Monthly Right click select
It seems that less than 1% of the feature ideas in Right click select will be implemented to Blender.
For example, if you go to the top listings, you see that the top 1 proposal "Add more noise types" seems to have been in development for 3 years. We don't know who is working with it and why it has been so challenging to implement it.
blender.community/c/rightclickselect/V8bbbc/
So, we have a problem. This is what the Blender users would want Blender to be, but it's not what the Blender developers would want to do in Blender, and we are not having a real communication through this service between the users and developers.
In fact, there is no way to see if the official team is even reading these proposals. (I bet some of them are, but who knows)
So, my suggestion is that the developer team would have a meeting monthly and use 1-3 hours to read most voted proposals people have added into this service.
They don't have to start working with this stuff if it's impossible or they don't like the ideas, but at least see the top voted things what people are asking to be done and why.
The service should be updated to have an official "checked" or "reviewed" mark in a proposal so that the users could see that the team has seen it.
13 Comments
1%
You are assuming 100% of the proposals are well written, have user-journeys examples and personas, have well defined goals and milestones, UI mockups, etc. Which unfortunately is not the case.
There are some really good proposals and some that simply ask for Blender to do X like in Y software, not really useful. Some proposals even contradict each other, what to do in that case? Close the one with less votes? What if it aligns better with Blender's workflow?
Official team
There are members of the "official" team seeing proposals, but the thing is: with open source you don't need to be part of the "official" team to implement some of the proposals here. Anyone can help.
The BF team is focused on making Blender stable, there is no proposal on making Blender stable yet they work on it. They also work on large strategic goals that definitely not fit in a proposal. Noone asked for Geometry Nodes, a full-blown 2D animation system, or Cycles X, but most seemed happy that it happened.
I've been adding a "Developer" badge to BF developers here, so you should see it in their comments, but again, anyone can help.
Thank you of your well written comment to this proposal.
I added the number to start the conversation from something. Of course I also believe that most of the raw ideas the community is producing are not production ready and the developer time is expensive.
"There are members of the "official" team seeing proposals, but the thing is: with open source you don't need to be part of the "official" team to implement some of the proposals here. Anyone can help."
That's true and I believe there is some addon developers etc. looking these proposals this very minute. In fact, one of my own proposals once solidified itself to be an addon that can be bought from gumroad (and I also did so to support the developer, since I as an artist cannot implement sadly anything. The only way I can try to help is to write in places like this. I could write some sort of a use case stories tho if that helps. I've done it little bit in my previous job irl)
I think the "proposals" of making Blender more stable manifests themselves in a form of bug reports and I think that work is more important than our bizarre ideas someone like me could be writing here. So I for sure am not trying to push anyone from track of doing that work. :)
Some of the core developers read every feature request and help out potential viable feature request to make it better understandable for developers. Those features are most of the time implemented in no time.
What I like from this proposal is that there is a better feedback loop from users and developers. The challenge is that this would lead more time away from actual development and projects and priorities that have already been selected to develop on.
Many users don't understand that some tickets might require months to years of planning and development time to realize. These requests are most of the time not selected as it has to much impact to the roadmap of Blender.
What developers mostly do is when they start a new project, they go over the list of feature requests and see which feature requests can be scoped in the project. It will then be part of the design and will be realized.
For example I am working on the 3d texturing brush. I regular check for new requests that apply to this project and learn how these systems are actually used. Final solutions might be different as they need to be aligned to many different view points. Software development is most of the time a hard job. I often compare Blender development with writing a book containing 22Mil sentences with multiple co-authors. Each change has to be checked if it fits the character development, the story, the scenario. Any change can lead to multiple other changes etc, etc.
What would help is to make sure that the quality of the requests are high, discuss them with developer to get their feedback also check how viable they are. Also when adding new request check if they have been added before. There are also some chats to make this better in RCS.
Thank you. Also, thank you very much of your work with 3d texturing brush.
You had many really important points, and I did read your comment many times.
I am also bit afraid that this kind of idea could potentially become a time or productivity eater when the intended use was to help the developers to have a small space for mind storming and help the community have a small window to somehow see the results better through this service. I cannot predict what would it end up becoming.
Now when I read my original proposal, I could've written it with better tone. I guess I was little bit venting and partly didn't even believe that anyone would be reading it. I was quite naive.
What's the point of that when people don't even use existing features (for example, the META tag, for proposals relating to RCS)?
I'm not asking a feature for the regular users into this website.
Instead I am trying to help the developer community to have tools or ways to find ways to find the relevant features the regular users would need in Blender.
