1.18 Progress Update

Hi All!

1.18 is progressing nicely. These last few weeks have been very productive for our team. I realize it is taking a long time to get this release done compared to other major releases. There are multiple factors there:

• I took a well-needed vacation and summer is my least productive time of year due to family obligations. I've been back in full productive mode for several weeks now.
• There was a pretty large backlog of getting the other team member's contributions incorporated into VaM. This work is now complete, which means 1.18 is going to have a lot of new content
• As I was incorporating other member's work, I took the time to improve several features related to this content. Some details below.
• There has been a lot of community feedback about usability issues, so I took the last couple of weeks to make a vast number of improvements. Some details below (more on Trello). I plan to keep on doing this for each 1.X release to give it higher usability and more polish to keep 1.X living a healthy lifetime as 2.X work ramps up.

Listed below is everything that is already completed for 1.18

New Content

• Several new skins licensed from a very popular community contributor (stay tuned for details)!
• 200+ new morphs
• New atoms
• New clothing items
• Improved materials for a lot of atoms and clothing items including more texture sets

Morphs

• Improved categories and morph cleanup to bucket in proper category
• Advanced filtering (interface shown in the screenshot here) for quickly finding morphs you care about
• Quick set buttons: Zero, Default, Set/Clear Animatable
• Added favorites system
• Morph presets - can now choose to save/load appearance, pose, or both
• Added ability to use other gender's morphs for more variety
• Text now auto-sizes to accommodate long morph names

File Browser

• Path remember now works using groups of params that are in same category. Example: Makes selecting Person textures a lot easier since you will only have to find the directory once for all the params.
• File browsers now remember scroll position per directory
• Added sort options (A-Z, Z-A, NewToOld, OldToNew)
• Added directory display and order options (Show First, Show Last, Intermix, Hide)
• File browsers now have a keep-open option. Great for trying out different presets quickly!
• Search (text entry) field now active on all browsers

General Usability:

• Back button added to clothing and hair UI
• Added new toolbar tool/icon for cycle selecting between Person atoms for a much faster method to get to the main object of desire
• Atom UI now has oversized background to help aid with clicking just outside a button and have atom deselect
• Added button to arm all controlled controllers for record. 

See Trello Board for more info.

Next week will bring my focus back on custom hair to wrap that up. I don't yet have an ETA on 1.18 yet due to the complexity of this hair work, and there is still a pretty long list of planned 1.18 items shown on the Trello board. It looks like 1.18 will probably be one of the biggest releases to date. Thank you for your patience! 

Meshed and team