Early timeline feedback

I'm checking out the new Timeline feature, and thought I'd pass on some early feedback. I haven't gone into detail on the bug report items (this is overly long as is), but let me know if they're not known issues that you want more info on.

UI:

- I've found documentation for the API, but I can't find docs for the timeline UI.
- I can group tracks, but I can't do anything with the groups. I'd think I'd be able to move around, loop, speed adjust, etc. groups as a whole.
- It seems like you can't drag a clip from one track to another without causing it to move around. It would be helpful if holding shift when dragging a clip off of a track would lock its position in place.
- You can drag out the end to loop the end, but you can't drag out the beginning to add loops at the start, you can't drag a clip's start time forwards past the first loop, and if you trim the start of a clip in the middle of a bunch of loops, you can't simply drag it back out where it was. Relaxing these limitations would make adjusting clips easier to work with.
- "Complete last loop" doesn't seem to work unless a clip starts at time 0. It seems to compensate for the start time incorrectly.
- Most of the playback buttons have tooltips, but the rightmost one next to the frame number doesn't. Clicking it makes white range sliders appear, but I can't tell what they do.
- Renaming groups would be useful for organization, as well as having "Control Playable Asset Clips" display a more useful name, so they don't all show up as "ControlPlayableAsset".
- On a timeline, you can select "Parent Sequence" as the update mode, but I can't find info on what that does.

Functionality:

- Can this only handle linear sequences? Cutscenes can be nonlinear, looping over an idle sequence until the user picks something (or just clicks "continue" if the cutscene has text rather than voiceover), and taking different paths. That's stuff that the animator state engine does, but I'm not sure how the two systems integrate.
- It seems useful to be able to add and move events directly in the timeline, rather than having to create a clip for them. Maybe this could be done with control tracks, so you could add an event on a control track to call a function on the controller object. (I'm not entirely sure what the intended workflow is for control tracks yet, so maybe that doesn't make sense.)
- Audio track playback during preview playback would be useful.
- Dropping a timeline into another timeline did odd things. Only animation tracks showed up (audio and control tracks didn't). Edits to tracks in one showed up in the other, but deleting tracks was a bit wonky (sometimes deleting a track would do nothing). It looks like it I'm not sure if this is meant to be allowed, or if it was intended to do a deep copy.

 

It allows you to playback only the specific range, this is usefull when you only work on small part of timeline and don't want it to play everything from a beginning to an end every time.

I have 2017.1 and the ability to rename groups is present. Just click the group's name with the left mouse click and start typing.

 

Oh, that's unintuitive since it doesn't work or look like renames everywhere else in the editor. It looks like a read-only text field where you can only copy text (normally even if an editable field selects existing text on first click, the second click will deselect and give you a cursor, but this doesn't do that). It would be improved by making it consistent with the rest of the editor, and adding "rename" to the context menu like everywhere else.

 

(FYI, if there's no indication that feedback is even being read, people aren't going to spend time giving any in the future. A "thanks for the feedback" is enough to let people know that that they're at least not spending an hour compiling feedback and then shouting it down a well...)