Improve Add-ons Manager

[Otengam]

I've had some thoughts on the Addons Manager for awhile now and would like to know if these things could work their way into the game at some future point. 1.12 Add-ons server is quite frankly overwhelming with the number of addons available. It's good that so many people want to contribute but also as it is right now, it's hard to choose or even explore addons without losing your place.

• More columns: (Completed/Incomplete %, Last Update, Upload date)
• Mouse-over Descriptions
• Tags/Filter
• Other related thoughts

More Columns
At first glance the window looks like it's telling you a lot but to get tangible information you need to click the Description button. This makes the user interface feel clunky and you have to click more than you need to. Needing to click more times than necessary is off-putting and people feel it might not be worth doing again especially if they're trying to see if there's anything that's changed.
Some of the columns that I would like to see are listed above. These extra columns are significant because players can sort through the numerous addons much easier. Some addons are uploaded unfinished and I don't mind this. What I do mind is having to click Description to check if there's anything new. Is there some way that we could get a notification or an asterisk next to an Addon if it's been recently updated? With a column for how much the developer feels an Addon is completed it could help users decide if they want to wait a bit longer for the 100% completed version or just dive in and see what it's like as it is.
Last Update and Upload date columns is linked to the previous paragraph issue. Being able to tell when an addon was last updated/uploaded helps players decide whether or not the developer is no longer active. I've heard objections that there shouldn't be a rating column and I understand the reason for it. It's good for players to explore new content without only picking the most popular at the expense of other hidden gems. The column labelled "Downloads" however is a way of deciding this too. My interest in Update+Upload columns is also to help decide whether or not an update is worth my time testing out. I don't see this as a bad thing. At some point, if I run out of content I will try out the addons that I previously neglected.

Mouse-over Descriptions
We want people to explore addons. There are a lot of user made content out there and two of the hindrances to exploring them is the lack of convenient information and how staggeringly many addons there actually are. So to make things easier the Addons Manager should reduce the number of clicks needed to browse addons. A good way to do this would be to include a tooltip popup whenever the player moves their mouse over an addon row. This would popup only the text description of the addon without extra information like "Website", "Dependencies", "Translations" etc. If the user wants this extra information that is exactly what the "Description" button is for.

Tags/Filter
Tags can help players explore. Right now you can sort by developer name but this is still fairly limited. Perhaps an addon developer has created dozens of separate addons or half a dozen map packs for a series of campaigns in the same series. If tags can be used then it would be trivial to use the filter to search for addons from a series. Now I understand that Tags would probably mean a bit more work to implement because of database programming so a stop-gap solution would be to improve the Filter search.
Perhaps there are some unknown searching techniques but as far as I can tell the Filter simply does a text search. If players were aware of operators that could be used like:

Code: Select all

'MP Campaign' !Incomplete

then this might help to search for: Multiplayer Campaigns that are NOT incomplete. There is a "Options" button at the top right which can be used to filter addons but this like some of the other GUI just seems hidden and too inconvenient to keep clicking if you want to change your search. It's also not as powerful as the "!" not operator.

Bear in mind though search does not necessarily help players to explore in the same way as tags. Search is not the same as Tagging. With tagging it's also possible to start recommending addons based on tags that other players have searched for or recommend addons that others have also downloaded.

Other thoughts
Quickly the button titled "Cancel" on the Addons Manager window is misleading because "Cancel" implies dismissing any changes done. I suggest the button should be renamed to "Done" or simply "Close". In the same way, the "Ok" button could be renamed to "Add" so it's clearer although I just double click the addon I want to install anyway.

Another button that could be added is: "Random" which would help the user to quickly highlight an addon opening it's Description up too. This would help users to explore new addons. Perhaps the "Options" button could be renamed to do a "Random" search with the filtered criteria from "Options".

I've read mentions of a "Recommended" section to be added somewhere. It might be in the main menu but this could be something that gets more players to try the addons out. Perhaps in the Campaign window there should be a button on the bottom left called "More Campaigns" which would open the Addons Manager. There might be some hesitancy from new players because they don't know how to use the Addons manager which could be explained at the end of a tutorial campaign before they even play any actual mainline campaign.

