Add tooltips to the texture pack channels, for newbies.

[owlboy]

Describe what are you aiming to achieve I think it would be useful for the channel colors to have very short tooltips defining their default intended use for newbies who are new to texture packing.

Describe any workarounds you can use now Going back to the documentation to make sure I'm remembering correctly.

Any other comments or context/references I know you might intend for people to learn this stuff fast. But I think this is a good accessibility/learning feature that (seems) simple to implement. And you already take great care in designing the UIs and documentation for your software.

I do notice that you don't appear to have tooltips anywhere in the shader UI. Is this intentional? This feature request is only about channel packing because terms like "Red" are ambiguous without context clues on the surface without domain knowledge. (I mean that in a loose sense.)

I also notice that you take the space to describe GSAA - Almost as to push people into using it. (I agree that it is an important feature all good modern "Standard" shaders should implement as an option.) I think having that without at least some basic tooltips elsewhere is an interesting choice.

Thanks for taking the time to consider this!

[owlboy]

Followup: I found a tooltip on the V sliders for the Fill Value and the I for Invert. And Linear. 😄

[orels1]

Hmm, the actual intent of the channels differs by texture slot, and is usually described on each texture itself 🤔

E.g.

Or

While I could add it right in the repacker UI, it felt a little redundant, and would require me explicitly setting up the packer for each texture property (right now its applied to all textures in a generic way). While its not that much of a problem - its definitely a bit more involved than it might seem, but I'll give it some thought.

In terms of tooltips overall - my experience thus far is that people don't read them almost at all. Hence why this shader's UI is filled with "This module has documentation" links. So far if people are willing to read, they usually are willing to go to the docs page to get a full explanation.

And for some things I add a little note below where it is confusing, like the GSAA part. But its mostly ad-hoc. And yeah the "GSAA" note was explicitly to push people to not disable it, since again, I don't expect most users to hover over stuff.

One day I might find time to add tooltips to all the properties as well as have them in the docs, but as of right now - I am only able to maintain one set of explanations, and I chose docs to be the place to put them

[owlboy]

When I was fiddling with the standard shader for the first time yesterday I was confronted with this Texture Packing workflow that I knew existed, but I had not yet used. And I was focused on how the results compared to Filamented. I totally missed that those menus appeared after packing. The additional menus do serve as the in-UI reminder I was seeking with my feature request.

I guess the fact I missed these supports your point about how much people actually read parts of the UI too. 😅

While I'm really into useful, but brief tooltips everywhere in component UIs in Unity, I do appreciate the maintenance burden they sometimes carry.

Thank you for taking the time to reply to my request. And feel free to close this issue. I think my original request is mostly covered by the additional UI that appears after you fill in the slots and pack.