Moving multiple items together

[Nick the Cabin Boy]

Would it be possible to have a procedure to move multiple items a fixed distance?

I am rejigging my layout plan, now that I have moved into a house with a train room. This involves moving a heap of buildings, roads, etc all the same distance. It would be great if there was a command/button that said "Move all selected items direction by amount"

"Direction" would be simply Left, Right, Up, Down, moving in one plane at a time.

In the meantime, I will proceed with Select item, calculate new position, enter new positon!

Thanks,

Nick the Cabin Boy

[Nick the Cabin Boy]

Actually, I've had another think about this, and this idea might be easier to implement.

Could we have the ability to set how far a selected object moves for each arrow/shift-arrow press? That would allow the user to move many objects at once, without the program having to calculate the destination co-ordinate for each selected object.

Nick the Cabin Boy
I'll have to change that, but House Boy doesn't sit!

[BadBanana]

I agree this would be very useful in some cases.  At present I simply use the fact that the arrow keys move things by fixed amounts as follows... 

With metric measurements, arrow keys move one or more items by 2.0mm and if shift is pressed at the same time then they move by 0.5mm;

With imperial measurements (although I don't use them so I just had to test this), arrow keys move one or more items by 1/16th of an inch and if shift is pressed at the same time then they move by 1/64th of an inch;

But for large moves this becomes problematic.

Maybe the solution could be some additional increments based upon other modifier keys - Control or Control with Shift would allow some additional scope here.  Perhaps increments of x10 or x50 could be considered. 

@David - if you read this, it would be interesting to discuss further.

[Nick the Cabin Boy]

I have a heap of objects that need to be moved about a metre!

Nick

[BadBanana]

Understood!  Quite a challenge.  I guess you've looked at moving a layer at a time, and things like that.  It can help, but only so much.

[Nick the Cabin Boy]

The extra space I now have allows me to lengthen the "legs" of a U-shaped layout. For starters, I am simply moving everything to be in the same configuration, but in the new location. I've been sitting at the computer with a calculator! It's all X+534 (mm) at the moment.

Once I've done that, I can work out whether to re-space stuff, or add new stuff, or, hopefully, both.

Cheers,

Nick

[BadBanana]

One thing I can suggest (not sure if you've done this, or it it's not suitable for your needs)... 

(Apologies in advance if you've tried this - I realise that you're not a newcomer.)

Place a single piece of track which you have disconnected from the current design at the precise target location (so at its current location plus the required offset).  I do this using the arrow keys, but monitoring the location value as it moves.  When it's in the right place I glue it down.  Then when I select and move a large bunch of stuff including remaining track, but not including the piece that I glued.  I move everything currently selected just by dragging with the mouse and drop it when it shows that the track will snap onto the glued piece in the new location.   You can do this with all layers at once if needed.  Obviously any glued items must be unglued first. 

This helps because you've only got to place a single piece exactly.  I just tried this on a complex layout to move everything by exactly 200mm - it took only a few seconds.

[Nick the Cabin Boy]

The track isn't a problem (except that I might have to buy a bit more). I've designed two towns in quite a lot of detail, and they still need to be in the same position relative to the track.

One of the changes I made was to go from an out-and-back to having loops at both ends, thus allowing trains to lap at leisure. I had to redesign part of the terminus to make it a through station, as there was only one road to access both platforms. The original plan was based on one of Cyril Freezer's (P.26 in Track Plans 2nd edition), and it would have worked fine as a terminus, but not as a through station. This only really became clear when I was having a break from moving houses (and moving house), and started working out the naming of sections. Only took a couple of minutes to fix in AR!

[BadBanana]

The track isn't a problem (except that I might have to buy a bit more). I've designed two towns in quite a lot of detail, and they still need to be in the same position relative to the track.

Understood - that's why I select all layers including track and then move them all at once.  It works for any objects drawn as far as I can tell.

[Nick the Cabin Boy]

Well, I've just done a little bit of experimenting.

I have a "Sunday Market" as part of the plan. It's just stripey rectangles, but I've saved each colour as a user object. I selected the leftmost one and calculated where it ought to be. Then I selected them all and moved them with hold-rightarrow until they were nearly there, then with rightarrow. When they looked to be in the right spot, I selected the original one again, and it was correct.

I then tried again with a block of 10 houses, complete with road and house numbers. This time I went 2mm too far (that green highlight confused me). I had selected one house to check this. I was about to re-select everything, when I had the thought that the Undo would re-select. No, it undid the last command, which was the last rightarrow, thus moving everything back left by 2mm!

I'm almost finished now, but wife is reminding me that we/I still have boxes to unpack. Some of these are important, as they contain TRAINS!

This conversation has shown me that using AR for about 15 years doesn't mean there is nothing to learn, so thanks, BadBanana!

Nick

[BadBanana]

No worries!  For what it's worth, I have only four years with AnyRail, and I find that I am still learning stuff too. 

Enjoy the rest of the unpacking. 

[railroads2005]

I like the idea of a user selectable move distance to the arrow keys. What would really be nice if we could select the move distance as a default in settings and then have a dialog available to change the distance at will.