Horde3D

Hey guys.

I just wanted to give a little feedback on the editor while I remembered.

The main thing that struck me was how annoying having to right click an object to select it was. You should left click to select (like all other 3D software in the universe). It might even be useful to draw a bounding box for the selectable object when mouse over it for feedback.

Once you select it, you should see rotation/scale/transform handles (you can use a mesh for those) and they should highlight as you mouse over each axis.

I seem to recall issues with scene node placement when cutting and pasting too (it placed objects as children in fairly weird ways).

Now I know you're not trying to recreate 3dsmax and the like, but you should at least pay lip-service to how they work. I suggest looking at Torque's world editor for an example of a non 3d app that is reasonably useable for world building.

Don't get me wrong, an editor is a really useful tool for a game engine and I really support the effort, but think the usability is currently not as good as it could be.

I'm happy to work out the details of the various interaction modes if there are any questions. Give user feedback or usability help if you need it.

Right-click to select is how Blender works, so it isn't entirely unusual for 3D software

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

You can enable a bounding box in the menus, and the rotation, scale, translation is shown in the property window. The mouse button for selection can be configured in the settings.

A snap-to-grid function would've been very useful when I was trying to make the track for "race of death"
I had to place all the blocks, and then edit the numbers manually in the property editor to round them to the nearest n-units (e.g. 10 unit grid).

Ok, all other SANE 3D software

Blender was a nightmare to use last time I tried, which admittedly was a LONG time ago. Left click just seems so much more natural for selection. Left click and drag for band selection etc.

You are just very used to Windows/Mac GUI paradigms - the open-source (and by extension linux) world is far more varied. In particular, many open-source apps have considerably more powerful user interfaces than their commercial counterparts, at least in part because they aren't constrained to 2-button, mouse-driven interfaces.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

That might well be true. But then that software on PC and MAC has had a ton of usability testing and has built up a set of rules for usability that professional artists (and wierdly professional programmers who have to use said art tools) have come to rely on. Choosing to disregard the built up ruleset for your target audience is a very brave/risky thing to do.

I think in general Horde editor is very usable, a few small quirks here and their, but no major problems? The only thing I would like to see are some light/camera 3d icons to represent their position, direction, and as swiftcoder mentioned snap functions.

A professional artist is pretty flexible and will pick up most tool sets quickly, most main stream software have their own interface problems so its not a very good argument

Theirs always areas that can be improved, but I think a release with Beta 3 support and onwards is most important at the moment.

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Let's bring 'em out! Any old iron! Any old iron!
A door opens and a homewife brings out a rather sophisticated-looking ground-to-air missile system, and dumps it on the cart.
Thank you.

True, but I think usability is a big issue for artists. Ok your a bit of an exception but in general artists seem very picky about these things. So trying to break out of what is a fairly normal left-click-select meme seems a bit backwards to me.

Maybe its a linux-ism?

They really don't have such rules - just take Max, Maya, Lightwave and Modo (all big players in 3D content creation), and you have such a variety of GUI paradigms that the average user cannot transition smoothly between them.

Max uses a (moderately) standard Window's approach to the GUI, while Maya uses tearable menus, most of them contextually triggered by the spacebar. Lightwave has many text-driven tools, and Modo has a very modern context-sensitive, unified interface.
The huge advantage of right-select is that the right mouse button always selects. In a left-select GUI, there must be a special selection tool, and selection can only be performed when that tool is selected, requiring two tool-changes each time you need to modify the selection you are working on.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

In programs like that, I would be looking for the keyboard shortcuts to each tool, in which case I'd be learning the specific conventions for each different program anyway

I think the best option is just to have this kind of stuff somewhat configurable, so if people can't learn new tricks then they can make the software behave more like they expect.