Give Patrick a job, EITG...

#1

Well, I was just going to say something really nice about rODEo at the Ramjac forums, only to discover that some little loser wasted a lot of his own and other people’s time hacking it and taking it down. Bravo.

Anyway, on to rODEo. Animator has never been too friendly with Wacoms which I think is a major let-down. So I was very surprised to discover the other day that rODEos interface supports Wacoms without a glitch. What is it that Patrick knows that EITG doesn’t know? How come the plug-in can do it better than the host-program? Either way, kudos to Patrick I’d say.

#2

Lets not forget that XP is the only part of the program with scroll-wheel support.

Ian

#3

and the non-modal window world of rodeo! a real beauty to work with! and i could go on and on…

#4

Hi Manuel,

thank you for your kind words, I guess Patrick will appreciate this.

The difference between our tools and Animator is, that they are small and new. We can concentrate to make them work and it is a managable task. Animator on the other hand has a codebase made from dozens of differnent people in maybe 20 years. It is by far much harder to track all areas in the code that would be influenced by changes.

Also, Patrick is lazy :slight_smile: So, before he codes something he searches the internt for code fragments that do the tasks before sitting down and writing them from scratch. See the Xpressionist interface. Does it use the EI API functions? No. Why? Because the interface builder we use for it provides everything form a built in text editor, via crossplatform support up to scrollwheel support. The EI API does not.

I personally think it would be nicer if Xpressionist would look like all the rest of Animator and in the beginning I was very resistant to Patricks plans to simply use something else. But I think he was right to not waist his energy on writing a text editor for Xpressionist, but the engine itself.

I was able to restore the ramjac Forum yesterday. Everything is online again.

Jens

#5

The only thing I would have to say about that is that XP’s interface can get very slow when you try to write a long script of say 50 lines or up. At least on my old G4 it did. It’s not that big a problem, it just means that I ended up using an external editor and made good use of copy/paste.

#6

One MAJOR factor in all of this is that XP was written from the ground up with all of these bells and whistles. Animator already exists and therefore any changes that are made have potentially HUGE impact. Animator is several million lines of code. Yes…millions. Any change has to work with what’s already there. It’s really easy for a user to say “Oh, it’s just a scrollwheel”. In reality, it means figuring out if the current event system can support it and if not rebulding the event system which affects EVERYTHING. Once you’ve done that you need to decide exactly what the scrollwheel is going to do everywhere. The world “scroll” should really be eliminated since it can be used for a whole lot of interface concepts. My personal favorite comes from SolidWorks. In the 3D and world views, the wheel isn’t just for zooming. It looks at the location of the cursor to determine the center of the zoom. That’s REALLY useful.

Oh and while we’re on the subject, anything you do has to work on both the Mac and PC.

#7

Blair, thanks, you just solved a mystery for me. The zoom pan orbit in Hexagon has seemed “more controllable”, IOW easier to get focused on the space you wanted to work on but I couldn’t put my finger on why. After checking I found that hex’s scroll wheel zoom functions in that same manor (zooms from the curser position not the center of view) Amazing how much subtle UI changes affect the usability of the interface. Thanks for illuminating

#8

Hi Blair,

I wonder how many apps do this, and how much of a ‘standard’ it is. CSi’s Concepts modelers do this as well.

Actually, it seems quite intuitive to me, and I agree it is REALLY useful!

-Steve

#9

Other apps that I am aware do this:

Archicad, FormZ, and Autocad. It is becoming more of a standard in the last 2 years.

#10

Also Modo

Jens

#11

And Rhino.

#12

and Vector Works

Alberto

#13

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