Blank slating mainline Campaigns
One of the topics that's also brought up is clearing Campaigns and making all the content come directly from Addons. I am leaning against this idea but I can see a change should be made.
One of the reasons for this idea is that new players feel the Campaigns are ALL that there are in Wesnoth. This is FAR from true. I agree that in some ways mainline Campaigns are a limitation because some campaigns are out of date and not necessarily well updated. In some cases, the mainline campaigns are not even that exciting whereas Addon campaigns are created by players who feel the game is missing something so their addons add new interesting ideas. This is good but it doesn't warrant leaving the game empty when a new player first installs and runs the game.

Better awareness should be made to players about Addon campaigns. I propose: At the end of every mainline campaign, a window popup saying: "Thanks for playing [Campaign name]. If you liked this storyline check out Addons which include fascinatingly original campaigns with new ideas and concepts by other players like you." then the Addons window would open with a pre-entered tag search related to the just finished campaign.

Let me know what you think of these ideas. I'm not a developer for BfW so I do understand that these suggestions are definitely easier for me to make than to actually implement.

[gnombat]

Note that some of these features (mouse-over and last update) are available on the addons server web interface (http://addons.wesnoth.org/1.12/).

[Aldarisvet]

Answering a question on the Users forum about a description button which a questioner missed as myself in my time, I understood what is the problem with add-ons server. Every normal person, clicking in the line of the campaign in the list do not expect it would start immediately downloading the content. Clicking on the line just means that a person wants to see more. Imagine that Google market would start downloading content just after you click on the game icon in the list? This is stupid, its against intuitive expectations! What really should happen when you click on the campaign's line in the table is that it would open a description. And only in the description page there must be a Download button.

[Iris]

This is stupid, its against intuitive expectations!

I’m sorry for that.

Back when I added the Description button I didn’t have any experience designing user interfaces (or in-depth knowledge of our legacy GUI1 toolkit and its API), so naturally these nuances never crossed my mind — especially since I just wanted to do our community a service and add a mechanism to display add-on info when no-one else in the dev team would consider it a priority. No-one really complained since then (2009), so the original workflow remained unchanged. You’ve always been more than welcome to submit patches, although in this particular case they might not be accepted since vultraz’s GUI2-based redesign of the Add-ons Manager is slated to replace the entire thing at some point before 1.14.0.

[Aldarisvet]

Well, I am not saying that someone is guilty (no one is), I perfectly understand that everything was done was made with best intentions and as a voluntary duty.
So in the beginning there was only a list with campaigns/eras and then you added a description button which opens the window with a description. Better than nothing for sure. But what now is needed is to make a switch, so clicking on the campaign in the list would open a Description page. And a Description button below the list should be renamed to Download. Also Download button should be in the Description page too.
Well, obviously it is much easier to implement than making some things like a ranking system. I just only can guess with my programming experience that such change demands kinda 30-min work for the person who already knows the code.

In general I can say that some interface mistakes can cost really a lot for the game popularity, because people miss some important things. 'Add-ons' button in a main menu is an example of such a mistake. For sure it should be placed just after 'Campaigns', not somewhere below 'Load' button, and called another way, 'More content', I dunno. 'Add-ons' seems to me as too technichal terminology, something complex that I would not be intrested in. But best thing is to put 'Get more campaigns' button inside Campaigns in the bottom of list.

[Otengam]

Back when I added the Description button I didn’t have any experience designing user interfaces (or in-depth knowledge of our legacy GUI1 toolkit and its API), so naturally these nuances never crossed my mind — especially since I just wanted to do our community a service and add a mechanism to display add-on info when no-one else in the dev team would consider it a priority. No-one really complained since then (2009), so the original workflow remained unchanged. You’ve always been more than welcome to submit patches, although in this particular case they might not be accepted since vultraz’s GUI2-based redesign of the Add-ons Manager is slated to replace the entire thing at some point before 1.14.0.

I wasn't aware that there was going to be a GUI redesign so I guess the points in this topic could actually help for 1.14 or later but 1.13 isn't official yet so it will be awhile.

I think some small things like renaming the buttons or adding in a button onto the Campaigns section could sneak into 1.13. I haven't looked at the GUI toolkit but I would assume it would just be a one-liner, renaming a label ("Ok" -> "Download", "Cancel" -> "Done") so these are quick and easy things that could be done without waiting for GUI2 or BfW 1.14.

Trivial: Rename buttons
Relatively easy: Mouse-over Descriptions, Add "Addons" button inside Campaigns window, Open Addons window at Campaign conclusion
More time consuming (maybe 1.14 or later): Tags/Filters, More Columns

Apologies, I am probably being very presumptuous, I don't even know if these things are things that people even want. Right now, they are just ideas that I think could be beneficial.