Last weekend I released a new version of MDL Tweaker II and in this blog post I want to point out a few of the improvements of this version. The feature that has been improved most is the condition manager. Not only has the user interface changed, hopefully it is even easier to use now, but also the types of conditions you can apply has been extended. In the previous version multiple conditions on the same object always meant that all these conditions had to be true, for the object to display. But this new version does also allow other combinations of multiple conditions. For example one of the conditions must be true, none of the conditions must be true, or one of the conditions must not be true.

This can for example be useful if you want to display an object between minute 45 and 15 of the hour. As this passes the 60 minute border, this condition would become either the minute is between 45 and 60 OR it is between 0 and 15. With the new condition manager that is now possible.

Another nice improvement is the preview window. Instead of using buttons to zoom, there is now a slider where you can set the amount of zoom. This should be a lot easier to use (in the end I would prefer to use the mousewheel for the zoom, but at the moment trying to get that to work makes the tool just to unstable). And another improvement of the preview is the overal speed of drawing it. In the previous version this was often CPU limited, while I have now optimized the OpenGL code more. So it should no longer eat all your CPU and rotations of complex objects go more smooth.

With all those improvements done, I hope to be able to put some effort in reading transformations and animations now, as that is an important area that MDL Tweaker can not yet read. Once I have some progress on that, you’ll certainly read it here again.