Quote from: Exhale on November 04, 2024, 14:35:41We all forget it, since we are so used to the way ompt works, but it is terribly designed. For a new user it is dauntingly confusing, and always finds a new way to trip up their creative flow. It is a godaweful mess, and we need to own that, accept it, before we can begin to change it.While i agree with you on several points (mainly all what you said about Blender), i also don't think that a dedicated team of designers is a must for the GUI to be usable and/or intuitive. It really depends, because there do exist people who are good at both programming and design at the same time. I feel like it's more likely to become problematic when there's a lot of contributors, each with different ideas and no strong leadership in regards to this area of design.
There are some real positives, the tab system is a strong intuitive one. But the contents of the tabs get in the way of things, presenting options that a person cant even interract with (greyed out options) to overwhelm the mind giving our present system an information overload.
I know when I first started in mpt (before I knew there was an o version, which i think was only a few years old at the time) I was forced to read the help section almost every time I used it, and these days the help isnt even an offline thing, new users have to go to the wiki.
The reason I eventually came to these forums in the first place was to learn things I was sure I could do in ompt but had no help in the help learning about such as Zxx macros and how to take full control of vsts. I had to search the forums here just to properly learn what I was doing because I learn very slowly and always have.
The point is, what a programmer thinks is self explanatory almost never actually is. The things us wizened old users of a bit of software think are logical pretty much never are. And to see that difference and fight to bridge that gap is the power of carefully thought out design... which is what is lacking in the majority of open source projects out there, including this one.
Quote from: acrouzet on November 05, 2024, 00:34:26Websites prove their identity via certificates. Firefox does not trust this site because it uses a certificate that is not valid for download.openmpt.org. The certificate is only valid for low-xdns.xfinity.com.
Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN
Quote from: acrouzet on November 05, 2024, 00:34:26I tried clicking the link with a VPN on, and it downloads.
Quote from: bass on November 04, 2024, 21:21:53I already asked about 5 years ago, if there any plans to add buffers for each channel so we tracker player programmers could finally add cool visualisation stuff (like oscilloscopes) when using libopenmpt.
This ticket here is from 2017 and it´s still marked as new:
https://bugs.openmpt.org/view.php?id=1042
Quote from: bass on November 04, 2024, 21:21:53I don´t know the internals of the library, but could it be possible to add this feature without changing the current mixing routines? Just some kind of extra data, which could be added additionally. It would be enough to add the first 100-200 bytes of each channel into a new bufferlist or something like that.
Quote from: Exhale on November 05, 2024, 07:01:46I was here offering my design services and being shot down... yes I was just one designer and frankly being shat on for the general UI improvements pretty much entirely focused on ease of use has made me fuck right off.Can you provide an example link?
Quote from: Exhale on November 05, 2024, 07:01:46And frankly your qualifications towards design are irrelevant.Why? Why is yours or anyone elses not? This makes no sense.
Quote from: Exhale on November 05, 2024, 07:01:46Your focus is programming, and has been for long enough to take your focus away from art.Wrong. Do not make assumptions about me.
Quote from: Exhale on November 05, 2024, 07:01:46I have music and art, I take my inspirations for those from all around me, games, movies, television, etc - the inspirations for these things are conveniently clustered... both are pure creation and aesthetics. You have at least programming on top of that which depending on the languages you have delved into could be infinitely massive with rabbit holes of information.Similarly you supposedly have design on top of that. There is a really big difference between experiencing design and being able to create design. The latter is also "on top" of the former.
Quote from: Exhale on November 05, 2024, 07:01:46So dont even pretend that spending an afternoon, a month, a year, even a decade playing around in graphic software can make you compare to a graphic designer who has devoted his / her entire life and career to it.Again, you are making assumptions about me which are outright wrong. Just stop doing that, it really does not support your argument at all.
Quote from: Exhale on November 05, 2024, 07:01:46It stands to reason that any designer volunteering time to help with this project will have at least a divided attention between music making and designing. The focus and obsession in OMPT is obviously functionality, and that is great, but it needs some people to join the team who are listened to and not brushed off who are obsessed with and focus almost exclusively on the design and user experienceAs just explained, purely focusing on design will not be able to work with the current OpenMPT code base. It will inevitably require the existing programmers to devote time to implement such changes, in a code base where this takes more time than it would take in a cleaner code base. The code base needs to get cleaned up further nonetheless anyway though. So, implementing big user interface design changes NOW, results in double the work. Given how small the OpenMPT project is, investing double the time is not something that makes all too much sense, IMHO. The current user interface design and code is somewhat of a dead end, and we have been knowing that for years (see https://bugs.openmpt.org/view.php?id=783 and related issues for discussion of some aspects of that). Investing significant amounts of time into the current interface to improve it would stall other development in OpenMPT and libopenmpt, and probably also burn out people who have to implement the changes. That is maybe something a pure design-only person will have difficulties to understand, but that is frankly just the situation of the current user interface code.
Quote from: Exhale on November 05, 2024, 07:01:46which would take some severe restructuring of how things on this collection of websites, specifically the issue tracker.We have been bitten by big hosters failing more than once in the past, which significantly slowed down development for a couple of weeks, which is why we probably will continue to host our own services. Changing that, even if only migrating to the big ones, would require a lot of administrative work for migrating existing information.
Quote from: Exhale on November 05, 2024, 07:01:46Your opinion on the usefulness of my criticisms here are also irrelevant. These are things that need to be said, over and over again, because the message is never received and crucially acted upon.My opinion is kind of important because I am 1 of the 2 maintainers of OpenMPT and libopenmpt. If you cannot convince me and keep repeating wrong statements, you are wasting our time, and thereby actively hurting the project.
Quote from: manx on November 04, 2024, 15:35:28I guess you should reconsider your assessment of our qualification. You frankly do not know our education and background, so please stop assuming things and accusing us of random things. You are not constructive AT ALL here.
You are saying OpenMPT needs a "design team" (quite a claim for a currently 2 person project), yet you provide no suggestion at all on how to get one. And you also offer no alternative. What's your point, really? We already know that the OpenMPT user interface can be improved in various aspect. Rambling around and reiterating that fact is not exactly helpful.