[sldev] New Viewer Shell Proposal

[Callum Lerwick]

On Wed, 2007-08-15 at 11:03 -0700, Ben Glenn wrote:

> The goal of the project is to revamp the overall organization and
> presentation of commands and tools in the Viewer in order to make the
> UI less intimidating for new users, while still remaining flexible and
> extensible enough for power users. I don’t have many specifics in
> terms of schedules and deliverables as of yet but I wanted to get this
> out there and start gathering Resident feedback as early in the
> process as possible. Consider this an experiment in “open source UI
> design.” Please feel free to add your comments in-line or on the
> discussion page. And if you’re interested in helping with a particular
> aspect of the design or implementation, even better! 

I would suggest "Black & White" as an example to follow. Though I
haven't actually played it in a while...

It would be neat if we could just eliminate all the damn windows, they
intrude on your view and thus your immersion, but given SL's nature I
don't think that can entirely happen. Turn as many windows as possible
into HUDs instead, which are attached to a side or corner of the view,
and cause re-centering of the 3D view. Turn the remaining windows into
real free-floating native OS windows that can be placed outside the 3D
view.

It seems broken that something as fundamental as camera movement
requires two hands, one on the mouse and one on alt/ctrl. I forget how
exactly B&W did it though. Right-drag should do what alt-drag does now,
while the right button is held down the left button will do what control
does now. Ta da, one handed camera movement. Something would have to be
done about the pie menu, perhaps left-hold could activate it sort of
like a Mac. The pie menu strikes me as being a bit broken as-is anyway,
its too easy to accidentally activate and select things.

One thing B&W did is it had a 3D hand in-world as your pointer. This
allowed the indication of your pointer's location in all 3 dimensions.
However, this makes your pointer dependent on your OpenGL framerate and
SL isn't known for having a good framerate a lot of the time... As a
compromise, a 2D pointer could be scaled up and down according to the Z
depth of what you're pointing to on screen. This could help with the
"accidentally grabbing the sky" problem when trying to camera-grab
something in the distance by giving some indication of what exactly
you're pointing at.

It would also be neat if you could interact with the world in a
meaningful manner while in first person view. Look at how Doom3
"overloads" the fire button to interact with NPCs and screens, or how
you interact with objects with a dedicated use key in Half Life 2.

Doom3's PDA is perhaps a route to go for miscellaneous UI, such as most
everything currently in the menu bar...
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