June 2013 Roadmap Wishlist Jeske

• Increase quality measurability, and in turn hopefully increase quality.
  • Add an automatic crash reporter (Google breakpad?) and online dashboard.
  • Add an easy in-blender visual screen-cap bug sighting tool/addon.
  • Push to fix quality “quirks/warts” such as: ui not updating and having to be “nudged”, quirky selection-models-and-bugs across different tools.

• IMHO, Blender’s “end-to-end” capabilities like BGE, compositing, VFX have a multiplicative effect on utility and represent a powerful niche commercial tools are not doing.
  • A video-sequence-editor update and Non-Photo-Realistic Shading would be great.
  • Bigger end-to-end additions might be 3d-sound-rendering/sequencing, comic/graphic-novel layout/authoring, or live broadcast/streaming using BGE/interactive-mode.

• Add features to increase community leverage and sharing.
  • An asset library and sharing materials is a good start.
  • Next, make it easier to create parameterized “recipies” for all parts of blender. Random ideas:
    • transform node-groups into “library components”, allowing them to encapsulate complexity while directly exposing internal editor widgets UI such as an RGB curve.
    • mechanism to encapsulate scene, model, logic, animation, script, and composite setup for something like a “video title effect” while easily exposing fields like “color” and “title text” in the video sequence editor.

• Continue to improve the non-modal/non-blocking "interactive exploration" strengths of blender with easy end-to-end “fast proofing”
  • low-rez proofing through render/composite and/or opengl render-layer stand-ins. For example, to be able to adjust 3d VFX while interactively looking at proofed final output.

• make it harder for users (especially new users) to "get stuck" in modal ui states, or accidental UI reconfig
  • make it more obvious how to get out of “node group edit”.. Add title-text to the up/exit button ("up to parent"), to make it bigger and more obvious like the leave fullscreen "back to previous" button. When it's active, make it's color match the group-editor modal background color, to make it more visually obvious.
  • make the NLA strip state-toggles more clear, especially from the dopesheet/graph-editor, so a user who accidentally toggles the NLA state of a strip has a HINT about why they are seeing no data in graph/timeline
  • consider hiding “save startup file” in preferences, instead of putting it in the file menu right next to "user preferences" where can be accidentally hit easily
  • add panel-locking capabilities to prevent users from inadvertently putting the UI panels into a state they don’t want them in. (lock panel type, lock panel scroll, lock panel menu)

• lighten the UI and remove some of the visual-cutter and busy-ness from less commonly used UI features
  • example 1: maybe info panel buttons don't need to always show the raised borders

• Improve some global UI consistency issues brought on by rapid feature addition after 2.5
  • try making a “property panel vertical node editor” which feels more consistent with the 2d node editor.. less of a nodes-vs-pulldowns, and more “vertical” vs “2d” node editing
  • rethinking property-panel vs property-sidebar, global-dopesheet vs movie-dopesheet

• Tweaks to Increase every-day UI usability (for both new and existing users)
  • help users understand blender - add more precise and thorough feature descriptions to all unified tooltips
  • improve the File Browser. Zoom / column-width, toolbar refresh, better visual feedback on confirm
  • try some more unified approaches to operator-status, current operator editor - perhaps something more like a live F6 dialog with active/selection context-sensitive tools added
  • extend the easily missed passive “splash-preset” into an expliclt “first-launch defaults-choice”. Include more friendly defaults without disturbing long-term blender users. (aka, left-click-select, release confirms). Could extend to transitional keymaps/layouts for Maya, 3ds. load/share user prefs across versions,
  • make it more obvious how to start when blender starts with a welcome page” to (optionally) replace the 3dview cube startup (create a 3d object, create a 3d scene, motion tracking, video editing/compositing) … possibly create some kind of more bold visual toolbar for switching desktops
  • ...likewise when approaching a new/fresh UI panel - an obvious and central data load/select UI, instead of having to find where that panel put the button/menu to load/select data in the movie-clip or video-sequence editor)
  • UI for property edits to entire selection

Some more ambitious goals...

• Enable more types of Blender improvements completely as external extensions. Make it easier to author them and keep them working. Offer more UI customization capability to extensions.

• Incorporate a scripting technology which offers Intellisense code-completion for much easier exploratory coding/scripting, and faster execution speed. Top candidates are TypeScript/V8 and Mono/C#.

• Safe script extension sandboxing. Encourage easy download/install with a custom zip-addon file-extension (.blext?), and auto-update.