Finding and moving menus is no fun – so many of EXA’s menus now come to you. Once you make a selection, the menu will appear and/or slide into view near the selected items. When you’re done with the menu, use the circular “selection count” button to simultaneously deselect the items and hide the menu. Fast, easy, convenient, with less clutter in your layout.
With the new Document feature, EXA is slowly releasing its bias toward improv and by-ear playing styles. A document can contain several pages of images and text, so you can load up your favorite sheet music or lyrics and start playing along.
And for the new players, the default layout now includes a large document filled with tutorial graphics. With this visual walkthrough of EXA’s main features, it’s never been easier to get started.
Thank you to the EXA community for the continuous feedback and ideas! Please watch/share the v1.2.0 DevUp video and look through the full details below.
DevUp VIDEO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r028QoOitSQ
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r028QoOitSQ)
MENUS
- All menus for multi-selectable items now start in a hidden state. This currently includes the Ringers, Loops, Sections, Groups, and Documents menus.
- Upon the end of a selection (either a single-select via grab, or the grab-release after a multi-select), the relevant menus automatically appear nearby. The menu appears with a quick “scale up and slide” animation. If the menu was already open (due to the previous selection), the menu slides to its new nearby position.
- The position a menu chooses automatically incorporates a variety of factors, including the item positions, your head position, and your viewing direction. Importantly, the menu will decide to move above or below the selected items based on your current vertical head position. If you end your item selection looking the opposite direction (for example) the menu may not move into your field of view, since it cannot move too far from the selected items. To “hint” where you’d like to see the menu appear, look in a particular direction upon ending the selection.
- To avoid unnecessary menu motion, a menu will only slide into a new position if it is outside your field of view, or beyond a certain distance away.
- Enable the “Application > Interaction > Live Menu Motion” option to try a mode where the menu appears immediately at the start of a selection, and continually repositions while you continue the multi-select process. This can create excess menu motion, but can be useful. Because you can see the motion, you can look around to move the menus a particular position, then end your selection. If you get a good feel for the motion in this “live” mode, it can help you anticipate where the menus will appear in the standard mode.
- The menu positioning is not currently intelligent enough to avoid collision/intersection/occlusion with other items in the scene. However, the menus have internal parameters that should avoid some conflicts between menus (for example, when selecting a group and its ringers at the same time, or a section and its loops).
- The “selection count” circle for the multi-selectable menus now appears at the top or bottom of the menu (it switches based on the relative position of the selected items). This circle is now selectable (via hover interaction), and it generates the “deselect” action. This makes it more convenient to cancel unneeded selections (and thus close the menus).
- The “Application” menu now only contains settings, which have been split into three parts for better organization. Everything in this menu persists across your EXA sessions (not tied to a particular layout, etc.).
- The new “Layout” menu contains the save/load features, plus the tools for creating new groups, sections, and documents. The creation tools could no longer live in the specific menus, since those menus are now often hidden from view. These features are relevant to the “layout” menu, since they add to the contents of the layout.
DOCUMENTS
- The new “documents” feature can display images (JPG, PNG) and text (TXT) files. A single document can contain several pages, with mixed file formats.
- The document interfaces are resizable, with the same two-handed grab interaction that you use for ringers.
- Image pages fill the document panel as large as possible, while maintaining aspect ratio.
- Text pages display the text in a monospaced font, word-wrapped, with any excess text at the bottom truncated. Text does not stretch, so resizing the document vertically will allow more text to appear. You may want to break up long text files (like a chord+lyric sheet) into smaller pieces, then use the document interface’s NEXT/PREV buttons to page through them.
- You can have multiple document interfaces in a layout. Create new ones via the new “layouts” menu.
- To tell EXA where to find your documents, add your document folders to the “DocumentDirectories” list in EXA’s “AppSettings.json” file. This text-based configuration file is located in the /EXA_Data/StreamingAssets/ folder.
- When a single document is selected, the “documents” menu provides options for adding and removing pages. When adding pages, the menu displays an item for each file (in JPG, PNG, TXT format) found in the specified directories. By default, EXA provides three “Example” files, and several “Tutorial” graphics.
TUTORIAL
- The default layout now includes a large document interface filled with several “tutorial” graphics. New users can look through these pages to quickly get familiar with EXA’s main features.
- The tutorial pages, in order: basic controls, ringers, tools, play tool, mute tool, draw tool, grab tool, multi-select, loops, sections, and item menus.
OTHER
- Starting a new item selection (via grab or multi-select) now causes all other item types to become deselected. This helps keep the layout uncluttered with irrelevant menus and selection highlights. Groups are an exception: starting a group selection only deselects other groups.
- Added an option to disable “Grip-To-Grab” via the “Application > Interaction” menu.
- Added a “hidden” feature that will, upon hitting a ringer, automatically mute the latest previously-hit ringer. This is very useful for playing wind instruments, for example, since it stops the previous note when you start a new one. To use this feature: hold the “down” direction on the Vive touchpad, or hold the A or X button on the Oculus Touch. This is “hidden” because it’s not fully developed yet, but it’s too useful to exclude from the release.
- Doubled the volume-decay rate of the mute tool. This makes the tool more responsive, and makes it easier to get a short/staccato sound when you play a muted ringer (i.e. mute with one hand, hit with the other).
FIXES
- Fixed memory leak that occurred whenever items were deleted (either directly, or when loading a new layout). Several item types were not fully releasing their mesh data from memory.
- Fixed memory leak that occurred whenever loading up layout thumbnails or document images. These items were not fully releasing their texture data from memory.
- Fixed issue causing the proximity-based mute to be inactive after loading a new layout. The ringers created for the new layout were missing a mute-related component.
- Fixed the “nearest point to menu” calculation, which was giving incorrect results. This calculation is used to find the item-side endpoint of the curve that connects to the menu.
- Made minor performance fix by avoiding the use of Unity’s “Camera.main” property.