[Bf-committers] Meeting minutes May 1 + todo for release

Matt Ebb matt at mke3.net
Thu May 5 09:02:06 CEST 2005


Ton Roosendaal wrote:

>> Are the softbodies still considered WIP and open to proposals and  
>> changes, or has it basically been locked off now?
>
> My suggestion would be that in time we might find ideas how to 
> present  such a system better for users. 

Ok, to rephrase my question more specifically, if I can find the time to 
write a review doc within the next week about this sort of thing, will 
it be seriously considered? Or is this decided "finished" already?

The last thing I heard about the softbodies was "it's WIP, things are 
still being added, we'll work on the interface later when it's all 
there", but now with this talk of release, it seems like this side of 
things is has been quite neglected. An attitude of "the feature is done 
when the code compiles and has no bugs, regardless of how usable it is 
for people" is not a healthy one, and it would be  very disappointing if 
this is the case here.

> The fact our competitors don't really  do that at least tells me it's 
> not an easy task... if you want to play  with power, you'll have to 
> become powerful yourself too. :)

I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I hear this phrase repeated - 
it's such a cheap cop-out :) It's like saying "oh, it's complicated, so 
we won't even try to make it better", and completely ignores the 
importance of good UI design can make. Obviously if a certain amount of 
'power' took a certain amount of 'UI frustration and confusion', then 
all applications that performed the same tasks would be equally usable. 
Of course this is not the case. It's in how you tackle these challenges 
that makes the difference, and can set an application above the rest.

In any case, it's not about removing power or being powerful or 
whatever, it's a matter of doing basic analysis to make it more 
understandable about what it all means and how the settings interrelate, 
and ordering things to better fit an artist's workflow. I wouldn't be so 
quick to use Maya's "a MEL programmer needed for every artist" interface 
as the benchmark for good design. Maybe it's not easy, but that doesn't 
mean we can't spend a little time at least thinking about it and working 
through *now* instead of 'in time' after it's released when it's much 
harder, and in the history of Blender's open source development so far 
usually means 'never' ;)

Cheers,

Matt


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