[Bf-committers] [13276] trunk/blender/source/blender:

[Matt Ebb]

On 19/01/2008, at 4:48 AM, GSR wrote:

> Hi,
> ideasman42 at gmail.com (2008-01-18 at 1328.43 +0100):
>> IMHO Using the work Approximate is good, too many features have
>> technical names, It could have been called  "Disk-Based AO" but
>> "Approximate AO" tells the user not to expect accurate results as  
>> with
>> raytraced.
>
> Screen space ao is also approximate. Tooltips are for describing
> things and giving extra data, names are there to identify things.

Names are there to identify things in a language that's actually  
useful for blender users to understand. "Approximate AO" gives artists  
a good indication of how it works, that it's more of a rough guess,  
differing to other AO. Calling it "Brecht's cool disk-based-spherical- 
harmonics-AO" gives no indication to artists on what it is, and would  
probably deter people from even trying it since it makes no sense to  
anyone but people who read technical papers.

Brecht's done a great job in making his feature accessible and fast  
for people to use with minimal fussing around. All the technical  
details about the technique are there in the documentation, where they  
belong. People who are interested about how it works behind the scenes  
and want to search for papers (in percentage of artists who actually  
want to use the tool and get stuff done right now = close to zero) can  
do that quite easily following the links and descriptions there (or if  
that's not good enough, they can read the code!). This is the correct  
place to be describing things in detail, not on a button name where  
there's not enough space to describe it anyway.

It's a bit arrogant and insulting to be demanding people to do things  
and calling it dumbification. It's not a matter of selling things,  
it's a matter of making software that is designed for artists to use  
well. People who want to get things done and have an interface that  
actually helps them use the software more easily are not dumb. An  
interface where you need to search google to find out what every  
gibberish-filled button does, is.

Matt