Hello!
Sorry, you’re right. I simply never noticed.
I agree that it’s useless, at least for me. But in this case, it should be removed when looking at all the layers with transparency. Solid layer work, display without copper fill works, so it wuld be nice to get the outline out of the semi-tansparent display.
Thanks,
First:
Please do not go inventing your own date format. I had been staring at your string of numbers before I realized it was a date. ISO_8601 is (as far as I know) the only date format that has a logical order (From big to small numbers) and it specifically states that years must be (at least) 4 digits wide to avoid ambiguity. Combine that with worldwide use of this forum (and other internet stuff) and that almost any order of date items is used makes a bit of ambiguity a clear drop in muddy waters.
As eelik wrote, It has been like this for a long time, and I also do not know why it would be usefull to show the internal zone geometry. However, with the setting “Show filled areas of Zones” I never see the internal geometry, regardless of transparency settings.
Hello!
Sorry for the date. 2021-02-07 is the right date (downloaded this morning).
That said, to be accurate, if I use “show filled areas in zones”, I get the picture I posted above (the last one) which looks very confusing. I thought these were traces. The same setting but with pushing the transparency cursor to fully opaque results in the second picture, the red one.
As I wrote before: With the “Show filled areas of zones” setting, I do not see anything of the internal geometry. Not even with half translucent zones:
Maybe this can be influenced by a setting somewhere in the preferences.
If I change to the: “Show solid areas of zones in outline mode”, then it does show the internal geometry, but with the same transparency settings as the “zone” setting in the “appearance manager” (on the right of the screen).
Hello!
Ok, I will do a similar setup, in order to show various settings. I will call them options 1, 2, 3, fom the top most, middle and bottom most icon.
Here is what I get with option 1 (you can verify in the left menu the option I am talking about). You can notice that I have the various layers filled and half trnaslucent, but I also get the outlines and therefore this one is not very useful.
The mouse hover label is “Show filled areas of zones”, and the action corresponds to what it says except for the outlines that just make the layout confusing.
Option 2
This one can be used because there are no extra graphics.
The hover label is “Show only the zone boundaries”, and it corresponds to what it does.
Option 3
The hover label is “Show solid areas of zones in outline mode” which seems to correspond to what it does, but it’s useless, at least to me.
That’s about it for today!
Thanks
Are you using non-accelerated fallback graphics mode?
Yup, this is an artifact caused by the fallback renderer, unfortunately there is no easy fix. I recommend using the accelerated graphics mode if you can.
Hello!
I’m running Kicad 5.99 on a virtual machine. Is it possible to have accelerated graphics in that case? I have tried to enable it, it says I need openGL 2.1 or later. I tried to find openGL, and all the link point to NVidia. I have only on board graphics because I don’t care much about speed. Does it matter? What will happen if I use a NVidia-related openGL? Or is there a recommended openGL to be used in a virtual machine environment?
Thanks!
Environment:
What VM software are you using? You may be able to enable graphics acceleration in the VM (i.e. GPU virtualization) so that OpenGL will work. In VirtualBox, for example:
KiCad uses OpenGL for accelerated graphics in the board and schematic editor, which is normally used for 3D programs (even though we use it for the 2D drawing in KiCad) so you will see this called “3D Acceleration” here.
Hello!
Thanks, it worked at once (I’m using virtualbox).
Now I have noticed 2 odd things.
ZoomBug
I thought the legacy renderer was going to be phased out / removed at some time not too far into the future. It’s not an option anymore on my Linux box.
I also accidentally bumped into an issue report on gitlab for this issue:
Yeah, it is technically not very feasible to fix the issue as long as we are using Cairo. So our options are to ignore it, switch to a different software renderer, or stop supporting software rendering. The third option is not likely to happen (anytime soon) just because we still have some users who want to be able to use KiCad on ancient hardware, and as long as they are running a relatively modern OS on that ancient hardware, we want it to be possible.
what GPU do you have on the host machine? I guess this depends on how well VBOX does passthrough or whether it does software rendering. Have you installed the guest vbox drivers?
If it is software rendering this could explain what you are seeing… it’s not so much erratic but because the framerate and process rate is slower it is more influenced why when you provide an input and thus would appear erratic .
Hello!
As for the GPU, I don’t know. I’m using an ASUS mini ITX motherboard, and I don’t have any
other graphic board, everything is on board.
If it is software rendering this could explain what you are seeing… it’s not so much erratic but because the framerate and process rate is slower it is more influenced why when you provide an input and thus would appear erratic .
I was moving very slowly, one mouse mechanical step at a time. Sometimes (from about 4 second in the video), the changes correspond to my wheel movement rate. And sometimes I get the whole screen downscaled by a factor of 2.
And this does not explain why the mous position change happens. I’m in the mode where everything should be scaled around the cursor, and the position of the cursor itself should not move at all inside of the drawing. In the video above, you can notice that I’m starting to zoom outside of the drawing frame, and when I zoom, only Y changes. Originally at anout 1/10 of the total height (letter A), it moves to a position close to alignment with board’s upper border (letter B).
X doesn’t changed, but this corresponds to my setting.
Hi Roboya,
The option “Show solid area of zones in outline mode” is shown below
The extra lines are mostly part of the KiCad algorithms and do not serve a major functional purpose.
You can use the other two options for viewing the copper pour with clearance and just the outline of the copper pour without clearance.
Hello Amit!
Thanks for you reply!
It looks like you missed the point. Please look at message 7, first picture. What I was saying is that in semi-transparent mode, it shows the zone borders, and I think it shouldn’t. You can notice on the left menu that the zone mode is activated, and therefore the outline shouldn’t be shown.
Does anyone actually use this setting? I wonder if it is really needed anymore? It seems to cause more confusion to users in my experience.
Hi roboya,
Those lines should not be visible in the zone. It might be a bug since we are using the 5.99 version which is under development. Either you can download the latest version available on the KiCad website or can update the shape by clicking on the Options > Properties > Ok. It will directly update the shape or zone. Thank You!
Did you read the thread? It’s already clear what those lines are, confirmed by a KiCad developer in 5.99 and zone boundaries.
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
