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Author Topic: Total Interface Overhaul (now with sparkles)  (Read 74279 times)

RAM

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Re: Total Interface Overhaul (now with sparkles)
« Reply #60 on: December 30, 2009, 10:43:40 pm »

The advantage of the wedge is that you can always find your target by following the line from the menu, which is fixed, so you never need to go looking for it.
Graphics in D.F. are very dense, it would be difficult to highlight something without obscuring the meaning of the affected items. If you used an outline, it would cut through the sybols. If you changed the brightness, it would either be harder to see or you would need to reduce the brightnees for everything not highlighted. If you inverted the colours or similar, then it might freak people out and make it difficult to identify what is what. I am not trying to say that it is good or bad, just that the costs are different...
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FrostGiantsDaughter

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Re: Total Interface Overhaul (now with sparkles)
« Reply #61 on: December 30, 2009, 10:45:40 pm »

What the heck, I clicked on this looking for sparkles. Misleading title!
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Lord Shonus

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Re: Total Interface Overhaul (now with sparkles)
« Reply #62 on: December 30, 2009, 11:36:44 pm »

What about flashing the tile(s) currently selected?
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sproingie

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Re: Total Interface Overhaul (now with sparkles)
« Reply #63 on: December 31, 2009, 01:26:04 am »

Lots of tiles already flash, and that would add more noise.  I think a subtle diagonal line is a good idea.  It's a pretty minor detail tho, I'd rather spend cycles thinking about the content, placement, and organization of the info box myself.

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Toady is the man who Peter Molyneux wishes he was

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RAM

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Re: Total Interface Overhaul (now with sparkles)
« Reply #64 on: December 31, 2009, 03:39:28 am »

I think their is too much dialogue, I would prefer a spartan list rather than a verbal description.

Manage workers: 2 workers

Contents: See list
 Items: 30
 Time required: 300%

Current task: Glass Portal
 Worker: Urist Glassmaker ((zoom to worker))
 Item: Black Sand Bag(-Pig Tail Bag-)
 Target: Custom Stockpile 13

Queue: 0 h, 11 m, 0 s, at current rate
 1 item on repeat
  Gather Sand: 7 repetitions currently possible
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Vote (1) for the Urist scale!
I shall be eternally happy. I shall be able to construct elf hunting giant mecha. Which can pour magma.
Urist has been forced to use a friend as fertilizer lately.
Read the First Post!

zwei

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Re: Total Interface Overhaul (now with sparkles)
« Reply #65 on: December 31, 2009, 05:13:23 am »

edit: went ahead and modified intro screen, taking from fanart thread:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Amazing original picture here: http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=1604.msg915833#msg915833

What about flashing the tile(s) currently selected?

If anything, game needs to generally flash much less, there are too many "flash, red arrow, flash, dwarf, flash dog, flash, dwarf, flash cow ..." moments.

You can do many things to separate selected item, see RAMs examples, but in the end you do so to find selection. Most of outlines/colors will fail here and blend with rest of the game, making it pointless.

Quote from: RAM
I would prefer a spartan list rather than a verbal description.

This is important thing to decide: I prefer verbal description where game does not expect you to be aware of what text says. I see "Status" section as more of troubleshooting area rather than another set of controls: if workshop fails to perform it will provide clues to what is happening and to fixing it in normal language and will also alert of possible problems, if everything is okay, you will want to skip it.

For example, pointing out that noone has enabled labor for current item in queue and suggesting dwarves who have experience in it/are currently idle.

Basically, i want to seaprate helpfull filler from controls.
« Last Edit: December 31, 2009, 06:38:56 am by zwei »
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RAM

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Re: Total Interface Overhaul (now with sparkles)
« Reply #66 on: December 31, 2009, 07:35:19 am »

Then again actually depicting a dwarf might rankle some who have different conceptions of their appearance...
There already are depictions of Dwarves in the games introduction movie...
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Vote (1) for the Urist scale!
I shall be eternally happy. I shall be able to construct elf hunting giant mecha. Which can pour magma.
Urist has been forced to use a friend as fertilizer lately.
Read the First Post!

BigFatDwarf

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Re: Total Interface Overhaul (now with sparkles)
« Reply #67 on: December 31, 2009, 08:57:29 am »

Then again actually depicting a dwarf might rankle some who have different conceptions of their appearance...
There already are depictions of Dwarves in the games introduction movie...

