[Meorawr]

Great feedback in general, I'll cover it in hopefully less than thirty paragraphs this time

Originally Posted by suicidalkatt Interesting! But a nice dropdown menu for a texture set would be awesome! (I haven't tested this release so I have no idea what you've implemented).

There's a texture picking dialog which allows you to preview textures and filter them by set, so it's a bit better than a dropdown

Originally Posted by suicidalkatt Perhaps a simple 'advanced' button or checkbox to enable some hidden options.

I don't like advanced/basic toggles for small things though. A toggle for just one (or two) settings seems really unnecessary. For all intents and purposes, the 'Style' section of the editor is "done".

I might just add the setting in and see how it feels, realistically texcoords can be handled with just one control.

Originally Posted by Siku I don't know, in the final product, when we get a basic and advanced (current options), switching to advanced mode and see i have to click on an advanced button to see texcoords seems kinda redundant.

At the moment, we're not entirely sure how many advanced toggles there'll be and where they'll be. Activation has one, and I'm probably adding one to the categories list to filter out half of the stuff. Either that, or I rework the categories list and split it into 'stuff you need to do' at the top, 'stuff you might like to do' in the middle and 'stuff you need a degree in astrophysics to use' at the bottom.

Originally Posted by silverhatred <entire post covered below>

Feedback <3
I love you

Originally Posted by silverhatred I dislike how timers are now a separate aura that you have to rebuild completely. -Solution: Just build a timer into the settings of the texture and not make a timer the texture.

Completely agreed on the hate part, but the solution isn't one I particularly want to follow. One idea I'm running to a lot is the idea of 'transmuting' a display. I wouldn't call the feature that in the UI, but the idea is that you'd be able to take an existing display and say 'now create a timer that is linked to this one in almost every respect', and it'd automatically handle things like setting up the activation criteria as well as the sources mechanic for you.

I think by default, 'transmuting' a display would cause the editor to automatically synchronise all relevant settings between the two (so the sources/activation/animations/etc.), but should include options for unlocking parts so that they can be edited manually rather than be constantly updated.

The end result being that you could create a timer/stack counter/whatever from any existing display in one click and not have to worry about redoing the activation conditions, etc. However, if you wanted to, you'd still have the ability to create a custom timer and manually configure it all. Seems like a nice balance to me.

Originally Posted by silverhatred I dislike how the aura itself is built around a picture and not a spell/name, ie spell names are just a mere setting not the cornerstone. -Solution: Back in the old PA, you had one aura that did one thing based around a name. Now with the new if/then activation trigger scenario you can tie a much smarter ai into your auras. However more often than not I will do duplicate settings to several different "textures." Either have the setup based on the name, or have the setup based on an activation. Either way you end up having to do both for everything and it seems like the original "aura" you set up is more like an organizational folder.

I'll start at the end on this one, the aura system right now is an organizational folder. It kind of came into place because there's no pages now (we think they're unnecessary when you can organize stuff into auras). Originally the code didn't even have the concept of auras, but that was changed later in development because the editor would have been a giant pain without some form of organization.

The whole 'style vs. activation' thing comes up a lot in terms of 'which is more important?'. I'd agree that activation is more important, but in terms of navigation it's a lot easier to visually see your displays and say "that's the one I use for tracking my holy power" than it is to mouseover tooltips or remember their positioning.

Duplicating triggers and whatnot sort of overlaps with the first point, the 'transmute display' feature could/should fix that. Additionally I think creating dependencies should be promoted more as a 'basic' feature and as something the user should ideally do, as opposed to an advanced one. From a performance standpoint, dependencies are one of the cheapest trigger types. From an ease of use standpoint, they could be one of the easiest too when I put in their ID picking dialog because as it stands, they don't require you to duplicate triggers.

One feature I've seen a few times is some sort of multi-editing system whereby you could edit multiple things at once, so for instance you could select five texture displays and change their scale and colour in one go as opposed to five. It'd be a lot of work to implement, but it's feasible. Maybe not a 5.0 release thing however, we'd have to see.

Originally Posted by silverhatred There seems to be an extra unnecessary layer between the browser and the textures. I realize that this layer is put there because of timers and charges and stacks as well as multiple triggers on separate auras but there really isn't a need to set up this stuff when you can just source the event triggers. -Solution: have the "group" of spell events be a level higher than the initial creation, not way deeper in.

I'm not sure what this point is covering, I'm afraid. At a stab I'm going to guess it's the Sources system and respond assuming that, but if I'm wrong then feel free to elaborate

I'll make this really clear, I don't like how sources are handled in the UI. Once again it comes to power vs. ease of use, and the sources are sort of like patch 3.0 retribution paladins. They hurt.

The thing is this though, you've currently been forced to live with the 'advanced' activation editor which lets you combine 63 triggers into some silly complex logic at your whim. That's good for power.

