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[Rekov]

That looks great meph. The colors, the scrollbars with their little gems, the new +/- buttons. Even the very faint dark grey $ looking pattern that helps the horizontal lines read.

[Cruxador]

Right now, latest test on my end, looks like this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

That's already a big improvement. I wouldn't have thought to go for the purple, but I think it works pretty well. I do think it would also really help to mellow out the color of the text a bit since despite being contrasted to a lighter color: The white retains some of the garishness (by which I mean excessive contrast) of the original ASCII scheme.

Are the textures for the individual options meant to remain as little bands through the middle, or is that purely a WIP aspect? I think it looks a bit goofy in its current implementation; it might look better to have them fill the majority of the field, not just the text field, excepting only a few pixels of buffer at the top and bottom. Maybe three?

About the scrollbars, I think the red gem might add some ambiguity about the function since they look like they might move independently though I assume in fact they're simply the center element of the bar as a whole. Maybe not a problem since the functionality would become apparent pretty immediately in use, though.

[Starver]

I get the impression the LHS "headers" are collapsable (match four-corner-bevelled button appearance collapsed, on expansion, as shown, 'loses' the bottom bevelling). Although maybe just 'stuck expanded', but the same sort of visual intended.

Despite the unsophisticated nature of the appearance (though is marginally more complicated[1] to en-widget) I would have prefered the "<item>" and  "<#> items" to textually line up at the start of the <item...> bit (or right-align to the number, inuding the invisible "1"), just to make it more obvious as you rack up or down the quantities through various powers of 10 (including 10⁰). Speaking of which, there's obviously some attempt to match plurals or singular or uncountable massing(s) with axes/picks, anvil(), cloth/spawn/beer as examples, but the method (drawn from raw naming tag? ...must check) failed with "15 ... turtle()". Not your territory, of course.


That aside, I like the general up-vamp done. I can easily forgive some other little niggles I could mention, because they'd be more and more about "how *I* would do it", and I'm clearly not the one doing it.


[1] Auto-width a number column, invisible separator, then name (greedy column), existing invisible separator, existing "<pts> pts" column (then inv. sep., +/- graphics) that I'd right-justify as well. Assuming it isn't currently more complicatedly set up with no invisible breaks just clever padding in two places, but that's even more complex to coordinate per-row.

[Yakefa]

Hello Meph, nice work with the UI update.

Pointing this out again, but if there was one think to take from this fan mockup, it would be the different background colors used to differentiate your stash from the item reserve.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Using 2 (harmonious) different colors allows the eye to instantly recognize that each side of the screen has a different purpose, without having to read any text. I'm not using you should use the same colors, but this visual principle is a good UX rule.

[ror6ax]

Meph, what about the idea of item description - be it popups, menus, areas or any other implementation, is it something you guys think is a good idea?

[Egan_BW]

Item descriptions! We Dark Souls now!

[Yakefa]

Item descriptions! We Dark Souls now!

As a player, do you like having tons of items thrown your way without any explanation? Unless you have a 6th sense, the answer should be negative.
This is just common sense to want to learn more about the fantasy world you're in.
And no one asked for a wall of text, a simple one-liner is usually enough for most items.

[Egan_BW]

You seem to be responding to a position that you imagine that I hold.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Item descriptions! We Dark Souls now!

As a player, do you like having tons of items thrown your way without any explanation? Unless you have a 6th sense, the answer should be negative.
This is just common sense to want to learn more about the fantasy world you're in.
And no one asked for a wall of text, a simple one-liner is usually enough for most items.

They don't get themselves typed in magically though do they? If it's not in the already massive Steam update schedule, it most likely won't happen. Most of the game is still a one-man project.
Ask in fotf, due tomorrow, if it's part of the "new user-friendliness" updates for Steam. No point in interrogating the artists about it.

[evthestrike]

Aren't there already descriptions in the raws that could be displayed?

[Starver]

Well, let's see what we (well, the wiki) can find for...
A wheelbarrow..?

Code: [Select]

[ITEM_TOOL:ITEM_TOOL_WHEELBARROW]
[NAME:wheelbarrow:wheelbarrows]
[VALUE:50]
[METAL_MAT]
[WOOD_MAT]
[TOOL_USE:HEAVY_OBJECT_HAULING]
[FURNITURE]
[TILE:153]
[SIZE:30000]
[MATERIAL_SIZE:6]
[CONTAINER_CAPACITY:100000]
Some basic stats can be ripped from that, but you'd need a bit of processing to natural language to get "This wooden wheelbarrow would be useful for hauling heavy objects" (colours/etc representing item details ripped from both generated and archetypal raws of an item under review.

Creature raws do that well in game (including one-off proc-gen ones, though with strange oxymorons like "four-legged biped" or whatever you get these days), and the creature-description page information should be available as hover-info-box, maybe (cut down a little?) but it might take a bigger effort to program item-raw parser/translater into natural language. Easier to add [TEXT_FOR_HOVER_BOX] tags, maybe, and manually fill these in for everything. But still a lot of extra work needing doing ("Hey, Zack! Got some time to spare?") alongside everything else.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Aren't there already descriptions in the raws that could be displayed?

No.
You'd have to type them all in, or as the post above says, make a generator for them, like the one which shows descriptions for the instruments.

[ror6ax]

The wiki is a source of formatted data that could be used for item descriptions. Like these https://www.dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Category:DF2014:Items

[Egan_BW]

Off topic, but I'm intrigued by the idea of procgen item descriptions which also go into the history behind the item itself and those of its type. That it, Dark Souls lore but procedural.

[voliol]

For now, the only procgen items are musical instruments, all other items have names of relatively common English vocabulary, and are searchable on the wiki. I suppose support for description-boxes could be added for the sake of future magical items, but imho it shouldn’t be first priority now.