899299 - override event selection when hitting play in the editor

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Webmaker Graveyard :: Popcorn Maker, defect)

Description

[Jacob [:Jacob]]

The new event highlighting scheme is great, especially having things surface to the top of the stage when you select them. 

There's some new awkwardness introduced from this however.

Now that a selected event rises to the top of the stage, it often misrepresents the reality of a project unless you make the effort to click out and deselect your events every time you want to play something back to test it.

That's a pain. Also users might not realize what's happening, that they have an event selected in the timeline, and be confused as to why the layer order is wrong. Plus nobody wants to see a green outline box while watching something as its being played back.

I propose we automatically deselect all events every time a project is played back so that the layer order is correctly presented what a project is playing in the editor.

Comment 1

[Jacob [:Jacob]]

After talking to Scott, he says there's a way to do this so that events remain selected in the timeline during playback in the editor, but don't have the annoyance of the green selection border on the stage and the wrong layer order on the stage.

Comment 2

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

Sadly, this is not practical.

The two solutions both add performance hits I'm not willing to take, from discussion.

We can either loop through all selected track events on play and pause.

While this is fine for one or two, it has the potential to be a lot. Doesn't scale well.

The other solution is to on update move elements around the dom, or add dynamic stylesheets with dynamic class names, that way I can use classnames instead of inline css for dynamic zindex values, then being able to turn off zindex with css, and add it back. Then all I need to do on play/pause is add a single class for playing/paused on the video.

So, not worth looping through all track events, or adding remving things from the dom on update.

Keeping this open, though, as it is valid and I don't like to admit defeat. We should however remove it from popbetter.

Comment 3

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

Wont fixed for now, we can reopen it later if we decide we want to do it.