when working with a scene that has some objects deleted, new objects that are placed sometimes spawn an unexpected object. when saving these cities, they don't reload as expected.

i think this is due to the mechanism of assigning an ID to newly placed objects:
https://github.com/kfarr/aframe-city-builder/blob/master/lib/builder-controls.js#L185

as newly placed objects are given an id of 'object' + document.getElementById('city').childElementCount;, if a scene has deleted items then newly created items might have the same ID as an object already on the scene, resulting in this odd behavior.

a fix would be to generate a near-random UUID for each newly created object. this will break the rudimentary undo feature which needs an overhaul anyway.

I'm curious how people are using City Builder. It's been featured as an example project on aframe.io but I'm not clear how many people are actually making cities. Looking at some of them via firebase I see a lot of the cities are gibberish or identical copies of others. (A separate ticket is here for browsing existing cities: #18).

I'd like to track a "funnel" of how users are actually interacting with city builder. Some questions I'd like to answer:

• How many people ( what %) are using webvr compatible devices? Accessing via mobile?
• How many people actually click "enter vr" button?
• How many people place at least 1 object? Save or Save As a city?

Using this data, I'd like to be able to improve the UI with the primary goal of encouraging as many people as possible to create or modify a city (save or saveAs with unique city contents).

I've used a couple different web analytics suites before and I really like the funnel view provided by amplitude, but others like keen.io or mixpanel would work too.

Amplitude's javascript sdk is very simple, for example:
amplitude.getInstance().logEvent('EVENT_NAME_HERE');

Some key events to instrument, prioritized from highest:

• "Enter VR"
• "Place Object", properties 'file', 'position', 'rotation', 'scale', 'id'
• "Save" - property 'name': city name
• "Save As", - property 'name': city name
• "Exit VR"

Some questions:

• Can we identify which VR device is being used (vive, rift, daydream, gearvr, etc?)

move these load/save functions somewhere else - action-controls or new component?

https://www.useloom.com/share/9183e84688ec4c3ba55943408fd3d582

the current green table appears at knee-height for me. it would be nice for it be at about waist height, for more comfortable interaction. a mechanic like the table-height-adjustment flagpole control in The Castle Will be Mine would be a nice enhancement 😄

undo not working (i expect it to undo when i press the vive grips)

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfO0_ptFl8r8G0UFhT0xhV17eabG-erUWBDiKSRDTqEZ_9ULQ/viewform

<script src="https://aframe.io/releases/0.8.2/aframe.min.js"></script>

why?

• currently 0.7.0, what's the diff? probably high falutin' new cool things
• broken as threejs library has new format for getting world position

it's gross

can reproduce the issue in both 54.0a1 (2017-01-29) (64-bit) Firefox Nightly and Aug 29 Chromium

Cities with ~100+ objects seem to be slow in VR mode in FF nightly / Vive. There can be a noticeable delay when looking around or moving controllers which is nauseating and annoying. Here are some notes on optimization from a-frame slack conversation:

• enable a-frame stats - done, and noticed a few things. the control-bar component creates a new draw call for each object previewed, but this is not removed. so over time in a scene when objects are browsed this slows down the scene little by little.
• city builder users obj files. at the moment, each obj uses a separate mtl and png, but after some quick analysis those are usually identical (or very similar) and it's possible to load one mtl and use that same mtl reference for separate obj files. this may result in significant performance improvements and is probably the first place to try.
• research instancing of identical objects - https://github.com/takahirox/aframe-instancing/
• using "pool" is probably not going to offer significant performance improvement for this use case per slack conversation

after this commit to enable erase feature: 84f5a2c

it was necessary to change to uuid when creating new objects, discussion here: #20

this breaks the existing undo feature which simply looked for the ID 1 less than the value of the total number of city objects (https://github.com/kfarr/aframe-city-builder/blob/master/lib/builder-controls.js#L250).

undo should be fixed to support the new uuid system

I tried rebooting SteamVR several times and still no luck. When I turn on one controller at a time, the first controller will turn on and I can see it. When I turn on the second controller, the first controller will then disappear.

Updating hash in the URL bar should trigger loading new city.

this is the event:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WindowEventHandlers/onhashchange

here's a video
https://www.useloom.com/share/d419dfb8d85942b29b3e4078711e05dd

good news - people are using this
bad news - people are overwriting other cities with crap

feature request: allow people to "protect" a city with auth

another idea:

• cities can NEVER be overwritten, only saveAs

In settings, go to GitHub pages and set to publish Master branch. For people to easily try out.

item placing doesn’t work, this is caused by new aframe with upgraded threejs with renamed get world position / rotation function, relatively simple fix is possible

https://www.useloom.com/share/ee9c0224e1064ec3bfb4cc9cb982c6c6

Similar to tilt brush, it would be nice to be able to delete previously placed objects. Right now the only way to do that is with undo squeezing the grip buttons.

Right now there is an icon on the action menu but it doesn't do anything: https://github.com/kfarr/aframe-city-builder/blob/master/assets/environment/icon_erase.png

It could be very similar to tilt brush: objects touching the erasing object (this could be a glowing red orb or a voxel image of a bulldozer or...) simply disappear.

for desktop users not using VR, the old dialog box ui is ugly. it would be nice to have the same controls on desktop view as those in the action menu. the old ones could remain as a debug option only, or be removed entirely? https://www.useloom.com/share/30b514c655154c24af2a9aa2ed919a67

@Utopiah asks "City Builder could have access to another library of objects (maybe curated, at least with a specific scale) as an endpoint?"

Right now it is a cumbersome process to add new objects, I included a step-by-step guide on the updated readme here:
https://github.com/kfarr/aframe-city-builder/blob/master/README.md#how-do-i-add-new-objects-to-city-builder

It’s clear that the objects shouldn’t live in the repo in the long term. There's a firebase hosted version of this app at https://aframe.city and it is conceivable objects should be hosted file blobs and I was intending to move in that direction eventually. AND, if you want to be really fancy, there could be a cloud voxel editor for the objects. I’ve seen a few implementations of web based voxel editors, a few are quite fully featured.

there should be a better erase icon, like an erase with a laser. the bulldozer isn't doing it for me:
https://www.google.com/search?q=erase+icon&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS724US724&oq=erase+icon&aqs=chrome.0.0l6.1954j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8