Hi
Here 's an idea for a Wings feature. It would be nice if you could record and play howto scripts as Nendo does.
In case you are unfamiliar with this Nendo feature, here’s what happens. You press a hotkey and specify a file name. Nendo starts writing your subsequent actions to the specified file in a binary format. Once you’re done with the demonstration, you press a hotkey. The recording stops, and the result is a script you can play back in Nendo. The file stores your modelling actions (menus are not shown), highlighting, selections, viewport rotation and panning.
Implementing something like this in Wings would kill a whole flock of birds with one stone:
- Produce small files that can be downloaded easily and fast (as opposed to video)
- Eliminate video codec problems
- Enable you to work with the content of the tutorials at any stage of completion
- Save the content as Wings files
I can’t really think of any serious disadvantages to this approach in comparison with video capturing. One would be that you can’t include a soundtrack. And of course, scripts would not be backward-compatible if newer functions were used in them. Other than that, this would be preferable to video.
In case you need to rewind or FF (which you apparently can’t do when playing back a script), you, as the tutorial user, could use a video capturing app to capture the tutorial distribution in your own copy of Wings.
I didn’t find any references to this feature in the Wings Wants thread on the official forum, and I wanted to write there myself. But I wasn’t able to complete the idiotic registration procedure. So if you are reading this and you are a member of the official board, could you please quote this post in Wings Wants?
Anyway, do you think it would be worthwhile developing this?
