Content Creation Improvement Informal User Group/Archive/August 7th, 2012 Meeting

15:03 	Geenz Spad  	on that note, I think we'll be relabeling the first bit of the meeting as open discussion, since no one ever seems to really have any content creation related JIRAs to bring up
  	[noctis.mesh leather wingback chair (13p, 9 pe) whispers [noctis] MESH leather wingback chair (13p, 9 PE) whispers] 	
(⇞PgUp or ⇟ PgDn ) change your pose. Touch for menu.
  	Geenz Spad  	hey Siddean, we'll start at around 3:10, sound good?
  	Typhaon Nishi  	Hey Siddean :)
  	Siddean Munro  	morning
  	  	Yep sounds good
  	Geenz Spad  	alright then
15:04 	  	so how has everyone been?
  	Typhaon Nishi  	sweet
  	Nalates Urriah  	Typhaon, your can read Qarl's answers to your questions in my summaries of Metareality podcasts. Look in Gen News http://blog.nalates.net/category/second-life/general-news/
[15:04] Kadah CobaKadah Coba is eating lunch
  	Typhaon Nishi  	cheers Nal
  	Geenz Spad  	lunch at 3PM? :P
  	Nalates Urriah  	:)
  	Geenz Spad  	or so I'm assuming it's 3PM your time; pretty sure that's accurate
  	Kadah Coba  	inorite?
15:05 	Maxwell Graf  	hunger knows no clock for the virtual resident, nor sleep!
  	whispers Geenz Spad whispers  	anyone had any further thoughts about the UI discussion?
  	Nalates Urriah  	3:05 PM SLT
  	Geenz Spad  	and silly whisper
  	  	anyone had any further thoughts about the UI discussion?
  	Sahkolihaa Contepomi  	11:06PM for me.
  	  	omg it's Kadah.
  	Kadah Coba  	Meant to go earlier, but was busy.
  	Geenz Spad  	that's the story of my life now days :p
15:06 	  	anyone had any interesting ideas?
15:07 	Nalates Urriah  	Toy has VLM
  	Geenz Spad  	ah, I noticed that on your blog
  	Kadah Coba  	?
  	Nalates Urriah  	It's one I like
  	  	virtual land marks
15:08 	Kadah Coba  	Oh, that
  	Geenz Spad  	here's the link to Nal's post on it: http://blog.nalates.net/2012/08/04/virtual-landmarks/
  	  	I think it's an interesting idea
  	Nalates Urriah  	Thx Geenz
  	Kadah Coba  	Too bad all the Lindens that were planning something similar over a year ago are all gone.
  	Geenz Spad  	eh, who knows, maybe something can come of it
15:09 	Typhaon Nishi  	that would be cool if you could get Qarl to come to one of these meetings
  	Geenz Spad  	weirder things are happening right now
  	  	Qarl tends to be pretty busy, I had extended an invitation to him, but my guess right now is he's pretty busy
  	Sahkolihaa Contepomi  	Pathfinding having gone grid-wide today is one thing.
  	Typhaon Nishi  	yeah thats understandable
  	Geenz Spad  	anyways, let's get started
15:10 	  	so, let's open up some general discussion here
  	  	this is people's chance to bring up any problems or ideas they have with regards to improving the state of content creation
15:11 	  	anything? :P
  	  	if there's nothing to bring up, then we'll move on to the UI discussion
15:12 	Siddean Munro  	I got nothing to add cos I'm still half asleep
  	Geenz Spad  	hah
15:13 	  	so I did ask Oz yesterday about how well any build floater stuff would be received by LL, and that discussion has led me to believe that we need to produce some mockups
  	  	aaaand looks like Nal crashed
  	Typhaon Nishi  	yep
  	dispensor jolie pied barefeet medium Slink Update Dispensor Jolie Pied Barefeet Medium  	kylieangel Resident attempted collection but was not on the list.
15:14 	Kadah Coba  	Oh lol, mockups.
  	Maxwell Graf  	what would that entail?
  	Geenz Spad  	so anyways, knowing how that discussion went, it'd be a good idea to begin sorting out how that should be handled
  	  	he did chuckle about the dockable UI idea!
15:15 	Kadah Coba  	Mockups would be a good idea since the product team is likely to reject anything anyway.
  	Geenz Spad  	did comment about how people like the sidebar *after* it was removed all of a sudden :p
  	  	or at least the idea of the sidebar
  	  	well, from my understanding this isn't entirely a product team decision
  	Kadah Coba  	Only some said that.
15:16 	Geenz Spad  	a portion of it has to do with if their UI guy agrees with the design decisions with it
  	  	what this guy's part is in the rest of the viewer UI is, I have no idea; but making mockups for various ideas will only help us
  	Maxwell Graf  	what would a mockup be? just an image? a non-functional floater in the UI? just an image of a hud?
