Alternate recruit/recall interface

[Coffee]

Hello

I've got a bit of spare time coming up and would like to have a go at making a patch for an alternate recruit/recall mechanism, partly for fun. The idea is to add the following functionality:
-- if a leader is on a keep, the recruit spots would slightly pulsate with the team color and available recruit spots would be slightly brighter (just so you can tell visually they are different)
-- available recruit spots would be left-clickable to enter a combined recruit/recall menu
-- the recruit and recall menu would be one GUI (like tab separated to go between them)
-- the regular recruit menu entry would bring up the recruit tab
-- the regular recall menu entry would bring up the recall tab

The patch would make it testable for playing with an actual campaign, say with 1.11.0 as a base. Thus if it turns out to be a bad idea, it should show in the testing.

I'll probably get to this tomorrow (I've contributed minor code to a bunch of open source projects, but am a bad maintainer of things ). I thought I'd put it out there in case someone's got anything to add (like someone is already working on X which means I would be wasting my time).

[Coffee]

I've created a patch to add a "recall list" button for the recruit menu (when applicable) and a "recruit list" button to quickly go to the recruits list from the recall list (see https://gna.org/patch/index.php?3527)

I'll put a patch in for the left click on select hex in a bit. Hopefully it is not only me that sees recruiting as it currently is as too slow and needing something to speed it up.

[fabi]

Hello

I've got a bit of spare time coming up and would like to have a go at making a patch for an alternate recruit/recall mechanism, partly for fun. The idea is to add the following functionality:
-- if a leader is on a keep, the recruit spots would slightly pulsate with the team color and available recruit spots would be slightly brighter (just so you can tell visually they are different)

You can recruit or recall on a location that is a castle or keep tile and connected with castle or keep tiles to a keep occupied by one of your leaders.
This gives us two cases:

a) The player is very new to the game and hasn't learned about the concept yet.
She should play the tutorial in this case. Using some sort of highlighting to demonstrate the functions is a good idea there.
This can already be done with some wml tricks, there is no need to change the c++ codebase.

b) The player has played at least once and is aware of how recruiting/recalling works.
In this case it is easy to spot where recruiting/recalling is possible since all castle/keep tiles share enough visual clue.

A constant pulsating would not give any extra information the player is not easily able to spot herself.
Thus the feature is just annoying.

And also somehow breaking our game style.
Beside the hp/xp bars and the unit circles we do not have any visual clues on the map that a citizen of the gameworld is not able to see as well.

-- available recruit spots would be left-clickable to enter a combined recruit/recall menu

I have already coded and commited a feature using the lift click on empty hex fields differently, the action might be a little bit overloaded if you add more possible consequences to it.

My current work on the hotkey system brought the possibility to assign mouse buttons to hotkey commands.
Thus you can already assign any of the additional keys your mouse might feature for recruit/recalling.

-- the recruit and recall menu would be one GUI (like tab separated to go between them)

Since you already implemented the issue differently, I guess you spotted that our current gui systems don't support tabs.
Thus you would have to spend some time on coding the GUI back-end first. (edit: This would be awesome )

Regards,
Fabian

[Coffee]

Just following up on this thread.

I've implemented the extra quick switch recruit/recall button as per https://gna.org/patch/index.php?3527

However, as mentioned in that thread the left hand side pane overwrites the button on a refresh by clicking on a unit in the right column of the recruit/recall GUI, and I don't know where to look to track this down exactly. This is why I haven't finished this yet.