Allow to quickly create folders by including the / forward slash

Fabiano · 24 Th05 2023

Hi!
I'm in a phase where I need to create a lot of small layered animations starting fom a full body one.
Our 8 direction project is quite big and has a lot of animation folders (Erika is familiar with it).
It looks like this, for meters and meters:

So let's say I already have the e/walk folder and I need to create the e/walk/run/female/loop animation.
It would help me if I were able to create a new animation in e/walk and call it run/female/loop, or just create it directly in the Animation node and by typing in the complete name, Spine would automatically detect if such folders already exist and do the action in there.
Same goes for folders.

I recognize it might be an edge case, but maybe it's also easy to implement on your side.
I also understand that if somebody is not aware of this feature and just wants to create an animation with a slash in the name, they should know what just happened and be prevented to do so. So Spine could just show a confirmation window asking if we want to actually do the merge. (maybe a "do not ask again" checkbox in it?)
And if we refuse, it doesn't create anything.

This suggestion is to avoid having to do dozens of clicks to create nested folders.

Misaki · 30 Th05 2023

Sorry for the late reply! I understand from your explanation that the current procedure for creating animations under a particular folder when there are so many folders is bothersome. However, I personally wasn't very sure if the feature of specifying the folder path by animation name was a good idea, so I was considering another approach to a solution to this issue. Maybe Nate can let us know what he thinks later.

Misaki · 30 Th05 2023

After getting Nate's opinion, I thought your proposal looked good, so I created an issue ticket for this:
EsotericSoftware/spine-editor747
You can subscribe to the issue ticket, then you will receive additional notifications upon any progress.

We always appreciate very much your taking the time to share your views with us in such detail!

Fabiano · 31 Th05 2023

Thanks so much Misaki!
I've subscribed the issue.

I thought more about the proposal and decided to make a mockup of what I think would help making clear what the user is about to do.
When prompted to give a name to the new Animation or Folder, Spine could show a reminder of the directory we're currently adding something in:

This would be to avoid the user thinking that when they select the se/body/walk folder and hit New Animation, they need to type the whole structure in nonetheless.
I know it's never been a problem until now because it's quite intuitive that if I select a folder, the new stuff would be created inside, but with the addition of new / possibilities this might be somehow confusing.
So the goal here is to just make things 1000% clear.

I personally think it would be a good addition anyway, even with the current system. Just an additional reminder of the result

Misaki · 31 Th05 2023

Fabiano Personally I like the additional idea! Perhaps we will come back to this thread when we actually implement this feature and will consider your idea again in detail.