The 'basic' one doesn't let you do that, you get a single 'main' trigger and up to one of each 'support' trigger which cover things like "Is mounted", "Is in a battleground" and so on. Functionally, it's the same as the 4.x one just with a few tweaks here and there.

On the subject of editor 'depth', you don't have to go down a level to edit triggers in the basic editor. There's no navigation needed in the basic version, apart from making your way to 'activation'. Hopefully that's what all the basic editors will look like, but we'll evaluate it on a case by case basis.

Sources come in as an advanced feature for saying "timer, this is where you get your timing information from". When it comes to the basic activation editor, we can easily automate this and hide the feature outright (you may have seen the Edit Mode dropdown under the sources section including the option 'automatic').

When it comes to an advanced activation condition, things get hairy simply because a source is designed for taking information from one location, not 63. It can't automatically determine which of your triggers is most important. The best guess it might be able to take is to say "trigger #1 is important, therefore I shall try to use it as a source". The best solution to this would be to allow automatic synchronisation, but make the user decide which trigger is being used for it.

I think the solution to this is to just wait for the basic components and see how it gets handled, I think automatic source creation/syncing is the best route out of this whilst still keeping the system in for some extra power should some crazy scientist need it.

Originally Posted by silverhatred I know its still in developement but honestly being able to go in and quickly change/add something new is fundamental to testing this. I love all of the new features and I know I could get used to the new ui, its just the placement and flow of it seems like a skinny bookcase with wide novels. -Solution: Group the settings more intelligently. For example "style" and "Layout and Positioning" should pretty much be the same catagory since people are going to be doing both of those at once more often than not.

I completely agree on the placement/flow issues in areas, but it's a balancing act of not trying to expose too much at one time while also exposing enough to keep things workable.

Two or so days before the initial release, Style and the Layout categories were merged. I split them to see how much of a difference it'd make, and to be honest I think it works a bit better split. The downside is the Layout category is very 'light' right now, however that might be because the Layouts feature in general is (almost) NYI. In addition, I hate scrollbars and that's what you'd be getting with a lot of the Style editors should I move layout stuff into there.

The thing with the layout system is, ultimately, I don't even want it in the editor. At the moment it's one of those necessary evils because the on-screen previews (as in, over-the-game-world previews) are disabled. Positioning displays simply by drag and drop feels the most natural than using pixels and dropdowns. I'll keep the layout editor in there, but I want the mouse interaction with displays to be able to do just as much as the editor would.

Originally Posted by silverhatred You seem to have put quite a bit of work into this and I definitely appreciate that.

If you're saying this just to avoid a thirty paragraph response, then no need, only people who don't provide useful feedback get that treatment

Originally Posted by silverhatred Your tutorial is great I would love to see moar once you get the ui worked out.

Tutorials will be worked on toward the end, for obvious reasons. Hopefully I can find a good spot for the ingame tutorials that isn't inside of the editor.

Originally Posted by silverhatred All of the new options with animations and combining different events is great and I have been wanting something like that for awhile.

General feature progression. We're not just going to sit in the stone age

Originally Posted by silverhatred Waiting on: Using the original spell texture automatically. -Maybe I am just stupid but I couldn't find a way to do this without adding the texture to the folder myself and calling it.

Again, sources feature. One source type is "Texture". As a source is basically "get <x> information from <y>", you can configure it to say "get the texture information from <y>" where <y> is a location like a buff/debuff. There's a lack of sources in the current release, we'll fix that soon.

Originally Posted by silverhatred Quicker feedback on aura changes. -Seeing the texture while making settings to it would be great, still a work in progress I know but it discourages me from doing any testing expecially when the breadcrumb interface is seemingly long. Clicking and dragging around the aura for quick placement is missed. Slidebars as well.

This is mostly because the on-screen previews are disabled, as I've said. We'll be reimplementing them very soon. As for slidebars, I assume this is for selecting things like textures? We might just add mousewheel functionality if that's the case.

On a side note, how would you feel about a small hotkey for reducing the opacity of the editor to help view the main screen? Say, you mouseover the editor and press ctrl and it'll reduce the opacity of the window by ~75%.

Originally Posted by N30 about the new texture scale, seams in advanced mode thry are in px, in simple mode the will be in % like on live version or in px, if they are in px is possible implement a scale switcher (px<=>%) on both mode?

At the moment it's all pixels all the way, simply because pixels let us merge two settings into one (the distortion setting in 4.x was the same as pixels, but incredibly stupid). If I put in scale, it'd be as a separate option as opposed to a simple switch. I can see why it's useful, and I've already been considering it.

On an unrelated note, I'm thinking of visually marking the editor categories in some way after creating a new display to assist in telling people what they need to do next. So you create a new display and the 'activation' section is highlighted, or has an icon, or something. Maybe a tutorial-style popup telling you what to do next. In addition, some other form of quick navigation between categories seems pretty required at this point. Ideas welcome, so long as they're constructive

~25 paragraphs, success!