Re: [Pipmak-Devel] Authoring features: What I am doing...

[Christian W. <cwa...@gm...>]

Andrea Viarengo wrote:
> Create a new project, close new project panel and after press F1 to 
> enter "Authoring mode".
> Click (with Right or Left button) to view menu
> Go to "Face selection mode" and after click on a face to select it,
> click another time to load an image (you can choice a file in all your 
> computer)

It crashes when I click on a face in "face selection" mode.

> With no face selected, click to show menu and select "Open project map".
> Try to add new  nodes.

Seems to work nicely. I wouldn't call this a "map" but rather a "list"
(what I have in mind for a "map" looks different). I can definitely see
having such a thing in Pipmak until the full project map is ready, or
even permanently as an alternative to the map. Why does it mess with the
interpolation setting?

> Pay attention that you cannot modify project inside zipped file *.pipmak 
> but only in uncompressed directory *.pipmak (Seems that Physfs can only 
> read  from zip, but cannot write into - Christian, do you confirm?)

Yes, that's right. Files inside a zipped project must just be treated as
read-only by any editing features.

> If you  try to open "EthernitY" or "My House Virtual tour" and visualize 
> the project map, after some pages (clicking on down arrow) you get an 
> assertion failed on image->isFile=0

I already get this when opening the node list for the first time in "My
House Virtual Tour". I'll see if I can reproduce it on Mac OS X and
debug it. Perhaps something unexpected happens when images are tossed
out of the cache, or something.

> 1) Christian, there is something wrong in how I build panel -40?

Not that I can see at first sight.
I never considered the possibility that anyone would draw on the
background image of a panel, but of course that should work.
"../" .. nodeList[i].id .. "/" .. nodeList[i].images[j] doesn't work if
nodeList[i].images[j] starts with "..", but I haven't checked if that
occurs.

> 2) Christian, you think that this could be integrated with what you have 
> in mind?

Parts of it, sure. In particular, the node list looks promising. On
others, I feel I'm unable to judge because I haven't approached the
problem myself yet.

First, a few random subjective comments purely from a user's
perspective, without having examined the code:

- Too many modes for my taste. Don't mode me in. I often found myself
wanting to do something like move to another node and thinking, "Hey,
why doesn't that work? Ah, right, I'm still in authoring mode."

- I'm confused as to under what circumstances authoring mode switches to
the pan tool.

- The node editing menu behaves as a weird mixture of a utility window
and a menu - e.g. it doesn't go away when you click outside of it. I
realize that's not your fault because the "panel" node type is just
designed for utility windows, not for menus.

- Since bringing up the menu is the only thing you can do in authoring
mode, why not display it all the time when in that mode, as a real
utility window? That would even serve as a more obvious visual
indication that we're in authoring mode (whether that's enough of an
excuse to get away with modes remains to be seen). To save space, it
could slide out of the way when unused (like the inventory in the demo
project).

I feel a bit bad for leaving you working on this without any guidance
from my part on where I intend things to be going. I should probably sit
down and try to write up at least the parts that have been floating
around in my head up until now. On the one hand I welcome your desire to
get something done at a time where my own development activity on Pipmak
is all but dormant. On the other hand, this GUI design stuff just
happens to be a domain where I tend to have very specific ideas on how
things should work, and I fear that I'd end up rejecting a great part of
your hard work because it doesn't fit with my ideas of a pixel-perfect,
user-friendly GUI, when that is not your fault because I never told you
what these ideas are. :/

  -Christian