  	Geenz Spad  	I imagine all of those would be acceptable Maxwell
15:17 	Maxwell Graf  	
  	Geenz Spad  	but if I had to pick one, go for static images
  	Kadah Coba  	The product team rejected every tiny change to the tools floater that I've put forth, including ones that I got from LL to do. lol
  	Geenz Spad  	story board it as well; that always makes sense to those UI designer types
  	& 'kota of whippet & buck <3 From Twiggy & 'Kota of Whippet & Buck <3  	You're receiving this because you're a friend, a blogger or someone rad If you'd like us to stop sending you things let us know
  	Geenz Spad  	I think that us leaving the existing build floater alone is going to help here Kadah
  	  	and just having an "advanced" build UI, whatever that UI way be
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15:18 	Maxwell Graf  	ah, that nixes my mockups then.
  	  	:)
  	Geenz Spad  	the idea for the whole pallet thing was kinda cool Max, I liked that part; but we need to find a better way that preserves the existing build floater
15:19 	Maxwell Graf  	yus
  	Kadah Coba  	I'm just saying I hope they are more receptive now, but I wouldn't spend a lot of time making the actual changes to the viewer, just the mockups since they are likely to either go "nope", "change everything", or say nothing at all. :P
  	Geenz Spad  	making that floater resizable isn't off the table I'm told, if such a thing could be possible
15:20 	Kadah Coba  	Resizable would take a lot of work
  	Geenz Spad  	eh, my experience dating back to about February on a particular project that Oz has brought up at least once now that no one seems to have noticed tells me they're a bit more receptive now days
  	Kadah Coba  	And there is still the question of why resizable? Most of the controls have no height avantage
  	Geenz Spad  	mostly just for the localizations
  	  	try using the viewer in german :p
15:21 	  	then take a look at the build floater
  	Kadah Coba  	Thats horizontal issues
  	  	And English has some of those same problems at times :P
  	  	The v2/3 tabs are awful space hogs.
15:22 	Geenz Spad  	on top of that, resizable could help mitigate some of the existing problems involving how cramped the floater is; pathfinding alone made the first tab of the build floater pretty cramped even though it technically only added a couple of options
  	Kadah Coba  	I saw a screen shot of how that looks. Honestly I think that and the cost info should all be in one generic text field in one place.
15:23 	Geenz Spad  	though given the complexity to the build floater's code, maybe we could figure something else out to fix existing problems
  	  	that'd be easier to implement, and fix most existing problems before we move on to a better UI
  	Maxwell Graf  	i still relish the idea of being able to pull windows out of the client window, like onto another monitor. Is that ever something that would be possible?
  	Geenz Spad  	also, just so everyone knows, I *may* be leaving around 10 till for another meeting
  	  	and that'd be a bit of a tircky thing to do
15:24 	  	there's ways to do it yeah
  	  	but it's more a matter of where those changes will need to go and how much of an overhaul we're talking about in the UI system and OS frameworks
15:25 	  	there's already one major overhaul that needs to happen very soon on the Mac side of things for the latter
  	Kadah Coba  	The tools floater code uses a lot of legacy style code, and all of it is a mess.
  	Geenz Spad  	so I've noticed!
15:26 	Kadah Coba  	And the XUI is several folds more messy.
  	Geenz Spad  	as is most of the viewer's XUI
  	  	then again
  	  	XUI is a fickle thing
  	Kadah Coba  	It makes use of lots of overlapping controls with static code to show/hide them as needed.... >.>
15:27 	Geenz Spad  	well, how about we just don't touch the existing build floater
  	  	we'll call that our "basic" mode
  	Kadah Coba  	Its far from basic.
  	Geenz Spad  	this is true! however it "works" as far as most people are concerned, and messing with it directly will probably cause more ire than it will praise
15:28 	Kadah Coba  	Might be easier to make an all new one along side it that eventually replaces it, but I think there is a lot of other viewer code that references a static global instance of the tools floater
  	Geenz Spad  	so any problems we fix there may as well be solely targeted at things like how terrible does localization XYZ look
  	  	oh god
  	  	that's going to be a bit of a mess if true
15:29 	Kadah Coba  	I think its gToolsFloter, or something
  	  	:/
  	  	Like I said, lots of bad legacy code :c
  	Geenz Spad  	well, let's go at it from this approach: Typhaon was nice enough to put together a list of things discussed at the last meeting, so let's expand upon that and try and put together some mockups
15:32 	Kadah Coba  	I'm not sure was brought up before, the v3 one is larger than v1 and despite this it has far more localization issues. But this is generally a problem everywhere in the viewer since 2.0, the larger controls fit less text. :<
  	Geenz Spad  	yeah, you mentioned :p
15:33 	  	so, who wants to volunteer for mockup duty?
