topic Anyone Remember Visual GDL? in Collaboration with other software

Anyone Remember Visual GDL?

Anonymous — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 22:17:57 GMT

A long time ago, Graphisoft made available an add-on called Visual GDL. It was pretty clumsy, but as I recall, it allowed you
to edit shapes in a 3d window that were automatically converted into a fully editable GDL objects. My memory is pretty fuzzy on this and I'm sure some of you will remember better, but it showed tremendous potential and I always wondered what happened to it.

At a recent user's meeting when I asked the people from Graphisoft Visual GDL they replied somewhat emphatically, "It has not been forgotten".

Re: Anyone Remember Visual GDL?

david nicholson-cole — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:19:10 GMT

I remember Visual GDL - was available in 1996-1997. It had some great features which we still don't have, for example contextual colour in the text. This is something we could still enjoy, if only GS would bring it back.
A Drawback was the lack of 2D scripting. You could build in the 3D window, and see the script form, or could write script into the text window. Being just a modeller, there was no opportunity for intelligence, i.e. IF statements. One nice thing was that it built very clean nice looking script unlike the dense clutter of auto scripted objects.
Problem was that GS tried to price it too high and nobody bought it. One day, the GS-UK rep called to my office and installed it for free. He said "Nobodys buying it, so we've decided to give it away while stock lasts".

Re: Anyone Remember Visual GDL?

Anonymous — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 06:00:18 GMT

I actually got mine for free! Actually, this is the second time that I asked a GS person about Visual GDL and got a positive
reply.

I'm hoping that someone can, if they are able, shed a little more light on the matter.

Re: Anyone Remember Visual GDL?

David Collins — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 06:40:15 GMT

david wrote:
Problem was that GS tried to price it too high and nobody bought it.

.... well, almost nobody!

Purely for fun, I actually tried to load my copy of Visual GDL a year or two ago. It had crashed repeatedly when I originally bought it and I was wondering if it simply didn't have enough memory on that older computer. But of course it was looking for both Windows 95 amd the old copy protection system and wouldn't run at all.

As I recall, another problem it had was that for things like the Wet Noodle Tool (which would turn a wall into jello) the generated script was in binary and could neither be seen nor edited, which sort of defeated the purpose.

The color coded script was nice, though. I always thought it would have made a great learning tool for GDL scripting.

Re: Anyone Remember Visual GDL?

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:57:42 GMT

I've never seen or heard of it, but it sounds great!

A tool like this would be great to bring back, as it would help other learn GDL.