Pre-emptive thoughts on upcoming features

A number of new cards have been added to the Trello. I thought I'd put my thoughts on them somewhere--my hopes, the implications made by the name or description, etc. I'm guessing Mm aren't going to look on the forum for speculative feedback on features already in the process of being designed and implemented. But it's something to do with my time waiting excitedly for 2.51!

2.51 - Text Sticker Mode has been discussed a lot on Twitter already, so I think I understand it properly. The word "Sticker" does come with a lot of implications which won't be fulfilled.

My understanding is it will act more like a projector projecting an image on the side of a building. Or a translucent piece of glass. So "Projection" would be more accurate with less potential for confusion because there's no implications made by the word itself. (I'm sure it's too late for any changes anyway, but just putting it out there.)

2.51 - Weighted Randomisation

I'm hoping the weightings will be on a different tab, or otherwise hidden somehow. Just so that newcomers still see a nice simple interface and aren't overwhelmed by all the sliders. (My guess is Mm have this covered.)

In The Works - Metering and Spectrograms

I've always thought it would be a lot easier to EQ an instrument if I could see what parts of the spectrum were being hit in realtime... That isn't what this feature is; it's on entire channels only. I'm guessing because the audio is on a completely separate thread and isn't really accessible to the logic side of things.

We'll be able to get a single-instrument reading by solo-ing just that instrument, so that's cool. But it would be awesome if that could work on a per-sound-gadget basis too.

That said... very happy this is coming!!

In the Works - Sculpts: Neatness Property

This is actually what I once thought -100% ruffle on sculpts would do. Took be forever to figure out what that did for paint. 😅 Even now, I'm not sure what it does! Will be cool to be able to use flecks for patterns.

Hopefully the layout will be custom for each shape so they line up--for example a hex-shaped grid for the hex shape, a roof-like/scale-like layout for circles, etc.

In the Works - Logic: Degrees/Radians Tweak on the Calculator

I'm hoping the default for this will be degrees, to benefit the majority of users right off the bat. And then existing calculators will have it set to radians so they still work the old way.

In the Works - Text: Font Size and Colour Markup

This will be great for stuff like RPGs where different key info tends to be highlighted and colour coded, things like that.

For people unsure what "Markup" is, web pages have "markup" such as <bold>the text in here will be bold until:</bold> appears. (This isn't real markup, just an example.) This might look different in the Dreams implementation, but there are actually already secret <tags> that work in text boxes. This will probably just expand on them.

Will we be able to use any size we wish, and any colour we wish (hex codes anyone)? Or will it be a case of choosing from a selection? If it's a selection, it would be cool to be able to adjust the colours themselves in a "global setting" somewhere.

In fact, being able to make our own palettes for this stuff would be ideal, even if we can use hex-code colours as markup. It would mean if we've made half of a big ol' RPG, and then decide to adjust the colours to be more accessible, we can do so in one place instead of needing to edit all text in the game!

In the Works - Audio: Tweak to choose which controller plays sounds

The description sounds like this will be something like the controller sensor, with 4 separate buttons. It would be great if there was an alternative of wiring in a player-info wire too, so that it can easily be dynamic.

It can be a bit of a faff getting those buttons to work properly in the controller sensor, so hopefully it will be easier for the sound gadgets.

Also, is there any way of applying this kind of thing to an entire timeline? If there's a load of timed sound effects and such in a timeline it would be annoying to have to wire it into all of them separately so that it's dynamic. Maybe we could have this all done using a speaker? That would be super flexible...