along with a couple of other AutoCursor changes everyone asked for. It is highly likely it will be in MR2. But don't quote me on that...

This one is easy... - Open your existing default file by going to the Properties, Files page of the Machine group. - Click the ! (Config) button for Operation Defaults. - Right-click and choose the Mill flyout. - The select the Highspeed toolpath option.

That is correct - It won't be addressed in the near future either. The risk was not worth the reward in this case. Did you send the color issue into QC when you got any of the MR1 Beta releases? I must have missed it, but we can look into it. The printing interface is a lot different in MR1 which could account for the problem.