  	  	I'm guessing no one :p
15:34 	Kadah Coba  	You do it. If I do it, it will only be what I want and I could/would make it that way for myself anyway. :p
  	Geenz Spad  	hah
15:35 	Maxwell Graf  	Well, i would consider doing one for the ideas I had, but if they are going to be in a completely separate floater or palette, then it seems almost like it would just be re-creating a texture organizer, which there are already plenty of.
15:36 	Kadah Coba  	Plus, I haven't yet figured out how to fix the minimum height issues with combobox controls.
  	Maxwell Graf  	though less laggy if part of the UI, I reckon.
15:37 	Geenz Spad  	hm
15:38 	  	well, we need to know what groupings of existing tools we should have in a new UI
  	  	and how that should be organized
15:39 	Kadah Coba  	The general order should be kept, eg don't swap pos and scale around :p
15:41 	Geenz Spad  	well yeah :p
15:42 	Kadah Coba  	What major issues are we trying to solve with it in general?
15:47 	Geenz Spad  	well, imagine adding something like another texture picker to the build floater
  	  	this is one of those "if we got X big feature here, how would we handle this" sorts of deals
15:48 	  	say we got morph targets for static objects later on, allowing people to customize how a static object looks; how would we expose those parameters
  	Kadah Coba  	Well what tab would it be going on? Some of them are pretty empty, others are jam packed.
15:49 	Geenz Spad  	presumably texture for the extra texture picker
  	  	and for morph params, I'd assume either object or features
  	Kadah Coba  	Those would likely be new tabs I'd imagine, which would cause it to scroll on every lang (if its not still like that for English now)
15:50 	Geenz Spad  	three tabs that are bit of a horror story in terms of the params we have already
  	  	and adding another tab would be problematic I imagine
  	Kadah Coba  	It would be nice if the tab container control supported multiple rows of tabs.
15:51 	Geenz Spad  	heh
  	  	I"m probably going to have to start wrapping up here in a few minutes
  	Kadah Coba  	It would solve the localization issue.
  	Geenz Spad  	Siddean? do you mind grabbing today's logs, and sending me a notecard of them?
  	Siddean Munro  	Yep no worries
15:52 	Geenz Spad  	anyways
15:53 	  	I'll begin work on some mockups, and since I'm sure there's people here who would like to stay close to the progress of this project, who would like to volunteer as far as setting up a little working group?
15:54 	  	Maxwell? Typhaon? Kadah? anyone?
15:55 	Typhaon Nishi  	it could be tied in with the current group?
  	Kadah Coba  	Group?
  	  	Like an SL group?
  	  	Those don't even work properly >_>
  	Typhaon Nishi  	yeah Im not 100%% sure what you mean
  	  	do you mean an SLone?
15:56 	Geenz Spad  	a working group in this case is basically a group of people who work on things like specifications, implementations, debating functionality, and so on
  	  	though we won't be doing an implementation until we have something we can get LL to agree to :p
now, you don't have to necessarily be tech minded
15:57 	  	really, just providing feedback would be great
  	  	and since this is a pretty big subject, any amount of feedback will be valuable
which by the way! speaking of feedback, the morph targets proposal is in need of some
15:58 	Kadah Coba  	Can knock something together for next week
  	Geenz Spad  	yep
so let's figure some things out, and I'll continue talking to some people at LL about the matter; hopefully we can get some stuff done here
anyways, gonna have to end the meeting here I'm afraid (or at least my part of it, I'll let Siddean decide if she wants to continue the meeting)
16:00 	Kadah Coba  	If we come up with something good and LL rejects it, Plan 2 could be get all the TPVs to adopt it :p
16:01 	Geenz Spad  	this is true :P but I will give one hit as to why this would be good; there's a new feature that *should* be out by year's end that would benefit greatly from some extra space in the build UI
  	  	hint*
  	Siddean Munro  	I don't have anything further to add today
16:02 	Geenz Spad  	anyways, I'm out of here; thanks everyone for comming!
  	Kadah Coba  	Seeyas
  	Typhaon Nishi  	thanks Geenz :)
  	Siddean Munro  	thanks!
  	Maxwell Graf  	must off to RL as well, ciao all.
  	  	...HOLA!!...
  	Siddean Munro  	I think if no one has anything else they want to discuss - since I'm not a technical type like Geenz is, we'll wrap it for now
16:03 	Typhaon Nishi  	ok cool
[16:03] Sahkolihaa ContepomiSahkolihaa Contepomi will be going to bed soon.
  	Maxwell Graf  	thanks Geenz and Siddean.
  	sachi Vixen  	Thank you!