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Live Clone UI can be very confusing: (Below I just refer to sculpts, but I know paintings can also be "live" in a similar way.)

There is no explanation of what the highlighting represents, so the user has to guess and experiment and test for a while before it's even useful to them. I was utterly confused by the highlighting and needed help from chat (including Tad from Mm, username RbdJellyfish in the chat) to even get close to what it was trying to tell me.

You can watch me seeing all this for the first time on-stream, and how much difficult I had: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1475546189?t=3h22m10s

As an explanation for readers who do not yet understand how this works... this is how it works:

While hovering a sculpt, it and some other sculpts are highlighted in the following ways:

Solid green for sculpts that will change if I edit the sculpt I am hovering over.

Flashing yellow-green for sculpts that are currently identical to the sculpt I am hovering over, but will not change if I edit the sculpt I am hovering over. But only while holding L1.

These are the things the user needs to go through to understand what the highlighting is telling them:

• Understand that normal clones and live clones are all considered identical unless a normal clone is edited.
• This highlighting is called "Live Clone Visuals" by Dreams. So my assumption was that it was telling me something about which sculpts were live clones and which weren't. That isn't the case. It highlights live and non-live sculpts. And the visual distinctions do not always match up to indicating a live vs non-live sculpt.
• I also thought that the highlighting may have been related to the "liven clone" shortcut. That perhaps the flashing sculpts were the ones that would become live if I use the shortcut. But that was not always the case.
• I did not even consider it being related to editing a sculpt, because while using the clone tool nothing would edit a sculpt. "I'm here to clone, not to edit" sort of thing.
• Needing to hold L1 to see the highlighting in some cases and not others meant the highlighting would disappear and appear seemingly at random, while I was trying to focus on figuring out what the highlighting meant. If you're hovering over a non-live sculpt, all other sculpts wouldn't be affected by editing it, so they would all be shown as flashing yellow-green, which means no highlighting works at all, unless you stumble upon holding L1 in that instance.
• Even once I'd figured out I needed to hold L1, it is easy to forget that I was hovering over a non-live sculpt and that's why the highlighting wasn't working and I needed to hold L1. So there were many false starts as I tried to piece together how the highlighting worked.
• Hovering over a live clone makes it and all the other live clones solid green, and non-live clones flashing green. This leads you to think that solid green = live, which is incorrect.
• Using "liven clone" makes all clones "live." Because you are now hovering over a live clone, editing the sculpt you're hovering over would change all the other clones because all the other clones are live. Therefore all the clones and the one you're hovering over will be solid green. This leads you to think solid green = live, which is incorrect.
• The fact that we need to hold L1 to see the highlighting in some cases can lead you into thinking it's related to the only available shortcut that uses L1--"liven"--and that the flashing sculpts will be the ones that will be changed by using the shortcut. This is incorrect.
• Using "unliven" makes the sculpt you are hovering over non-live. You're first hovering over a live clone so it and other live clones are green. You then use the shortcut. As this shortcut does not require holding L1, all highlighting disappears. This leads you to think they've all been unlivened. Or that you somehow used a shortcut to turn off highlighting. Or... something, who knows? It's a very confusing moment.
• Two slightly different shades of green are used, so it's easy to be momentarily mistake one for the other while the flash of the yellow-green is at full strength. Also, if there are non-identical sculpts in the scene that are also these shades of green that's going to get pretty confusing.

So without help, in order to understand anything about how to read the highlights, the user has to muddle through all of the above before they have a handle on how the highlighting works. There are multiple rules to how the highlighting itself works, which are difficult to work out unless you already know them. And needing to hold L1 sometimes but not all the times adds even more complication. There are so many dead-ends you can go down, so many ways to intuit the incorrect thing.

And before you've figured out all those rules by testing and guessing, the visuals are not useful to you at all.

There are no popups to guide the user, no tooltips to hint at what's happening. For most users there are no people in chat to make suggestions, and no Mm programmer to point them in the right direction. Looking back at my stream recording, even Tad had difficulty in accurately describing how it works. I don't know how long it would take the average person to figure this stuff out, honestly.

When I was figuring it out on-stream, I actually stumbled on the right answer in about 5 minutes. (Which still shows how difficult it was to understand, considering I'm an experienced dreamer and programmer, and had plenty of people helping.) But chat was telling me it was different to what I thought, which was incorrect. So perhaps they thought they knew how it worked but didn't? Or maybe the rules are just that hard describe accurately? I just got all turned around and ended up thinking I didn't know what "Live" even meant in the first place (which I actually did) XD

Suggestion: The way I would have it work is the following...

You go into clone mode, and by default visuals are off. If you turn them on, they're always on. The rules for highlighting are as follows:

Hover over a sculpt and live clones of it are shaded green.

Non-live clones of it are shaded blue.

For good measure, everything that isn't an identical sculpt is shaded grey.

And that's all. Very simple, pretty intuitive as to what they could mean, shouldn't take more than a few seconds or a simple test to get the entirety of the rules correct. Using the shortcut to make all sculpts live will just make them all go green. Using the shortcut to unliven a sculpt will make that sculpt go blue.

Also, put a complete explanation into the "live clone visuals" button's popup.

 

Liven Clone: (L1+triangle)

Unless only 1 object will become live by using the tool, the name should be plural as "Liven Clones." This would help people understand how it works also--to expect it to not just liven the one sculpt being hovered over, but multiple.

Even then, it's not made clear that all similar sculpts will turn into live clones. So it may be better to call it "Liven All Clones."

Currently we can only liven all clones. This means if we have 20 non-live clones of a sculpt and we want 2 of them to be live clones of each other, we need to make all 20 into live clones using the shortcut and then make 18 of them non-live clones one by one.

Even if technically editing a live sculpt that has no other live sculpts wouldn't do anything special, the user can simply pick and choose which sculpts they want to be live. And there's no harm in allowing just 1 live clone in a set to exist in the scene. It won't change any behaviour. If all clones are live, L1+triangle would be ignored but triangle will work so the Unliven shortcut will be used instead. If the sculpt is non-live, L1+triangle would make it live again.

Unliven: (triangle)

Here, we can only use it on a single sculpt. So again, if we had 20 live sculpts and we wanted them all to be non-live, we'd have to use it 20 times.

If you don't have button prompts on, and don't know if a particular sculpt is live or not, there's no way of knowing what using triangle will do if you use it on the sculpt. And that's even with the visuals turned on--as no matter what, the sculpt you're hovering over will show as green. Triangle could unliven it, or it could delete it.

Shortcuts doing different things at different times isn't good for building up the muscle memory of those shortcuts. It's hard to feel "safe" using them without relying on button prompts.

Live/Non-Live Sculpt Editing Setting: An idea I've had for a while now (but the post seems to have disappeared from the archives)... is to make the live/non-live stuff work in a fundamentally different way. A way that would be more powerful, intuitive to use, and requires no special tools like the clone tool to use it.

https://forums.indreams.me/hc/en-gb/community/posts/5093047914653-Live-Non-Live-Sculpt-Editing-Mode-Switch