Since the upgrade's been delayed, a little reminder:

Since the upgrade been delayed, there's still some time to make the change, so I'd just like to remind the interface design staff of the following:
Cone of Context Sucks!

Please make it optional! With the default being off.

I don't want to see a singlephoton of it.

Hi,

The release notes need a bit of work but this was added to build 1.13.2 (5)

* Added PickerContextOpacity to settings.xml

Edit your settings.xml and add the value

PickerContextOpacity value="0"

Where 0 is totally invisible, other values can be used to change the opacity

Note the setting may be overwritten while switching between main grid and beta grid viewers, but once its released this setting is persistant across sessions.

There are alot of tweaks being made based on the survey feedback during the focus tests, this is one of them, the majority of people liked the cone of context but some wanted its opacity variable including where its totally hidden

Ah so THAT'S what the dread cone of context is! I just noticed it this past week when applying a lot of textures. Yes, quite annoying, that.

"the majority". meaning people who don't do a great deal of texturing, and are confused where that floater came from

"some" meaning people who use the thing every day, and know where it comes from, and actually use it for something besides making the box red instead of wood.

I am really, really grateful for the setting... and I'd like to see it added to a UI panel in the preferences. But will this XML opacity setting affect both the "standing still" and "moving the floater" states?

Because I, for one, am really getting tired of the UI constantly glowing, sputtering, flickering, blinking and sparkling, with fades and little gimmicky things. One of the main reasons I quit using a mac when OSX came out.

These words above bring joy to my heart. Makes me feel a bit less alone.




Ahh, if only we could at leat get a complete list of debug settings, with comments, as a text file, so that we could used advance text search software like notepad to find this sort of thing. I guess I'm just a dreamer. The settings.xml file only has the ones that have changed from default plus ones the system stores for it's purposes.

Great news about the opacity slider, I know it's beyond hope that the default will be zero, and since I have to do an uninstall every week or two just to make sure that the latest problems aren't the result of some form of corruption, I'll have to add the cone slider to the chat bubbles, rotate mini-map, appearance camera, editor camera, etc., to adjust in the preferences, then the warnfirstattach, warnfirstbuild, etc. in the debug settings.

I would gladly give up the space in my about section, my picks, and my first life section if that space could go towards storing my settings on the server to be automatically reapplied following an installation.

It is possible to save the settings.xml file and copy it back into place following a total uninstall and reinstall - but for new versions there's no guarantee that the old settings.xml file will work properly.

I wouldn't put too much stock in the results of the survey. I found it quite unpleasant and unsatisfying filling it out. Also, we have a fair number of users who can't tell the different between the feature viewer forum and the feature suggestion forum, who can't figure out that the resident answers forum is not the "let's start a hate thread about such and such a person forum", etc. If you used the word "frustrum" in the survey the rest of the answers were probably given while recovering from the brain trauma that resulted.

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Hey, if we put a negative number in for opacity, you think it might suck some bling out of some other part of the interface?

I think it might just add a highlight instead of a shadow as the cone.
That or it might solve all the bling problems by "Error in settings, your computer will now self destruct. T -10 seconds."