[Bf-committers] ALT Info over params w/ Params Description

François T. francoistarlier at gmail.com
Tue Aug 3 20:16:48 CEST 2010


I played w/ SPH the other day, and found very hard to understand what params
do what. Most of them have weird non-explicit name, so it's hard to know
what you are doing. (And that goes for everything, not just SPH) I don't
have problems with weird name, I'm willing to learn them if at least I can
find documentation about those :p.
Farsthary did a nice documentation on his blog about it, but not very easy
to use, it's on a blog post so offline from blender, forget about quick
search, and fast accessibility. I'm not even talking about the screenshot or
params name outdated. Not blaming anyone or anything, I hell know it such a
crazy amount of work to maintain such a documentation

This is not big news, Blender always lacked of documentation, but looking at
Miikah's website and reading about his smoke patch post, I found a link to a
"changelog" txt file where he gives a description for each of the params he
added. (ie http://www.miikahweb.com/other/smoke_patch2_changelog.txt). I
believe this is a great initiative, weird names w/ very good explanation !
The only problem is, it is still offline to Blender, no relation, finding it
again the day I'll need will it be a pain in the ass, if the file still
exist somewhere or if the params name haven't change (like it did for
sph/fluid).

The idea I propose is to set those kind of description into the "ALT Info"
between the title (which is usually the same name as the param already so
kind of useless) and the py command (which I believe is pretty useful if you
are doing scripts and stuff). A good explanation of what might do a params
if I play with it just by putting my mouse other it, is IMO pretty
intuitive, fast access and not so hard to do.

I'm aware of the right click/View doc, but as far as this is almost just
oriented py programming for now, it is also kind of slow since each time you
don't remember a param you would have to go to a load up a webpage (goldfish
memory here :) ), when just a quick resume would do the job and show in less
that 2 second.


Voilà, just an idea/suggestion, if you could think about it, that would be
great.



Thanks a lot


François


-- 
____________________
François Tarlier
www.francois-tarlier.com
www.linkedin.com/in/francoistarlier


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