General request: Drop-down menu of maintain input paths

Couldn´t there be in general a drop-down option on (almost) every component, which input paths should be maintained?

E.g. on [Orient] Maintain Paths: G / A / B

If no option ticked, the standard is used.

I guess this would be a heavy impact on a lot of code and I am not sure if it makes sense on all of the components, but for sure on some. And often it would make life so much easier.

What do you think?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Landscape on April 12, 2013 at 9:12am

Great request!!

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 12, 2013 at 10:55am

It's something I've been considering for a while. It's a very expert user function, but the reason I haven't implemented it yet is because I want to improve the default behaviour. If expert can change the way the master parameter is picked then they stop complaining and thinking about it.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 12, 2013 at 5:37pm

Sod it. It's going to happen sooner or later so it might as well be now. I added a 'Principal Parameter' option to all component input parameters. It's no longer called master parameter. Also haven't got an icon for it yet.

Permalink Reply by Mateusz Zwierzycki on April 12, 2013 at 6:35pm

Well, so now we have some inputs/outputs where in a drop down menu we can see like 5 icons (flatten, graft, reverse, simplify, invert or expression)... + principal parameter(the sixth). I bet mouse tracking statistics would show that the first menu item (the component's name) is used only once per component.

So the "flatten" etc. descriptions are showed instantly rather then on mouse hover.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 13, 2013 at 2:35am

I concur. Big changes though, I might not make them until 2.0

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by phillip on April 13, 2013 at 8:02am

Oh, wow. I didn´t expect it to go thrue this easy. This is a really big step I think.

As Mateusz is mentioning there are a lot of icons in the drop-down now. So technically it is now possible to add 5 of these icons to an input at the same time, which makes the component quite big. Also the behaviour of this is somehow different from the other options, so I wonder if it makes sense to put them on the same grafical level.

Also beginners might get confused with an increasing row of icons at input/outputs.

Since you do not have an icon yet though and the principal parameter can be applied to only one input at the time, how about a different strategy to mark it?

I could think of several ways:

1, There is a line or dot behind the input declaration.

2, The input plug gets filled

3, The declaration gets a different text format (bold - italic - underlined) or color

4, The input wire changes color

(This could make a file even more readable when you just follow the golden thread.)

5,...

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on April 13, 2013 at 8:12am

The only difference between principal parameter setting and things like flatten, simplify etc. is that you can indeed only have one of them. Otherwise it's a very similar property and I'd rather use the same mechanism to display it. The property icons are clearly visible and have tooltip information. Tooltips would not currently be possible on wires or grip circles.

To be a total jerk about this:

Line or Dot behind the input declaration. Not sure what that means actually.
Input plug gets filled. It's subtle (which is good for expert users) but easy to miss (which is bad for beginners). Also, tooltips.
Different font/colour. Fonts and colours are user-settings. If someone selects a font which does not support bold or italic then you can't see the difference.
Input wire display. What if the input wire is set to hidden? Also, tooltips.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

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