[sldev] Project looking for a home: (VWR-10924) Magical scripted HUD/UI

[Mike Monkowski]

Admiral Admiral and I have been working on a project whose goal is to 
have floaters interact with in-world objects. The patch described below 
implements the major pieces, but now we have to finish the details, and 
that requires community input.  Specifically:

1. Determine which UI events to send to the object. For example, a 
button press has a mouse-down and a mouse-up event. Do we send both or 
just one? And if one, which one? The XUI trace function that we added 
shows the events. We've already suppressed some that we felt shouldn't 
be sent, such as scrolling. There's much more to do.

2. Determine a format for the messages sent to objects.

3. Some UI operations require interactions between widgets, for example 
pressing a button to send the text in an editor window. What are the 
interactions that need to be defined? How can this interaction be 
represented in XML? The on-click tag used for menu items seems the best 
way at the moment, but the implementation of on-click seems to be a 
work-in-progress at the moment. Will it persist into viewer 2.0?

4. With this patch an object can send a notecard with the XUI definition 
that the user can instantiate as a floater then manually enter a chat 
channel for communication. How much of this should be automatic? How 
should the chat channel be defined?

5. Documentation. There are a lot of XML parameters in the XUI. See 
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Skinning_HowTo/Basics#Related_to_layout 
If we expect residents to define XUI floaters, we should teach them how 
to do it.

So we're looking for an open source viewer that would provide a home for 
this project.  Imprudence looked like the best candidate because of 
their work on UI issues, but they're still based on version 1.21 and are 
only upgrading to 1.22.  This patch requires a 1.23.4 base.  Of course 
we don't know what happens when Linden goes to viewer 2.0.  All of this 
may break.  A comment either way from Linden would be nice.

Anyone care to adopt us?  You only get one programmer though.  Admiral 
Admiral has his new laptop which, of course, does not have the required 
but obsolete VS2005.  Grrr.

Mike
Mm Alder



-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [JIRA] Updated: (VWR-10924) Magical scripted HUD/UI
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2009 10:26:51 -0700 (PDT)
From: Admiral Admiral (JIRA) <no-reply at lindenlab.cascadeo.com>
To: monkowsk at watson.ibm.com


      [ 
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-10924?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:all-tabpanel 
]

Admiral Admiral updated VWR-10924:
----------------------------------

     Attachment: MSH1.patchfile

The patch MSH1.patchfile adds the following functions:

--Tracing all GUI operations to the log file
     Advanced->XUI->Trace XUI to Log

--Tracing all GUI operations to a floater
     Advanced->XUI->Trace XUI to Console

--Load and trace a floater from an XML file and send the trace over chat
     Advanced->XUI->Preview XUI...

--Load and trace a floater from a notecard and send the trace over chat
     "Build Floater" after opening or creating a notecard whose contents 
start with "<?xml "

You should apply the patches at VWR-14475 and VWR-15310
before this one.