And you could have an almost undo-like snapshot list that just shows the recent snapshots. Especially if you save what feature triggered the save (for example autosave-timestamp-deleteobject) you basically have a simple version of undo.
I’d happily take a performance hit when for example deleting and object or commiting a move, for the benefit of being able to undo it later.
Even if it starts with just move and delete commands, those are the hardest ones to revert.
While ram on lower end devices can be a precious resource, disk space is much more abundant, and if a user can choose a max amount of undos to save before it deleted the older ones this is quickly managed.
Opps… right… totally forgot that I already added this a long long time ago.
The fear of an unintentional or intentional leak is just one of several considerations not to share code or collaborate: there are other serious implications if I switch from lone wolf to team mode:
Estlcam V12 is 100% my own code - the only time I made myself dependent on others was the gamepad support in earlier versions and I regretted it quickly even though it was just a minor addition.
Someone elses code on something touching so many parts of the program like an UnDo function isn’t something that you can just add and then forget about it.
You need to understand it or risk breaking it with any update you’re working on.
And unless this person thinks very similar and has a very similar coding style I will from then on spend a lot of extra time on everything I do.
The other person having a similar style is also very unlikely as I’m no trained programmer and have no clue on the usual guidelines and good practises.
A nice little luxury as “one man show” is to be free to break any convention and do as I please with no need for coordination with anyone else.
And: I earn money with Estlcam. Anyone contributing so much work like an UnDo would be very ill advised to do this for free.
I admire the altruism of open source programmers but also confess: money is a good motivator.
I would feel shady to accept a free contribution of this magnitude but also don’t want to spend any money on it. I mean - the whole thing only exists because I was too stingy to pay for CAM software in the first place
100% true.
Any shortcut suggestions for Timestamp save and Timestamp restore?
Maybe I use Strg+S to automatically save a timestamped copy in a temporary directory in addition to the regular save file.
Anything speaking against Ctrl + “R” for “Restore”?
While I think an auto save by feature would be cool, having an autosave by time would be a great first step. This way in the worst scenario you only loose xminutes.
I have actually done this before for software that others made money on, purely because I liked to use it, and it was a faster way to fix bugs, etc. that affected me
For this type of restore, I wouldn’t have a keyboard shortcut at all. I would put a “Restore from Save” or something on the menu which pops up a box listing the available saves for you to pick from. Before restoring, it should automatically save a copy of the current state. I suppose a keyboard shortcut could be used to open that window.
Created an “EstlCameo” companion app for EstlCam to help provide “Undo” by capturing and restoring snapshots. I’ll share details/link if anyone wants to try out?
@christian-knuell what’s your github alias? I’d like to share more info/ideas that may help Users.
Expect problems and bugs… Am sharing as-is and hoping @christian-knuell will chime in on whether open source community contribute EstlCam companion apps like this could be a useful approach to help EstlCam 12 Users. Doesn’t work worh Estlcam 11 until if/when Estlcam 11 adds Ctrl+S support.
5min Full Install and Demo video…
There’s design changes that could make this and similar app less brittle, i.e. agreed contract for transient state files (with process id suffix). Would like to share details with @christian-knuell when he has time.
This sounds great, but I’m confused that Ctrl+S key does not make save happen for me, while running ESTLcam v 11.245_A_64 on a Windows 11 ARM edition. ??
I upgraded, both to support Christian’s efforts and to get the Ctrl+S hotkey for Aza’s add-on, but I’m hitting the hurdle of all my tons of existing v11 projects not being openable in v12, and I don’t have the bandwidth now to fight with the incompatibility headache. I’ll stay with v11 for now.
Crap. Sorry that didn’t work out for you. Thank you for taking the time to try it out and troubleshoot. I updated my post, video descriptions and repo README to clarify Estlcam 12 is needed.
Hey, I just now installed AutoHotKey — https://www.autohotkey.com/ — and created a script that gives me nice set of hotkeys for all the menu choices in the File menu dropdown, and now I have Ctrl+S saving in ESTLcam v11! Given this, any chance the add-on you made could be cloned and tweaked to work with this setup?
@DougJoseph, am not actively using or testing EstlCam 11 anymore. That said, latest EstlCameo release includes edits I made to help support EstlCam 11. However you’ll need to do your AutoHotKey thing, or be content with selecting Save Project from the File menu options.
EstlCameo uses FileSystem Watcher, key hooks, EstlCam’s window caption and EstlCam’s state files to try and figure out when/what project file to monitor and snapshot when saved by EstlCam. Snapshots are copied to /.snapshots/{project filename}/ subfolder. Restore never overwrites the project file. Restore only creates {project filename}-restored-{timestamp}.e12 file (or .e10 file extension for EstlCam 11). I started hooking Ctrl + Z and Ctrl + Y, but that was feeling too brittle and liable to cause data loss and unhappy people.
