UXPlus v1.0-alpha1 (Patreon)

Hello. I have something a bit different for you.

I started planning and prototyping this side project a few weeks ago, and worked on it properly for the last couple of days. Here's the first alpha (just on Patreon for now, no Hub post yet). I'm super happy to have been able to get it to a functional enough state relatively quickly. I hope it will prove useful to you!

What is UXPlus?

UXPlus (User Experience Plus) is a general usability plugin. The goal is to make using and navigating VAM more convenient in various ways, and the first and only feature so far makes creating triggers a lot easier.

Right Click Menu: Create trigger from UI element

The right click menu connects user interface elements such as sliders and toggles to their respective triggerable parameters, and allows you to directly create a trigger action targeting that parameter to (almost) any of the existing trigger types available in any of the scene's atoms. The attached video demonstrates how this works.

Having to manually find the atom, receiver and parameter matching the UI element you want to trigger will be a thing of the past! Right click on any element, and a menu pops up when the plugin recognizes it as a triggerable parameter.

This works in plugin UI's as well, as long as the element that was clicked on actually has a connected triggerable parameter. It depends on how the plugin was implemented.

In addition, you can copy the trigger action and click Paste Actions in any trigger list. This works great in cases where the Add Trigger Action menu doesn't give you the option you need, e.g. a plugin's custom trigger UI (Timeline's triggers track, LogicBricks etc.).

(Known) limitations in the alpha release

• Desktop mode only.
• Doesn't recognize all UI elements yet; morphs sliders, clothing item on toggles, hair item on toggles, skin texture slots, position/rotation states, to name a few. I want to make it as universal as possible, but these require some sort of tailored solutions.
• The Add Trigger Action menu doesn't display options for custom plugin triggers, Scene Animation triggers or Animation Pattern triggers. Use the Copy Trigger Action button!
• Not configurable in any way
  

Usage

1. Add to Session plugins

2. Right click on the UI element you want to create a trigger for

Planned

I have plans to make it a collection of unrelated modules, hence the catch-all name. There's no Trello board yet, I'll create one at some point. For now, I'll mention that I'm planning to make it possible to easily find all trigger types in the scene that are currently targeting the parameter that's connected to the clicked UI element. In large scenes that have lots of triggers, it can be very hard to find the exact trigger actions that change a parameter's value, but this can be made extremely easy when you can just right click on an element, and list and automatically navigate to any of its trigger actions.

I'm excited to hear your thoughts on this new way of creating triggers in VAM :)