<< a facetious question

yes, a little! :)

From my point of view that is maybe missing is a sort of transparency...

Hi Pior, it's also very common in Windows programs to have a stronger button highlight effect as well, in Microsoft Office for example.

You can change this in your installation of MoI currently though, for MoI v3 you would edit the moi.css file in the UI subfolder and find the hover rule for a command button, it's currently this:

moi\:CommandButton:hover, moi\:CommandSplitButton:hover {
	border-color:rgb(153,158,161);
	background:-webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%, rgb(237, 246, 249)), color-stop(30%, rgb(178, 223, 249)), color-stop(100%, rgb(237, 246, 249)));
}

If you remove the "background" line there then it will only have an outline highlight and not any background color change.

In MoI v2 the UI was structured a little differently, it's controlled by bitmap files rather than through CSS properties. In V2 you would need to edit the bitmap file CommandButton_mouseover.png in the UI subfolder to change the mouseover look for a command button.

- Michael

What is the syntax for keep the line "background" without use it ?
// ?
/* */
\* *\
...

Hi Pilou, one way is to rename it to an invalid property name like xbackground instead of background.

You can also comment it out, but for making a comment in CSS you have to put /*        */ around the comment.

- Michael

I have that ! (made xbackground:)
Seems that make no difference with before ?

Is it possible to comment out .htm code?

<!-- This is a comment -->

https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_comments.asp

- Brian

FP : The highlight effect on the command buttons is being discussed here. Disabling this effect has of course no effect on the preselection highlighting of objects.

Michael : Wow, the whole UI being driven by CSS is fantastic !! It looks very flexible, I see that there are even controls for button size, and it looks like mouseover even supports fade transitions (hard to tell what kind of fading transition/profile curve it is using though).

Simply knocking back the intensity of the hover states really helps already :
http://i.imgur.com/Lx3Uc09.png

(When the user put the cursor over a UI element, any highlighting effect applied to this element can be very faint because the eye is already looking right there and will be sensitive to even the faintest value change. I believe that the trend consisting of making big UI button flash with a lot of contrast is misguided UI/UX design practice : it looks good when presenting the program to a board meeting or during a tutorial, but for the end user it is not necessary. It does work great when controlling a UI with keyboard arrow keys or a gamepad though, like in Steam Big Picture, the Xbox dashboard, and so on).

Hi Pilou,

> I have that ! (made xbackground:)
> Seems that make no difference with before ?

Changing the background in moi.css will control the background for buttons in the GUI like on the bottom toolbar and side pane, not for 3D objects in the viewport.

- Michael

Aaaahhhh ok!
So it's for a relative confort of the eyes depeding of each user! :)

Hi Pior,

re:
> (hard to tell what kind of fading transition/profile curve it is using though)

I think you can control the transition curve with the -webkit-transition-timing-function CSS property , I'm not sure what parameters it takes though. MoI v3 uses an older version of WebKit and some properties like that were implemented before being standardized so it may have non-standard parameters. You may be able to find a reference to it somewhere online though.

MoI v4 will use a newer version of WebKit and should support the standard transition-timing-function CSS property I think.

re: fade-in/fade-out , the thing about UI animations like that is it makes the UI consume considerably more CPU cycles. It's fairly deeply ingrained in me to try and make the UI as efficient as possible and save cycles for things that have to do more intensive number crunching. But it's probably time for me to not worry about that quite to such an extent.

- Michael

Hi Michael !

Yeah I too believe that being careful and conservative about that sort of stuff it definitely a healthy way to go. And as a matter of fact a fading effect is definitely not a necessity since simply lowering the contrast between states already achieves a very similar end goal.

But all that said, having access to these CSS tweaks is certainly really nice, and without a doubt people will have a blast creating their own (edit : just saw that an editor was already available, awesome).

Best of luck for V4 again !

Just wanna say that this highlight is pretty flickery thing. And it's hard for an eyes. If it would have some opacity option it would be great.
I tried different type of lights, highlight color combination and style color combination. But it doesn't help much.
I can only suggest to use light preset called "Clay".

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2ofnx7j2x317i09/KCb2bnxayf.mp4

Hi Bravlin, yeah that is pretty flickery if you are using dark colors like that.

If you use a lighter color for your objects it should help to avoid that, using the regular default color goes like this:



- Michael

Yes brighter colors helps a little. But to tell the truth it would be greater if we have an option to somehow regulate prehighlight opacity.
Yes it helps to establish right components due mouse hover. But i guess it adds small calculation load and not everyone really need this surfaces prehighlight.
I remember the times when this type of a prehighlite was added in Maya. Lots of guys turned it off. I'm not sure how it warks in Moi3D but in XSI we used
raycust due MouseMove callback to get component under mouse coordinate and it was kinda slow on heavy models.

Hello -

Has this issue been adressed/feature been added as of V3 or V4beta ? I am just getting back into MOI after purchasing the upgrade and I still find this flickering behavior to be extremely disorienting/distracting ...

It's unfortunately up to a point where this is giving me something similar to motion sickness and I can barely use the app :/ (and no, I am unfortunately not exaggerating here ...)

Any suggestion welcome.

For clarity here is the behavior that I would like to avoid :

https://i.imgur.com/nsAkcVz.gifv

Basically I'd love to set up the software so that *nothing* ever blinks until I actually click on something.

Seems you are in Face selection Mode ?
Just click on an empty space for stop the Yellow enleighting or click on a face for valide your selection

Yes FP, I am of course aware of that, that's not the point.

Hi Pior,

> Has this issue been adressed/feature been added as of V3 or V4beta ? I am just getting back into MOI
> after purchasing the upgrade and I still find this flickering behavior to be extremely disorienting/distracting ...

Sorry no, it's the same as previous behavior. It hasn't really been on my radar since it's only been mentioned as a problem by just a couple of people over the last 12 years or so.

I'll see about adding in an option in moi.ini for the next v4 beta.

- Michael

Hello Michael !
Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply and following up on this, this is sincerely appreciated.

On the topic of user requests about preselection highlighting (or the disabling of it thereof) : in my opinion many users *think* they want/need a preselection highlighting feature, while in reality what they actually need is *some kind* of predictable behavior, conveyed in one way or another.

For instance : Maya has always been infuriating when it comes to selecting the component one hovers the cursor over, therefore users welcomed the addition of pre-selection highlighting because indeed it makes things easier to predict. And then when these users transition to Blender, they *think* they need the feature there aswell because sure enough it sounds like a useful thing to have - and this leads to countless user requests about this feature. Whereas under the hood Blender is doing an excellent job making sure that the selection behavior is always perfectly predictable, thus making preselection highlighting pointless.

I guess what I am getting at is : the ability to completely disable this behavior in MOI might actually make the program more enjoyable overall, even to users assuming that they want things to flash and flicker at all times :P If anything, the component prediction could also be conveyed by a subtle change in the mouse cursor itself, similarly to what happens when one hovers over a link when browsing internet pages. So in the case of MOI one could argue that preselection highlighting doesn't necessarily *have* to be materialized be a literal highlighting of the component.

Anyways - can't wait ! By all means hit me up if you'd like me to test drive any beta implementation of such setting, it'd be my pleasure to test it thoroughly.

Thanks !