The DSS Tape Measure came about one day when I was bouncing around to prefab shops looking for either a new house or new building for my shop, and kept running into buildings that – believe it or not – didn’t have their dimensions available. Since my land at Orbitalis is a little on the irregularly shaped side I really needed to know if a building would fit before buying it. It got to the point where I was standing at the corners of the building, writing down the map coordinates and then doing the necessary math to get a rough idea of sizes.
“Doing the necessary math” – Have you ever heard of something so monstrous?
So I did what I always do when confronted with a problem and wrote a little script that let me measure the distance between two points that I fix my camera on and voila the DSS Tape Measure was born.
Using the Tape Measure
As I mentioned the tape measure works by tracking your camera position, it’s pretty simple actually. Once you’re wearing it you should have a little yellow tape measure on your HUD…
So you’re all set to do some measuring. Let’s see how wide my deck is.
We’ll start out by picking the right corner of the deck as our starting spot.
Press and hold the ALT key on your Windows, or the Option on your Mac keyboard. The cursor should change into a little magnifying glass. Keep the Alt / Option key down and pick the spot you want to focus on by simply clicking on it with your mouse. Your camera will re-center on that spot and you can release the ALT / Option key.
Here’s everything I just said but with pictures!
Once you’ve got your spot picked out click on the Tape Measure HUD…
… To set that as your starting position. The HUD will let you know that the position is set…
And you’re ready to pick the spot you’re going to measure to. In this case it’s the other end of the deck…
And you’re going to do the exact same thing. Hold down the ALT / Option key on the computer keyboard and click on that spot with the mouse. The screen will re-center on that location… 
Now all you do is click on the Tape Measure HUD again and you’ll get your measurements.
