[sldev] Various questions on the viewer.

[Jason Giglio]

Richard Nelson wrote:
> 1. The camera can only get so close to the object before it starts 
> getting clipped against the near clip plane.  The purpose of the FOV 
> zoom is to approximate the camera actually getting closer when it 
> can't.  Can you elaborate on how this fails when working with small 
> prims (since that was the test case for the original implementation).
> 

The camera behaves in unexpected ways when it's in FOV zoom on small 
prims mainly.  I'll have to play with it some.

> 2. We are currently redesigning and replacing many of our existing 
> callbacks/observers with one or more flexible idioms.  One of the 
> requirements is allowing for flexible interfaces from the Observed (not 
> just a bitmask) and easy binding of user data.  However, I think this is 
> a case of a hammer making everything look like nails.  The Observer 
> pattern is very useful but when used in the place of clear functional 
> dependencies can make the code harder to understand and debug, as I've 
> seen in other codebases.
> 

OK, cool.  This is the kind of communication we need more of.  Thanks. :)

> 3. I am currently replacing hidden text elements with <string> elements 
> that don't purport to be widgets (via getUIString()).  However this 
> transition hasn't been completed (and we need to make sure that our 
> localization tools support it properly), so you'll see both 
> implementations until we clean that up.

OK, so if we are adding new UI, we should avoid text elements that 
aren't really text elements, and use XUI strings instead, if 
appropriate?  Should we clean these up if we are touching a file that 
has them anyway?

-Jason