Thinking about ZHAO-II...

Gee, Zig -- it does sound like a cool idea. But rather than more "stand" poses, just a "special" button for poses that substitutes the given animation regardless of the av's state.

But I understand the desire to keep the complexity down and not try to do everything.

Whoops! I got your message, I've just been very busy!! I will have a full review of what I think of the ZHAO II for you this week though

Ack... if you think it sucks, let me know in private

OK, this may just be me, but it seems every time I bump into something or walk up a stair or whatever, I lose the walk animation and revert to the default walk. I would love to see the AO periodically checking to see if the right animation is playing and reassert if necessary.

Does that happen even if you stop and then resume walking?

Actually the green/red isn't easy to understand if you're used to seeing two different models of on/off controls. Some software illustrates the current state of the world, while others illustrate the operation. In other words, does green mean it's already on or that pushing that buttin will turn it on? This was a real pain when I first tried it out, because it was so hard, as an SL novice but experienced usability person, to tell what the correct behavior was supposed to be.

I think the better alternatives go against the decision to remove scripted texture changes. But an alternative would be to just have a couple of lights, instead of coloring the entire button, or possibly changing the text.

Besides, I can't imagine what this is like for people with red/green color blindness (the most common type), but either of my suggestions would fix that.


Next stand probably should be a button, maybe even previous stand. I think the real answer is that you don't have enough usage data to make any sort of scientific decision. Have people complained about too many buttons? (Or taking too much space, which isn't the same thing)

If you do this, doesn't it make the red/green button issue moot? If all you have is On/OFf, Next, and Menu, then all you need is to render them green when on, dimmed out grey when off. When the status indication is not 1-1 with a button, then it's clearer that it's current state instead of next state.

Anything you to the configuration card would be an improvement. I pretty much don't use it because a) it seems like too much trouble to move it to a different corner, and b) the configuration offends my sense of usability.

You raise some good points.



I struggled with this when I did it the first time. In the current AO, there are 2 buttons which change texture. The On/Off button shows the current state - if the AO is on, it says On and is green. The Menu/Hide button shows the action to be performed - if the menu is retracted, the button says Menu. I went back and forth over this many times, and settled on that combination as (hopefully) being the most intuitive.



I'm hoping it does. Now, there's one texture, and it's an on/off symbol. Hopefully, this will be clearer - green means it's on, red means it's off. Greying it out for 'off' is a good suggestion too. I hadn't thought about color blindness at all.



True.



No. 99.9% of the IM's I get (that are actually help requests) have to do with messing up the notecard when trying to change animations.

Removing the prims reduces the script complexity somewhat. But there's no way to organize buttons in the dialog window, and I find myself searching through that to find the button I want, so... that's not really a usability improvement. I'm open to suggestions. I tried to arrange the buttons on the menu so each row has related functions. I don't have much more control than that.



Are you talking about moving the AO to a different HUD attachment point? I don't understand 'moving to a different corner' with respect to the configuration notecard.

I'll give you a copy next time I log on. Feedback from a real UI person would be great I know just enough about writing software to know that being a good interface designer and being a good programmer have practically nothing in common

Yes, I meant moving to a different HUD attachment point. The two issues are unrelated.

Strictly speaking, I'm an SQA person, but since I specialize in consulting for small companies, which can't afford full-time usability people, it means I'm often the surrogate usability expert

You're right about the different skill sets, and I'll go further. The aesthetics of a UI are part of the user friendliness, but that's yet a different skill set from the more psychological aspects of usability. Now if only I could convince the average programmer that just because they can build something they like to use doesn't make them usability experts.

I don't mean to derail the thread, but the viewer already has an AO built into it, sort of. It just uses all the ugly poses we want to get rid of .

I know that scripting and modifying the viewer are two completely different skill sets, but I'd think a lot of people might even contribute to a bounty for a built-in AO? Or some incentive/reward for all the work...

(No offense to Ziggy intended at all, I *love* my ZHAO )

I have thought about that, but haven't looked at any of the relevant code. I've been looking at the viewer code for some bugs that I'd like to see fixed. Maybe some day I might try to tackle it, if one of the better programmers on the open source group doesn't get to it first

There are some things that would be harder to do in the client, and (this is debatable), don't really belong in the client. Things like auto-cycling between multiple stands, for instance. But a basic 1:1 replacement of the built-in animation with a user-specified animation would be very nice.

And no offense taken, the ZHAO is a product that shouldn't need to exist

Nope, that's how I fix it. If I stop for a second, it will ipick up the correct animation again when I start. I'm just wondering if there's a way to make it detect an incorrect animatoin all on it's own.

Just to say I love the ZHAO and thanks for making it.

Can't imagine it being better so I'm all excited to see what you will do.

