The first thing I wanted to address was the ease of use. A lot of people would like to just drop their animations into the HUD and use it without messing with notecards. And you can do that with the new HUD. Drop as many animations as you want into it. Page through the contents using the arrows under the text and click the name of the animation to play it.
Notecards are optional. For instance you might have a notecard with a list of dances. So now you can load up the notecard and have access to just your dances. There is a lot of changes to the way I use notecards, but the first good news is that you can use your notecards from previous button bars. It's backwards compatible.
But there are a lot of improvements for notecard use:
- There is no hard limit to the number of animations you can list in a notecard. With long notecards you might run out of memory, but it can certainly hold a lot. For instance I loaded 278 lines of a notecard before I ran out of memory. That's right, you could have a notecard 200+ animations listed on it.
- Using notecards you can have emotes associated with each animation and times as before, but you can also have sounds now!
- Each line of the notecard can act as a "macro" meaning you use one button to fire off a sequence of animations, sounds and emotes in a timed fashion.
- Emotes are now automatically displayed with your name rather than the name of the overall object.
- There are no open listeners. And no chat commands at all. Everything is done by clicking buttons. The only exception at the moment is when you are setting a timer_interval for the dance mode. You click on the "watch" icon and then type in a number in chat.
I'm handling the appearance in a new way. The main reason was to address the problems that sometimes happens with transparent textures on a HUD. But I also think it looks better. As you can see, you can change the color and transparency of the HUD and minimize on your screen as well:
I've made a lot of progess on it. It should be done within days. I plan on trying something new this time around. I'm going to hire some testers instead of asking for volunteers. Sometimes volunteers are awesome and give me great feedback. Sometimes I give them a copy and I never hear from again. So this time I'm going to try hiring a couple of people and see how that works out. I really want the first copies I sell to be as smooth and perfect as possible.
Now, on to the questions. As it stands now, I was intending this device to be a personal animator only. Unlike my deluxe button bar, you couldn't ask people to dance with you. It animates you only. If I leave it like that I will make a second version that also animates a bunch of friends to replace the deluxe. If you have any comments about that, I would love to hear them.
The next question is: "Do I make this copy/no transfer or no transfer/copy?" If I made it no transfer and I improve the EZ Animator after the initial release, everyone who has one will get an automatic update. Obviously this is a kewl way to go and something I wish I had done with the Deluxe Button Bar. The only real difference would be cost in a way. If I went this route, I would charge more for it, with the idea that you are not only getting the product but all future improvements.
Lastly, the "macro" system is very simple at the moment. Each line of the notecard will have a series of "commands" separated by this symbol: |. Each command can be:
- The name of an animation in the HUD's inventory.
- The name of sound in the HUD's inventory.
- A number to tell the HUD how long to pause before doing the next thing.
- A command: for instance "[NAME]Macro 1" names the macro "Macro 1" and displays that on the button bar. If there is no [NAME] command to start the macro, it names it whatever the first item in macro is.
- Any other text is considered an emote and is displayed as such.
I wonder if there are any simple animation-related commands you can imagine that might work in a macro. Keep in mind that as it stands now, this device will ONLY animate yourself.
