[Bf-committers] access selection order via Python

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi Martin,

I thought you'd just needed a quick addon for a special group of specialist scientists (which is awesome, Blender's python API is enabling amazing features for many people). Adding more features for scripters is important and there's a lot of efforts done to make this happen.

However, there's also an underlying design behind all of it. With a good team of designers we've defined a framework and design concepts in 2010 for Blender 2.5, a project that took off very well and which we benefit today from still. My suggestion to you about how to code atomic or incremental tools was not an opinion (which you "respectfully disagreed" with), it was just an advice for design-aligned implementation of tools. 

A selection-order list by itself is not bad or good, it's just about how you try to create sane system in Blender that makes tools behave uniform, predictable, efficient to use, and as consistent as possible. You can take any UI idea and apply that to Blender, and for any idea you will get people who support it - but also popular support doesn't make the ideas good or bad. You don't make better software by popular voting UI features. Greatness can usually be better found in restrictions and in simplicity - great designs. 

If designs fail we should fix that of course. The mere concept of 'section groups' was on our (and my) list since 2010 - it just needed to be investigated well. It would help Blender a lot to get such concepts well defined, but preferably in a way that it's complying to a high standard we have now. It has to be sane, visual, pleasant, and consistently implemented for use in all of Blender. And in case you didn't know, the fact so many artists and scripters can be doing awesome things with Blender is thanks to design decisions, not in spite of them!

That was the long answer :) The short one is - we better do this good, or not.

-Ton-

--------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  -  ton at blender.org   -   www.blender.org
Chairman Blender Foundation - Producer Blender Institute
Entrepotdok 57A  -  1018AD Amsterdam  -  The Netherlands



On 27 Feb, 2015, at 23:01, Martin Pyka wrote:

> hi everybody,
> 
> thx for the suggestions. Yes, all available ways are right now, somehow 
> a workaround for this missing feature.
> 
> Here is a summary of the current debate:
> Two tools use workarounds to make this feature available [1, 2], I could 
> need it for my own addon [3], there are vivid discussions about that 
> issue [4, 5] and even somebody submitted this as a bug report years ago [6].
> 
> I think this shows, that there *is* a general need for these information 
> and a generic applicability. Now, I am wondering, how difficult is it to 
> implement it and what must happen in order to get this feature request 
> approved for one of the next releases?!
> 
> Thanks a lot already for the many nice responses,
> Best,
> Martin
> 
> Links:
> [1] 
> http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?221213-Tools-for-curves&highlight=mackraken
> [2] 
> https://github.com/JacquesLucke/animation-nodes/blob/master/utils/mn_selection_utils.py
> [3] https://bitbucket.org/rub-hippo/parametric-anatomical-modeling
> [4] 
> http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?241524-respect-selection-order
> [5] 
> http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?363745-How-to-get-selection-order
> [6] https://developer.blender.org/T21703
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Am 27.02.2015 12:00, schrieb bf-committers-request at blender.org:
>> Subject: Re: [Bf-committers] access selection order via Python (Ton
>> 	Roosendaal)
>> To:bf-committers at blender.org
>> Message-ID:<54EF8D81.8080100 at freemail.hu>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
>> 
>> Just an idea: perhaps you can get this selection order information if
>> you analyze the contents of the undo buffer.
>> 
>> Bests,
>> Fazek
> 
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