If you refer to entering token-delimited text into a notecard offendin UI-wise, I believe SL sort of mandates this. As far as I know it's impossible to write a notecard with LSL (SL's scripting language) so making an UI which would persist configuration automatically is basically impossible.

It would be possible to write a separate configuration HUD which would output the notecard text into the chat to be copied into the actual notecard, though...

PS. Ziggy, I'm an SL newbie but an experienced programmer and web designer, if you'd like my input feel free to send a beta my way. I just started trying out AO's last night, so I'm currently pretty much without prejudice.

I'd love to see this (or something like it) also go into poseball scripts but I think there might be additional work for you on dealing with the stand part of it.

Thanks for all the offers to try it out. I've given it to a few people already, and after I get some initial feedback, I'll probably start a "beta testers wanted" thread.



That is correct.



True. And since it's an open source product, everyone is free to change/improve it in any way they see fit

I'll probably write a notecard converter before I ship it, to go from the old to the new versions. That could easily be adapted to make a UI-driven configuration tool.

I finally got a chance to take the new one for a test drive, and I like it a lot.

The two little circles in the lower left: excellent. Frankly, smaller would be fine with me! (I suppose I could do that myself ...)

Configuring the new one is as simple as I think it could be, and it works just as I expected it to.

I miss the indicator that shows whether sit is turned on or off. 3rd circle? Yeah, I'd go for that, especially if they were all a bit smaller.

It would also be nice to have some way to easily see what state things are in, like whether stands are set sequential or random. This is less important, though -- I doubt most folks would care much so it isn't worth very much additional complexity to do it.

A real cool feature (which probably existed before, but I never knew it) is you can have any number of config cards with different setups, and select the config to use from the menu. (Zig should change the one it ships with from "Empty" to "Default", which will make more sense when folks customize it and only use one config card which is the typical case.)

Above, someone asked for a feature to allow the "edit appearance" stand as an option. Well, this is the easy way to do it: just make a card for "Edit", with nothing in it but one line configuring that anim for "Stands". Select that config and there you go, no need for a prim to jump on, no need for build capability where you are. (Just scripts, of course.) And best of all, no added complexity for the HUD, no extra work for our hero Ziggy!

Cheers
Jeff

See last paragraph of my post above.

Thanks for the feedback.



I've added that since we last spoke, and it includes the sit on/off status as well. If more people feel like it's worth a 3rd button to have that info visible, I can add it.



That's been there since the original Franimation script



Done that too, that's a good suggestion.



Now why didn't I think of that

Hey, I'm glad he asked the question, because I'm gonna do that myself but I doubt I'd have thought of it. No more prim adjustment stands littering my floor!

First of all, I love your ZHAO, without it I wouldn't be me anymore

Here are some thoughts - forgive me if they were mentioned already, I didn't read all of it.

- An option for setting a height offset for any specific animation would be extremely nice. Being a 1.50m furry I sit inside the sand when "groundsitting".

- An "/99 AO On/Off" chat command to be implemented as a gesture. I'd like to be able to hit F3 to switch AO off and so on.

- Make the buttons transparent They are quite bold.

- Make us pleazze swim and dive in Linden water! With the "SLWIM" hud this is possible, but it doesn't come with seperate swim up/down/float underwater animations.

- "Next stand" button

My 2 cents.

Setting a height offset - I think that has to be in the animation (or in the poseball/furniture, for those cases), I don't think the AO script can control that, especially if you're sitting on the ground.

I'm not going to add a listener to the ZHAO, one of the main things I did was to remove the listeners But anyone is free to mod it and add that back, and I can see how a gesture control would be useful.

The textures can now be customized by anyone.

You should already be able to swim using the ZHAO. So I'm probably missing something here, or you haven't specified any swimming animations.

I've added a 'next stand' button.

Hi Ziggy

I actually bought a full set of animations and added them to the ZHAO but i still don't swim! But am I doing wrong?

There's another thread in this forum which has a guide to setting up the ZHAO.

Thanks for the beta copy Ziggy. A couple of suggestions since I heard that you had time to have breakfast today, so you are not working hard enough
1. Why can't I have multiple animations for hovering- just like standing?
2. Leading/trailing extra spaces drove me crazy. Why not run the values through a function remove leading the trailing spaces to make things simpler.
3. Maybe much but an option to add descriptions for the animation that will appear in the dialog instead of the name of animation

Next post I sing praises to you for making something that makes since to me.

Hmm... no one asked for that before And the script is running pretty low on memory.



I'm pretty sure I've had animations which had a leading or trailing space.



Can you explain this one more? Or give me an example of how this would be useful?

Edit: I think I know what you mean - a no-mod anim named Walk5 doesn't tell you what it is. This would be a little bit of work to do, and would use a fair amount of memory (need to remember anim names as well as descriptions), so... I'll say, probably not.