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Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 12:21 pm
by heyvern
Keep in mind that Moho is still a very "young" application. It hasn't been around long... hopefully there will be a lot of things to look forward to.

Best bet is to make feature requests in the feature request area and post bugs in the bug forum. LM won't hunt through all of these forums to read about problems or specific suggestions.

I have been making feature requests when I think of them and posting bugs as I find them.

-Vern

Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 3:52 pm
by Fazek
I don't know what is LM's strategy about the script programming. I think it is a good way to force the users to program if LM keeps the old tools. It is great to give many examples for the beginners - the original tool set itself. And there is a more-or-less usable scripting manual as well.

The idea is great, but what is not - it is not possible to make ANY tools I can imagine. Lua itself has many restrictions - I must say that Lua is one of the most stupid languages I've ever used (not the only one, JavaScript is the same).

But this is not enough - 1. Moho restricts some possibilities of Lua - what I wrote before, the running of external programs through a pipe and the loading of dynamic libraries (just a compiler option to enable). 2. Moho not gives full access to its resources from the Lua interface, you can't render, you can't access the contents of the scene directly, you can't open and close windows as you wish, you can't make custom widgets - maybe a badly designed interface, maybe business interests (why?!) maybe LM protects itself from the users?

It is very annoying if I want to write a program, I can do it, I know how to do it but some missing feature (what is absolutely natural in other systems) stops me.

Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 7:43 pm
by Rai López
Fazek wrote:And there is a more-or-less usable scripting manual as well.
I hope so... :?

Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 2:23 pm
by 7feet
I dunno. I'm really not that unhappy even with Moho's basic toolset. Maybe with the promotion, since it took me a horribly long time to find it again after I'd used it first somewhere in version 3. I've said it before, and I'll pimp it again - I think that Mike writing the tools in Lua, just using the language, is one of my favorite bits of software design I ever saw. I mean, in addition to it just being a cool program. The invite to mess with the software was invaluable. At this point, since it's the only language I'm pretty familiar with, I've also written some stuff like data recovery tools in Lua (and thanks to Fazek for a better idea of how Lua interacts with the OS). I'm bidding on a pretty good size animation job for a feature. Combo of stopmotion and 2d animation. Truly, if it weren't for the mere fact of Moho's existence, I wouldn't even be talking about it. And whiling the hours away trying to hack things together more to my liking hasn't been a terrible thing. Chasing girls is a cool thing, but in the end getting work in what I think is a Really Cool Thing is even better. Well, almost. I'm not that geeky. But still.

And, Fazek, I'm not sure if I'm up for this gig. PM me, maybe I can throw some work your way.

Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 3:18 pm
by Fazek
Yes, maybe it was too hard. But, at least under Linux, my programming environment is really great. Tons of well-documented functions, source codes to learn how others do it, even for the largest and most complicated things... Lua and the Moho interface is very good for small add-ons. But if you want to make big, new functions (what a programmer normally does) this is not enough. Perhaps I could write a complete new program and forget Moho, or I could try to connect to other, open source projects, like Synfig. But these are hard and very time-wasting solutions. I'm so impatient and Moho knows exactly what is missing from our studio's system. Maybe these are only my problems because nobody goes this far in the programming. But it is far first, and normal for many people after, it you have an example you can modify. This is how open source works. I can't sit and wait for LM to make everything (will not, I'm afraid). Some of these problems are really easy to correct at the LM's side, hard to workaround at me. Sorry if my last message was so pessimistic. I'm still working.

Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 3:30 pm
by yboy
Quote from Toontoonz:
"If more people would complain - make suggestions - whatever you want to call it maybe LM would have changed these things earlier. Moho is 7 years old - 7 years old! - Nobody in 7 years has complained about the tools in Moho before me??? And if they did obviously LM decided it was not worth improving them.
What does LM get in return for making its software more useable? More sales.
Everyone, every single person I know personally that has tried Moho has given up after about 1-6 months out of frustration that it is just too much hassle and awkward to work with (and other limitations) with Moho. "

@Toontoonz: I absolutely agree, especially with the bold part!!! I am frustrated and some of my colleagues, who tried Moho too

First excuse me, my english is sometimes a bit clumsy.

Dear Moho-Developers, I am not a programmer, I don't know anything about programming and I DON'T want to put someone down! The Moho-Programm is in some aspects very powerfull and groundbreaking.
With this post, I only want to give a little feedback, which probably is necessary to help Moho to get the position it should have in professional environment.

My opinoin:
ok, ok, some people would hurt me for this, but I would pay much more money, than 99.- Dollars, when the functionally and the workflow would be optimized. And I think for a program like Moho, when you want to use it professional, like me, it is absolutely ok and fair, to pay more money.
For example: I payed about 350.- Euro for the Flash 8 Update! An UPDATE!!!
When I discovered Moho, first I was very upset, I payed so much money for Flash, instead I could have had a full-version-programm (Moho) for just a fraction of this price.
But then, and now I'm coming to some aspects Toontoonz is writing, I discovered some negative aspects in Moho, which, unfortunately I have to say, really turned my first positive impression of Moho.

And I can't believe that a programm like this, which gives on one side such powerfull and time-saving animation-possibillities on the other side is so long winded or circumstancially.
A key for sucsess of a programm, I think, is not only the possibillities you can do with it, it's also the usability. As a designer I have to work e.g. with freehand or flash. These programms seems to have in some aspects nearly the same drawing tools like Moho. But their tools are realy powerfull, because they are well thought out. Especially flash. For example the filling and drawing is so easy. Or you have a freetransform-tool, where you can adjust size, rotation or to bend an object with ONE tool/step.
What Fazek with his tool-optimizing did, is a blessing for Moho and absolutely necessary to work in a sensibly way, but I don't want the discussion on this point, we already had this in the other posts here.

What I want to say is that, if you (the Moho-Developers) want to earn money with Moho instead of lamenting, that your resources are limited, you have to help engaged people like FAZEK to optimize Moho (give him a job as programmer,...), you have to think about well-meant opinions like mine. (even if you heard this inconvenient stuff thousend times before...)
You have to optimize the functions, even when this means it rises the price of Moho. Moho will be just a insider tip (and that's a pitty...), from were you can't get enough money to live, until you will improve the usability and convert it into a serious programm for professionals.
One danger for example is that in the future FLASH could use bones or other good ideas of Moho. Just bones. Only this would for me be a reason to work rather with flash, because the workflow is much more optimized.

Some things I guess, which should be optimized are:

Audio:
the easy possibility to drag sounds into the timeline to animate events easy to the sounds and not to do this later in a videocut-program, where you perhaps realize, that a animation takes to long.

A real library:
where you can organize many complex objects, or store sounds to drag them into timeline.

Timeline:
On complex animations with lots of keyframes, I loose overview, which key belongs to which object or move. It should be possible to name frames or when you klick on a keyframe in an inspector you can read where the current timeline belongs to.

change Layer Ordering during animation:
You have to use "tricks" which first have to be found out to solve that, instead of having a clear function for this.

...blablabla...

I think you can't hear this anymore... so I will stop...but this is a forum for requests, so I will use this possibility. I don't want to reduce the achievments of the Moho-Developers. I'm new and I will practise and find things out, but these awkward things I said, are perhaps a reason, why Moho is not in the position it should be!