[Bf-committers] Pie/Radial Menus design

[Antony Riakiotakis]

Some thoughts on the pie design, with some WIP code as well for review and
to check possible directions

I am going to take into consideration the work done by Sean Olson and
Patrick Moore [1] and Matt Ebb [2].

There are two approaches on the technical level here:

- System uses current python definition of menus, overrides the layout
qualifiers and simply arranges the subitems in a manner as explained in
[2]. This would allow to just pass an operator option to WM_OT_call_menu
and spawn a popup as a radial menu instead and would allow users to set
their keymaps easily.

or/and

- System uses a new type of python Menu class subtype and a set of new
layout operators to set and define the regions that buttons can reside in
(as done in implementation of [1]). That would simplify the system since
only the few new layout qualifiers would need to be implemented and the two
systems would not interact. This forgoes the option to spawn existing menus
as radial menus, but seems like most people would write custom radial menus
anyway?

Needless to say, both systems need different mouse intersection testing and
draw routines, (the latter actually being the meat of the implementation).
In fact, abstracting those two makes it quite easy to have different styles
of pie menus (see for instance [1] for some ideas)

My current incomplete implementation [3] (missing intersection code + bugs
and using rounded widget drawing) uses first option, overriding the popup
menu creation routines with custom menu styles that can either enforce a
radial, popup or use the global preference for a menu style. Some popups
(such as undo history) can enforce use of the popup style, while others can
use the user preference or even enforce a radial style (Enforcement for
some of the menus is debatable but I tried to provide some sane defaults on
the first implementation).

Also it may be good to have a way to support more than 8 items in menus
Personally I was thinking doing it by automatically adding a "more" item if
there were more than 8 present which would spawn the additional items if
selected.

On the previous developer meeting though, design was leaning towards the
second option mostly.

There have been discussions with Sean Olson to also have some Graphical way
to create pie menus (with drag'n'drop probably?), which would be really
nice to have, but for a first implementation I think it could wait. Seeing
how everyone has his own opinion on where goes what in blender I think it
might be good to have.

[1]
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?267414-Pie-Menus-%282-66%29-Update-01-28-13

[2] http://mattebb.com/weblog/radiation/

[3] https://github.com/Psy-Fi/blender/tree/pie-menus