object snap not aquiring intended destination point

Hi, I work on drawings with AC2K that are so dense with 3dsolids and
xrefs of
3dsolids that the wire frame view is pretty much useless. I would be
quite content to snap only to visible egdes. Is there a way to do
this?

Because of the complexity of the drawings, I have to work in
View/Shade = Flat
Shaded or Hidden. This, plus cycling the select (ctrl key), at least
helps
me select a specific object. Then when I try to move that object to
some "end" object snap, the point actually aquired is some hidden end
point way the hell back there and not what I wanted.

I've used the HIDE command before, which seems to temporarily lock out
all hidden snaps, but that benefit dissappears if you have to zoom or
pan to the destination.

AutoCAD obviously knows the visible edges (else it couldn't do hidden
line removal) so why can't I tell it to snap only to the visible end
points?

Any solution to this?

 

I'm not familiar with 2000, In 2002 this seems to be a major bug, if
you use orbit or any method which changes autocad into rendering with
OpenGL, it forgets how to exclude hidden objects from snaps. The
trick around this is to set the hidemode variable to 2d, then type
HIDE from the command line. This should give you the old version of
hide, which will restrict most snaps to the visible items. [The
exception is that if your pickbox is on an object, which is partially
obscured, you will be able to snap to the nearest point on that
object]

There are also some other snapping bugs with AutoCAD. Solids (i.e.
2d planar solids) with thickness settings will snap to empty space
under certain conditions.

ACIS solids, sometimes Autocad can't find any snaps on them. If I
am making blocks using ACIS solids, I usually leave the original pline
I extruded, and draw circles on any important holes, etc, This leaves
additional geometry so that Autocad can find a snap point when it
fails on the ACIS solid.

Finally, if you have a big drawing, it is possible to just overwhelm
the program. This is a know limitation. You can help the situation
by using a single snap command instead of a set of running osnaps, or
by just freezing layers which are not important.

The bad snaps (plus hide errors, etc) have caused me to release bad
drawing... and I have really lost confidence with Autocad.

Joe Dunfee