Hi 2byts,
> Making the scene browser a floating panel would be enough.
It's possible to do that with just a couple of minor edits.
You'll need to edit some files in a text editor, the files are located in the \ui sub-folder. On Windows that will be: C:\Program Files (x86)\MoI 3.0\ui on Mac right-click the .app icon and choose "Show package contents" and inside there go to drive_c/moi/ui
First you'll need to disable the regular scene browser pane since things will get confused if it is around the same time as the new floating panel one. To disable the regular one open the file MainWindowLayout.xml (in the ui folder) and remove the line for <UIPanel dock="right" src="moi://ui/BrowserPane.htm"> - you can either delete the line or put XML comment characters before and after it to comment it out like this:
code:
<!--
<UIPanel dock="right" src="moi://ui/BrowserPane.htm"/>
-->
Then the other file to edit is BrowserPane.htm, also in the /ui folder. Find the line at the top that says width:12em; and delete it, or comment it out with CSS comments like this:
code:
<html>
<head>
<style>
body {
padding:0.3em 0.2em 0.5em 0.3em;
/*width:15em;*/
}
</style>
</head>
You want to remove that specific width so that the browser takes up the full width of the resizeable dialog that it will instead be displayed inside of.
Then to open the browser pane up in a floating window, put the following as the command part of a shortcut key:
script: /* Open scene browser dialog */ moi.ui.createDialog( 'BrowserPane.htm', 'resizeable,defaultWidth:120,defaultHeight:820', moi.ui.mainWindow );
Now when you push that shortcut key, the scene browser will open up in a floating window which you can place and size anywhere you want. Every time you restart MoI you will need to push that key to open it up again. It will remember its width and height between runs but not its position, you will have to move it over into position again on each MoI start (that's because MoI centers dialogs when they are first opened in a session).
Also one other note is for the browser to show up in the dialog, you need to have the browser pane mode enabled by the setting Options > General > Scene browser position: "Adjacent" (not "inside" mode), and the browser button in the bottom right corner of the main window should be enabled as well. The browser pane will be hidden if either of these are not set.
Hope that works for you!
- Michael
