Recommend Help Menu / Overlay Content

[jerknose]

Camera controls? Mouse controls? Links to GitHub issue page? Links to Kinetech Arts Meetup Page? You tell me what this needs!

[jerknose]

Related to #40

[lettucehead]

Camera controls?
Yes, exactly the ones I noted.

Mouse controls?
These are actually the same as camera controls.
The mouse controls the camera.

Links to GitHub issue page?
Great idea! I'd put a tiny link at the top saying "Found a bug?", maybe on the right, maybe in blue with underlining.

Links to Kinetech Arts Meetup Page?
This belongs on the menu on the upper-left. Better to have technical separate from nontechnical (well maybe).

[lettucehead]

My Thoughts On This:

Camera controls are great the way they are. Except some are buggy (I'll detail in separate issue). At a high level, what is missing is all the cool functionality that exists that users who haven't seen OpenPerform IRL may never know about. Users should be helpfully forced to interact with UI elements that are awesome. For instance, these major ones:

• Style: Geometry: heads
• Style: Geometry: hands
• Effect: Picklist: motion sculpture
• The combo of Effect: Picklist: data tags (accept defaults) + Camera Controls: first person or snorry (when snorry gets rehabilitated and first person gets fixed)
• Render Style: Picklist: dotshift (or others, all are beautiful)
• The combo of Style: Geometry: planes or discs + Style: Material: Super Mario (animated)
• After loading a Performer 1, selecting Load BVH file and translating Performer 1 out of the way
• Resizing body parts
• Detaching body parts

That is not an exhaustive list, but it is pretty good.

The huge things missing from that list are hardware-related, and that definitely does not belong in a Help Menu.

What does belong in a Help Menu? Basically, "What you can do."

But the Help Menu would be ridiculously extensive if it detailed literally all the options, most of which are available through the GUI.

Instead, there should be a Tutorial Mode, or a wiki page, detailing all of this sick stuff.

Is there a simple drop-in React tool, or something, that you already know of, that allows this kind of tutorial to be created, for a given interface?

I have another idea which I'll sketch out in a literal sense and upload momentarily: A UI Environment (in the sense that Water and Space are Environments). Think of it like the OpenPerform version of Job Simulator.

[lettucehead]

It makes sense to create another issue for this, but because (to my mind) the Help Menu DEPENDS on contextual user knowledge about OpenPerform functionality, it makes sense to post the idea (which yes, belongs in another issue) here, for reference and posterity:

[lettucehead]

There can be a link to the Wiki in the Help Menu as well.
The Wiki can detail all these basic functions and many much more advanced functions but for 99% of users this walkthrough tutorial utilizing real BVH might be an ideal method of showing them the ropes, including more or less all the basic awesome stuff noted in long list above.

The technical details behind, and best practices when using, all those effects belong in the Wiki. But the fact of their existence belongs in the Tutorial (if we create one). Just like the Help / Shortcut Overlay is to refer to a certain kind of material.

[jerknose]

@lettucehead Looks awesome! I think there are 3 issues here:

1. Bare minimum help menu. Nothing new created. Only showing the features, links, keyboard shortcuts that are good enough to show.
2. Wish list menu. What do we need to add or create to make this happen.
3. Getting started / Tutorial!

[jerknose]

@lettucehead Also, this information is already getting too verbose and overwhelming. If things require multiple pieces or steps, consider breaking things into separate issues or creating task lists: https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-task-lists

[lettucehead]

Adding a note that right-click and left-click are not the same so go over trackpad vs mouse