Some Suggestions for Improving the GUI & General Appearance

Discussion among members of the development team.

Moderator: Forum Moderators

Alink
Inactive Developer
Posts: 181
Joined: March 5th, 2007, 6:45 am
Location: Belgium

Re: Some Suggestions for Improving the GUI & General Appeara

Post by Alink »

Eleazar wrote: * A couple people have noted that this chops off the heads of tall units in keeps. This is true, but i don't think it is real problem. Once the player uses the hex for a while, i think he will see "through" it, just as players know where the mouse pointer is, but doesn't notice tangents of the mouse pointer and units (like the mouse pointer poking a unit in the eye). Let's leave it for a while, and see how it feels after a few games.
I was annoyed by this, and even if you may get used to it, I think it was a bad first impression (both for a new player and an old player discovering the new mouseover in 1.10). It was also breaking perspective a little (for example compared to the selection ellipse) and was not really like a mouse cursor flying above the view.

So, I just committed a trick to prevent that. It uses 2 layers, one for the top part and one for the bottom part. FYI it's the same trick used for grid and ellipse. The potential problems were finally ok:
- It's never hidden by mainline foreground terrains (you need really huge foreground terrain to hide the top part, at which point it also hides the unit too much)
- The case where units hide a small part of the indicator are rare, and when we will also highlight unit/ellipse, it should be visible enough.
- I needed to render the golden hex under fog/shroud as 1.8 does. It's a bit less visible under fog, but gives a visual clue when it's not clear if a hex is fogged or not (like water). Also, there is nothing to click under fog, except with a selected unit, but then the move info provide enough highlight. Other ways are possible, but have small limitations at the edge of fog/shroud.
Attachments
mousover_layers.png
mousover_layers.png (82.82 KiB) Viewed 4427 times
Post Reply