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jovet, on 19 September 2016 - 11:23 AM, said:
The MSTS Route Editor is a definite mixed-bag on the "intuitive" scale. But it has other problems that drag it down and make people rip their hair out.
It's so terrible on so many levels... an awful UI and uncontrolled situations leading to both aborts and route trashing. It could hardly be worse.
Repeating myself from many other posts -- Both KUJU's and Goku's route editors are completely analogous to TSM, Blender, Sketchup et all (see Joe, I didn't call it CAD :give_rose: ): you select from a library of meshes, you place them, move them, rotate them, snap the together, and delete them just as those other programs do the same basic thing. Our specific editors do not need to everything those other products do and for game data they need to do more. But fundamentally they're all congruent. So the functional list of requirements at that level in any one of those programs can and should be compared to any of the editing programs we use for both ideas in general and how the software affects work flow in particular.
To take one example, I go nuts using a modeling program that doesn't provide for keyboard mnemonics and data entry. I regard both as minimal requirements and on that score alone the KUJU RE sux. Anyone who has raised the pitch of roads or tracks to anything not divisible by 150 knows this. And the list doesn't end there. Can anyone explain why KUJU uses the Y or J keys for what they do? Or why the terrain undo keystroke involves the ~ key? It's all bizarre.
For another, in Sketchup I can grab a 360 protractor icon and use it for my cursor, select a point, start to turn it left or right and either click somewhere or type in a real number to convey a specific number of degrees... and the the software draw what it calls a construction line. I can then grab anything else and by moving my (now regular) cursor over to that construction line move the cursor along line (thereby moving the selected object too) and finish the movement by either clicking the mouse or typing a real number. So let's discuss that functionality to our world editors: Wouldn't you like to start with the direction of a road or track and move another object a fixed distance relative to that direction? 90d. 45d. 15.5m. The possibilities are endless. Is it a necessary function? No, you can spend a lot of time in the object rotator spreadsheet and accomplish the same thing. But stuff like that is found in those other programs and having something similar in our editors would be a big step forward in both what one can do and the ease in which it is accomplished.
And so when Goku showed up with his work product everyone, including myself were hopeful. What we got was a work still in development -- ok, set expectations properly and use very carefully -- and until very recently there was nothing to guide us thru the work flow (e.g., to get this done do a, b, c in these ways). If you just dabble with route building I suppose what we got was good enough and now at least there is some documentation, which does help. But if you've got years of work into a project you're going to be a bit more cautious -- remember all those folks who lost their work by adding interactive too soon? They didn't know it wasn't safe to do. Their ignorance killed their project. My take away is even with regular backups you need to be very careful about what you are doing as the snake you unknowingly introduce today may not bite for many months (been there, been severely bit).
Goku has a valid point when he says he needs more feedback. On our side -- the route builders side -- there is the problem of there not being too many of us anymore, of caution built up by years of being screwed over by KUJU's crappy software, and by not knowing the work process of the new software. And so it's rather easy to be thinking of that old TV commercial that went something like "Let Timmy (try) it. He'll (try) anything", which, if everyone has the same thought, doesn't help Goku at all.
There is the another blocking fact... not everybody is in a position to be dabbling with every feature. I'm not ready for most interactives and so I've neither the expertise or the inclination to try that stuff and provide feedback. As a suggestion, if GOKU's software will allow somebody to edit a section of track within a signal circuit, first in replacing track shapes and second by adding a turnout -- and everything still works -- that would be something a lot of people could try and if it all works be a huge gain because KUJU's software will crush your route when you try that.
Lemme finish by reiterating one point: On our side we users have a work flow. To change programs we have to learn a new workflow. Sometimes that's intuitively easy to do but not always. Stuff like toolbars and function buttons help of course but mixing in moves to the upper menu or undocumented keystrokes really gets in the way of a rapid change over. What I'm getting at here is a products success is not just the functions it has but in our ability to learn and use those functions more efficiently than whatever tool we were using before. Part of that is documentation, part of that is the UI. IOW, functions alone will not necessarily help us cross over from old to new.
IMO to whatever extent Goku (and contributed help) can address the learning and creating efficient workflow will be steps towards a wider acceptance of his product.
And I am trying to be constructive here.
