Monday 12 July 2010

At the touch of a button...

Are you ready for this? Coming up in Moviestorm 1.4 is probably the single most useful interface change we've made in ages.

When you're in the Director's view, press F2. Everything on the set that you can interact with is highlighted, and each prop tells you everything that you can currently do with it.



No more clicking around to see what does what. It's all there, right in front of you, instantly.

This is still work in progress - we haven't finalised the look and feel of this, and there are some issues with using the F2 key, particularly on Macs - but it's hard to stress just how much difference this makes, and how much this opens up Moviestorm to novices and experienced users alike. Even the dev team are finding things they didn't know were in there.

We're aiming to finalise development on Moviestorm 1.4 this week and get it over to QA. Then we'll test the hell out of it for a while, and make the awkward decisions as to what actually makes it into the next release and what's going to be held over for more development.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I can see how that would be incredibly handy! From the looks of things, 1.4 just may be the biggest, most significant release to date, and I can't wait to get my hands on it :)

Overman said...

What he said.

Dex said...

I, too, am really looking forward to 1.4; sounds like you're making huge strides!

Thank you so much for continuing to consider us Mac users! Is it possible to assign a different key stroke for this feature? Moviestorm doesn't use a lot of hot keys, so CTL+R (for Reveal) might be a solution, though it might get a bit confusing since the "R" key alone raises the camera.... But the point stands, there's a whole alphabet there with the CTL or the ALT/OPT key....

johnnie said...

@Dex - sure. I doubt it'll be F2 when it finally ships. That's the keybinding we've put in for now, but Dave and I (as the office's token Mac users) are already getting annoyed by it.

Either way, it'll be listed in the Keybindings menu (under Settings) so you'll be able to change it to whatever key you choose.

I'm still not sure what's the best key to use as default. I don't want to use a modifier key (alt/shift/ctrl) if we can avoid it, because I really want new users to know about this key and to use it all the time. Suggestions welcome.