That's a dwarf??? MADNESS!
But really though, maybe we should just pick how the dwarves look and get on with it. I mean, everyone basically agrees that they're small, hairy and drunk.
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sproingie

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Re: Total Interface Overhaul (now with sparkles)
« Reply #68 on: December 31, 2009, 11:07:50 am »

That picture works for me.  It's epic.  Looks a little unfinished tho (namely the thing he's hammering out).  Sorry to nitpick :)

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Toady is the man who Peter Molyneux wishes he was

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Impaler[WrG]

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Re: Total Interface Overhaul (now with sparkles)
« Reply #69 on: December 31, 2009, 03:14:21 pm »

Quote
Looks a little unfinished tho (namely the thing he's hammering out).

If it was finished he wouldn't be hammering on it now would he.
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SirHoneyBadger

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Re: Total Interface Overhaul (now with sparkles)
« Reply #70 on: January 02, 2010, 03:40:31 am »

Vast, rambling post to follow, I only hope in semi-coherant fashion:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
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sproingie

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Re: Total Interface Overhaul (now with sparkles)
« Reply #71 on: January 02, 2010, 12:40:07 pm »

Excellent points in your post.  There are certainly people who prefer the mouse or the keyboard for reasons other than mere convenience.   Me, I like the mouse, but I don't like having to aim at at single tiles for everything (and some people have real problems doing so).  DF's display is dense, much more so than any other Sim-games on the market.

As it is now, DF does allow tiles for every distinctly named entity in the fortress, so coming up with unique symbols shouldn't be a problem even now.  It could probably do with being more flexible, including symbols for affect, thoughts, moods, etc.  Right now the state of the art is being advanced by things like Khazad and Stonesense, both of which use dfhack to peek into memory.  This approach has its limits, but for the meantime it's the best thing we have for prototyping new interface ideas especially as they relate to displaying dwarf status and other output-only things.
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Toady is the man who Peter Molyneux wishes he was

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dragon pus was like creamy gold. Infect and collect!

ed boy

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Re: Total Interface Overhaul (now with sparkles)
« Reply #72 on: January 02, 2010, 01:38:38 pm »

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you my proposal. I'm afraid that I haven't put in any fancy text or elaborate shading, but that's because I'm no good at that sort of thing.

The picture:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
I hope that for the most part it is intuitive, but I shall explain it anyway.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I’m afraid I may have been a bit lengthy with the explanation, and my picture isn’t the prettiest. I do like this proposal because it is customisable, supports all screen sizes, supports fully both mouse and keyboard interfaces and sorts the various menus into what (I think) should be a much more simple layout.
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CobaltKobold

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Re: Total Interface Overhaul (now with sparkles)
« Reply #73 on: January 05, 2010, 02:42:44 am »

Spoiler: mouse/kbd junk (click to show/hide)

I'm going to say that these bug me mainly because the graphicstyles clash...
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zwei

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Re: Total Interface Overhaul (now with sparkles)
« Reply #74 on: January 05, 2010, 07:17:56 am »

@SirHoneyBadger: you give me too much credit. I just took interface as we have it and made it prettier :)

As for your idea, game could be easily be made skinnable. My idea is as follows:

Have gui panels rendered by WebKit and have them be basically html documents.

Reskin could be as simple as supplying new stylesheet or as complex as complete replacement of page templates with some javascript wow factor.

you can register your own protocol and have urls like:

df://workshop/100
df://mainmenu
df://buildmenu/bed

to allow menu-to-game callbacks.

Sample simplified page for workshop:

Code: [Select]
<html>
<body>

 <h1>${currentSelection.workshop.name}</h1>

 <h2>Queue:</h2>

 <ol>
${forEach currentSelection.workshop.queue item}
   <li>${item.name}</li>
${/forEach}
 </ol>

 <h2>Controls:</h2>

 <a href="df://terminateBuilding/${currentSelection.workshop.buildingId}"><span class="command">D</span>estroy building</span>

 <a href="df://addTask/${currentSelection.workshop.buildingId}"><span class="command">A</span>dd task</span>

 <h3>Info:</h3>

Permited workers:
 <ul>
${forEach currentSelection.workshop.workerCandidates worker}
   <li><a href="df://selectBeing/${worker.creatureId}">${worker.name}</li>
${/forEach}
 </ul>

</body>
</html>


As you can imagine, once community got its little dirty hands on this, we'd be able to do pretty much anything with interface as far as look and feel is concerned.

html and css syntax would allow easy tweaking and let people make use of weatlh of information about html coding as well as wealth of features. As bonus, localization would be easier.
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