52Zebra:
Thank you very much. When I am building a mission It gets very tedious doing fences barbed wire.
There are a couple of things to make life easier particularly when you wish to put many objects together or move a bunch of objects as a whole.
Putting many objects together (this works ONLY for stationary and scenic objects - it will NOT work for moving objects):
Look in your conf.ini file for this: "XXX=select+" where "XXX" is/are the key(s) for this command. Mine is "Alt MouseLeft=select+".
Hit "Edit" on the menu bar and check off "Rotate Objects". This allows you to rotate the group of objects in 5, 15 or 30 degree increments using the keyboard IN 2D MODE ONLY.
Use the above key command and move the mouse to place a lasso around a series of objects. Note: The box will be rectangular or square oriented north/south and east/west.
You may use multiple lassoes to collect objects together while leaving other objects untouched. I've even used this to collect one object at a time for a group of objects.
The objects will blink together when they have been chosen. You may rotate the objects
before you move them.
Either use the command "Copy" from the popup in FMB or simply use ctrl+C like normal. At this point the objects stop blinking.
Move your cursor away and either use "Paste" or the keyboard ctrl+V. The cursor point is the centre of the block of objects.
At this point you may rotate the objects
before you move them.
Move the objects together to make a larger group.
Using this you can put two fence lengths together, lasso, copy/paste, move together; lasso the four lengths, copy/paste, move together; lasso the eight lengths, copy/paste, move together.......
When you are finished use the popup menu choice "Unselect All". If you try "Unselect" alone it will not unselect the entire group and you could run into problems when you choose another group of objects to copy/paste or just move. I speak from experience here! It's a tad unsettling when you forget this step, choose another group, copy, paste somewhere else and suddenly find the last group you used is now in the middle of the runway. Been there. Done that. Many times!
Using this technique here I have fenced in an entire base in about ten minutes.
A note from above:
Look in your conf.ini file for the following:
Ctrl C=mis_copy
Ctrl X=mis_cut
Ctrl V=mis_paste
Without these you won't be able to use the keyboard for cut/copy/paste.
Placing objects carefully in exactly the right place:
Somewhere in here is a mod by KevinP for vertical and horizontal 10m rulers. You can place rulers on the ground using the above technique and then move the objects to just where you wish. This really comes in handy when you want to know the spacing for aircraft on line abreast take off in 4.12.2.
And, as stated before, slowing the mouse response down does wonders for moving objects around. The Naga I have allows me to slow the response down to one foot of mouse movement being less than ten inches on the monitor. When you do graphic art this is essential. I consider mission building to be graphic art.
Hope this helps.
Bob