PARAM-O development roadmap? (with Survey)

[Anonymous]

[Note by Moderator: Please make sure to fill out the Development Survey. Link to the Survey can be found in the 3rd post of this topic.]


Since PARAM-O is described as a technology demo of sorts, what is the development roadmap for this plugin?

There are a number of GDL elements that are not implemented yet and I am curious what is the development outlook for such a useful tool as PARAM-O?

[Minh Nguyen]

Jim wrote:
I am a Mac user and have been waiting for this ever since it was announced.

I have already built a few components in a matter of a day.

However there are a few features I think would make life a little easier.

1. Display of variable/number values
Sometimes, when components are not behaving as expected, it would be nice to see exactly what values are being passed

2. Display of axes and origin
It is easy to lose track of exactly where these things are, having a visual display would be much easier

3. Logical operators
It would be nice to have conditional statements to use with the parameters, so that based on some values, we could set others. This is useful for validating user input. I'm building a spur shelving component and it would be good to set a minimum value for the height of the shelves. There is a balance to be struck between the overall height and spacing of the shelves, so there is a conflict between shelf numbers, spacing and height. The only way I can find of resolving this is to use logical statements to filter the inputs.

4. More options for list input of values
I don't know how to configure user input so that it is limited to a list of variables. When we are designing components for others to use, it can be easier if some components have plain text options for input which translate to numeric equivalents. For example if I want to configure washtrough heights, it's easier if we allow users to choose the age group, and have the parameters filled in automatically. Otherwise they will have to look up what the recommendations are. Currently I can't find any way of doing this. Also - some numeric series do not necessarily have consistent intervals. I don't know how we can deal with this either.

5. Option to increase number of decimal places displayed.
Units are metres, so parts parameters often need to work to 4 decimal places. Having Param-o round these up in the display is really unhelpful.

6. Indicator to show which variables are user-configurable parameters
When you have lots of variables, it can be nice to be able to see at a glance which ones are user-configurable. This could be a different colour/shade dialog or even a graphical indicator.

7. Facility to add notes/comments to nodes
Node trees can get very complex very quickly, and it can be tricky to keep track of what you are doing at what stage. The ability to show or hide explanatory comments would help in development a lot I think.

Hi Jim,

Thank you very much for feedback on PARAM-O and we really appreciate the time you've taken to contribute towards the development of this new tool.

I have entered your comments and suggestions into our Wish List database (please refer to it as 13055). Hopefully, our Product Management team will consider implementing them in the future.

Thank you once again, and have a great day!

Best regards,
Minh

[Karl Ottenstein]

A side-conversation about free-form modeling started to take over this thread - so I split it off into its own topic in the Archicad+ forum, since it has nothing to do with library parts, and PARAM-O in particular. If you were part of that conversation, please go here:

https://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=72689

Please keep this thread 100% focused on the current status of PARAM-O and the roadmap for the development / improvement of what PARAM-O is intentended to be: a graphical library part development tool. 🙂

[Karl Ottenstein]

scraptrash wrote:
I’ve a general question about GDL I have in mind for some time.

Why there is no 2-way interactive graphical object modeling interface for GDL?
By interactive interface, instead having to input the coordinates either in GDL or param-o viewport, graphical viewport can also let me draw a cube as easy as in archicad project and the GDL code is immediately generated interactively. Then I can manipulate the codes and the graphical viewport changes accordingly.

Please keep this topic 100% focused on PARAM-O. Any new topics should be... you guessed it... started in a NEW topic/thread. 🙂 Thank you 🙂

To the extent that your wish for modeling using Tracker or Coordinate Palette input could be a wish for PARAM-O, what tools would you expect in the window? How would you link any aspects of the modeled mass to parameters to make a parametric object? (Do note that you can toggle a view of the GDL code on in the PARAM-O window in the right panel so that you do see the dynamic code changing as you describe.)