Re: [kde-artists] [Back to Basics] Better animation for KWin effects

Hey,

On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 6:35 PM, Martin Gräßlin <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi kde-artists,
>
> (please CC me in replies, I'm not subscribed)
>
> recently I have seen videos about the new compositor for Elementary OS [1]
> and
> I realized that their animations look much smoother than what we have in
> KWin.
>

Whoaa, that looks really great!


> But KWin itself is nowadays fast, we can do the framerate needed to have
> smooth animations and we have heard quite often that changing our global
> animation speed from "Normal" to "Fast" makes KWin feel smoother.
>

Fwiw, I personally think that the "Fast" is way too fast, for example
minimizing the window animation is not really seen as it is so quick. On
the other hand, "Normal" sometimes really does feel slow-ish. But that
depends on each plugin.


> Given that we can see that our animation durations are too long. And I
> want to
> fix that but for that I need your help :-)
>
> I personally have no idea how long the durations should be and I guess many
> are just random picked values. But I hope that you could help telling me
> how
> fast the animation needs to be for a specific effect. If you want to work
> on
> one of the effects, just let me know and I tell you which config option you
> need to tweak. Most effects have a configuration interface and some have a
> hidden config option.
>

The "feel of speed" is highly personal imho. How about creating a
spreadsheet (GDocs?) and collecting inputs from testers on bunch of
plugins, something simple like "Minimize effect - setting Normal - should
be: faster/slower/nochange (choose one)". If we get enough data, we can
simply take the effects that needs change and help changing them then. And
maaaaaaybe we can get inspired directly from Elementary OS? ;)


> Also we could tweak the easing curves [2] which are used in the effects.
> Most
> are either still linear or a simple easeIn/easeOut, I would love to have
> something better there.

Last but not least I'm open to define a set of new effects. Unfortunatelly
> QML
> is not yet supported, but we should be able to write some effects quite
> fast
> if you describe them properly. Also it's totally fine to have animations
> which
> require shaders.
>

I think we miss maximize effect (like in that Elementary OS video) as well
as fluid resize to the snapped corners (in that video as well). They look
really nice and given that maximize is one of the most used functions, we
totally should have that (if we don't already, I did scan the list of
plugins and didn't find it).

Cheers
-- 
Martin Klapetek | KDE Developer

______________________________________________________________________________
[email protected] |  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-artists