OpenVSP 3.32.2 Released

[Rob McDonald]

While 3.32.1 fixed the most egregious issues with 3.32.0, it was still a bit of a hot mess in its own right.  This release helps tame the chaos, hopefully it gets people back on track.

Of course, I couldn't help myself and stick to _just_ bug fixes.  So, if you use CFDMesh & Co, you will find that the 'f' and 'r' keys work like they do in the rest of OpenVSP.  These are UX candy -- go ahead and indulge.

(For those of you that are wondering what pressing 'f' or 'r' does -- try it!  If you can't try it right now, pressing 'f' will 'f'it all the visible stuff onto the screen by auto zoom, pan, and setting the center of rotation.  Pressing 'r' presents a bunch of green points.  Click one and it will be set to the center of rotation and moved to the center of the screen.

Other than that, it should mostly be a bunch of fixes.  The migration from sprintf to snprintf broke a few things.  Those have been fixed and an audit has been conducted, so hopefully we're through with that.

Fix lingering problems with CompGeom half meshes and tag files.  Previous fixes broke things like Wave Drag and Parasite Drag.

Fix error validating subsurface structures properties on structures data transfer.  Was preventing analysis of structures with subsurfaces.  Improve error messages while we're at it.

Attempt to set property length unit when converting an old file.  Unfortunately, I can't see a way to convert

Some of the VSPAERO output files were updated, our parsing of those files has now been updated to match.

Fix some small VSPAERO issues that were causing hangs and crashes when slicing planes were active.

Overall, not a ton of stuff -- but everyone should update because the problems these fixes address were hitting a bunch of users.  Hopefully we'll keep things under control for a while going forward.

Features
 - Make 'f' and 'r' keys work with CFDMesh & Co.
 - Allow parasite drag to use a reference wing not in the active Set.
 - Print missing command line when calling CpSlicer.
 - Clean up mesh from repeated mass properties analysis.
 - Attempt to set property length on import of older structures files.

Fixes
 - Fix validating structures subsurfaces
 - Fix visual artifacts in orthotropic material GUI in structures.
 - Fix double fee in Cartesian plotting library that shows up with bleeding edge versions of FLTK.
 - Fix parsing of VSPAERO output files.
 - Fix wave drag, parasite drag, half mesh, tag files issue.
 - Fix snprintf conversion issues
 - Silence snprintf warnings
 - Fix VSPAERO with slicing planes active

[marco]

oh why did you only tell me about the f key in this patch! I love it!

thank you saint spirit of OpenVSP.

[Brandon Litherland]

Looking at this post again, I felt it needed mentioning that I'm not trying to make anyone feel bad.  There are several places where these features are highlighted and described.  The OpenVSP Ground School Chapter One content has quite a lot of it.

Some features, such as saving user views to a VSP session, are actually hidden and most people don't know that this incredibly useful feature is there.

OpenVSP Ground School: Changing the View Center of Reference

Also, from the 2022 OpenVSP Workshop, Basic Modeling Guidance and Examples:

The OpenVSP View menu:

[Rob McDonald]

This happens a lot...

OpenVSP is a tool best learned (for many of us) through a discovery process.  "What does this do? -- click, drag, poke, observe -- Oh, that is what it does."

Unfortunately, it is not always obvious when things can be tried -- in particular something like a hot-key where there is not an immediate visual cue.

Brandon has been working hard on our documentation -- mostly as videos, per user requests -- but there are a lot of us who never consult the documentation.  I don't just mean for OpenVSP -- it is very rare that I ever consult a software program's documentation.  I have the expectation that I will be able to figure out whatever I need through discovery.  Usually that works, but sometimes it is inadequate.

I like to believe there aren't a lot of "hidden magic" features out there that users like you could be missing -- but I could easily be missing some.

Do you know that you can drag-n-drop Parm's to most GUI's where you might need to specify a Parm?

Rob