Dev Log #37 - Lane states (Patreon)

By double-clicking anywhere on a lane it toggles an "expanded" mode on and off. There's no official name for this state really. When a sampler block is on an expanded lane all its controls are visible, otherwise it only shows the waveform (and in the upcoming version, the choke envelope).

Only one lane on a track can be expanded at a time. When a lane is expanded all the other lanes on the track contract to get out of the way. The idea behind that is to reduce the visual clutter of having all block controls always visible and better direct focus onto the block being edited.

At the same time it's important to me that for the most part, elements can be edited inline without having some other panel or view pop up where the actual editing takes place (one of the reasons I dislike the current effects system).

The interaction between blocks and expanded/contracted lanes is a potential source of confusion because blocks have a kind of open/closed state which depends on the current state of the lane. On top of that blocks also have their own editors which can be open or closed.

When hovering the mouse over a sampler block's envelope editor and repeatedly pressing ESC, the current behaviour is to:

- Close the envelope editor

- then contract the lane (which "closes" the block)

- then "collapse" the track (which just resizes it to its minimum height)

What it means for a block to be "open" or "closed" is a little fuzzy and not strictly defined. I realised this recently when watching someone playing with Blockhead on a stream and I told them to "close the envelope editor" and it obviously wasn't clear what I meant by that.

Also if a track is completely empty, or only contains meta-blocks which don't have an open/closed state, it's hard to tell whether a lane is in an expanded or contracted state.

In an attempt to mitigate this confusion a bit I'm experimenting with just adding a simple border around expanded lanes to better indicate that they are in a different state, and that the "open" state extends to the entire lane rather than just the block:

After adding this it immediately felt a lot better though it's obviously not a complete solution to the issues.

Some people have also requested that I make individual lanes resizable which doesn't really work with the current formula of having lanes auto-resize themselves all over the place but I am not 100% married to this system, so things could definitely change over time.