Godot: Improve usability of animating sub-properties like modulate.a

[PullTheStrings]

Godot version:

3.0

OS/device including version:

Issue description:

The removal of Canvas Item Opacity and Self Opacity settings results in cumbersome and annoying workflow. They are now two color fields instead. As you can see in the images of my animation timelines in Godot 2 and Godot 3, the opacity setting has changed from an easy to understand number to a confusing color patch. I now have to click twice to change the value (three times if I want the value in RAW). In Godot 2 I only click once and adjust a number. I fail to see the improvement here. Please bring back the Canvas Item Opacity and Self Opacity settings as numbers.

Steps to reproduce:

Minimal reproduction project:

[groud]

No need to retrieve back the previous system. We should instead make available animating an attribute of the property.

[mrcdk]

You can already animate an attribute property like this:

Notice the modulate:a

[PullTheStrings]

My main point here is usability and ease of use. The ability to individually keyframe the color properties would be welcomed and you apparently can, please describe to me how.
But to return to my point, having the Opacity and Self Opacity hidden away behind a color patch is just a bad idea and requires more clicking with the mouse that I had to before, and makes it more difficult to check the Opacity of any given game object in the animation timeline or the Inspector tab.

[reduz]

Usability is about discoverability and clicking less in common cases.

This is not a discoverability problem or a common case.

In the case of animating sub-properties l, I agree this is a
discoverability problem, so a submenu could be added to add keyframes on
then.

As I plan to redesign the inspector, may be good to wait a bit on this.

On Feb 5, 2018 9:32 AM, "PullTheStrings" [e-mail] wrote:

My main point here is usability and ease of use. The ability to
individually keyframe the color properties would be welcomed and you
apparently can, please describe to me how.
But to return to my point, having the Opacity and Self Opacity hidden away
behind a color patch is just a bad idea and requires more clicking with the
mouse that I had to before, and makes it more difficult to check the
Opacity of any given game object in the animation timeline or the Inspector
tab.

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[ghost]

But to return to my point, having the Opacity and Self Opacity hidden away behind a color patch is just a bad idea and requires more clicking with the mouse

self_modulate.a and modulate.a my friend

[PullTheStrings]

Thanks, but I still don't understand how you keyframe those two values and get a numeral in the Value field and not the color patch.

[ghost]

Track name (property path) is editable.

[aaronfranke]

Is this still relevant in Godot 3.1? IIRC, there were some changes to this menu in Godot 3.1.

[akien-mga]

In the case of modulate:a, this issue still stands as far as I can tell. Without modifying the track name manually to append :a, there is no obvious way to keyframe the alpha component of a Color property.

The ColorPicker does not have any key icon next to any of its separate channels, and the Add Track dialog also doesn't give access to components of Color properties.