I am a volunteer developer who logs into the chat almost every day. Just last week, in front of my eyes, the lead developer of the node module agreed with the proposal here and created a TODO for it (also flagged this as a good first fix). Right now, one bebginer to the discord server, Erena, is learning geometry nodes, because she wants to do this (a group for filling curves). Do you know how many TODO geometry nodes there are? Most of the offer is not TODO, although their number is comparable. Why? TODO - a ready-made task with a description of how this is achieved. I know there is a moderation here that flags incomplete ideas. But you can also understand that even so, just an idea requires enough work even just to turn into a design?
What you told is really awesome to hear. That kind of stories are the kind of stuff the user level, which I am part of, would like to hear. I mean, everyone wants to hear about the progress.
As said, I'm not an engineer myself, tho. I am logical enough to understand that what you say is true.
I decided to sift through the top 101 suggestions as the tags for duplicates, done, in development, etc. are not super accurate. pastebin.com/KKZpaHWz Looking at them, I'd say 26.5 have been implemented, 11 are bad*, at least 7 are definitely, undoubtedly, in the works (if you don't think the noises at the top are worked on enough). At least 2 are done by paid addons, at least 1 should have a free addon (drag-and-drop import any file) and 1 I've personally updated and reworked a free addon for :) which hopefully in the future I might get into master, if someone cares to tell me about the depsgraph issues I'm having.
*Duplicates, an addon into master request that doesn't belong here AND is superseded by the better looptools already in master, "implement this physics paper", "my gpu too slow so please make workbench into eevee", etc., specifically - 35, 42, 52, 53, 54, 67, 69, 73, 79, 82, 86
Many of these 101 are unimportant and are just minor tweaks to make something nicer to use (e.g. more obvious collection instances in outliner). Blender doesn't have infinite devs, and I think the amount of implemented and worked on ones is pretty good. Others I don't really agree with (I didn't count them as bad) - e.g. a special render editor instead of using the image editor - I don't see the point. What new features would it add? Another editor to make that dropdown menu even larger? What about baking?
To say "only 1%" is extremely disingenuous. There's not enough people in the BF to implement all tens of thousands of suggestions here, and they don't have to anyways. Nevermind bad ones. It's open source though, plenty of people who can contribute.
How do you know what the Blender developers want? Having a million dollars is not something that I've done, does that mean I don't want it? And how do you know everything everyone posts here is somehow good and the rest of the community would want it too?
May I ask, how did you select the 101 suggestions that you are using to base the statistics? If you select top ones, obviously more of them will be implemented eventually. (It's not wrong to do that kind of statistics tho.)
"How do you know what the Blender developers want? Having a million dollars is not something that I've done, does that mean I don't want it? And how do you know everything everyone posts here is somehow good and the rest of the community would want it too?"
I can only try to look what is happening here and what things are being selected to be actively developed and that's a weak signal to know what they might want.
I was being quite hyberpolic with the proposal since I was in a belief that the text would just sink into the service, just like many other texts. I was wrong and definitely didn't believe of getting this much attention with this one. And i'm sorry about it.
Now when we got the attention, I am very much hoping that at least something good would spawn from this, otherwise it would mean that I wasted everyones time.
I switched the sorting to top, kept all categories and all statuses. I was going for 100 but I forgot I started numbering with 00, and decided to look at the 101st anyways since there was 1 which was correctly marked as a duplicate and hidden.
You don't have to look only here. There's blender today, there's the weekly dev reports on the devtalk forums, there's the blender artists forums where (in the appropriate category) people will share some development news, and there's the devtalk forums themselves, for quite literally developer (or thus, development) talk, and lastly there was the recent Blender conference (one every year).
BCon in particular was quite exciting for me as it showed some bevel improvements I've been waiting for a long time - the ability to properly eat into surrounding geometry is just incredibly good to have and would make hard surface modeling really easy and allow for good booleaning, too!
This site here is just so that people don't scatter suggestions around where no one can see them.
Did you check
developmentStatus=donealso ?I am aware that many of the requests have been added, but I still think it's less than 1%. (It necessarily is not bad tho, maybe less than 1% is the amount of quality content?)
Also, some of those that are "in development" looks like of being fallen into some sort of an uknown status where we don't know what is happening with it.
I think some of the "done" features also have been done as an addons etc.
However, as far I know, the deveopers don't have a workflow to actively research the requests added here and maybe add feedback to the requests. They can randomly go and check some.
I think 1 hour / month would not be too much for this kind of work, but am I wrong? I know that I am testing ice here and I am completely okay if people don't agree with me. :)