Ideas for a UI facelift

[fabi]

Hi,

I'm a bit confused as to what is currently being proposed, and wouldn't normally say anything, but race was dropped in 1.11.8 default theme, and I hope it isn't in the future.

Hi Doofus,
race made it back into the UI, thus we are discussing the position and format of not only this attribute during the last few posts in this thread.

Just because "Elvish Fighter / Elf" looks silly, it isn't because showing race="Elf" is bad - it's because the name "Elvish Fighter" is bad and should be "Fighter".

Ah no, that was not the reason.
Like discussed above, the race attribute has no direct effect on the game mechanic, thus I thought about keeping it out.
Anyway, there is enough space to display it and (also discussed above) UMC designers might have used it more explicitly.

As for the flag in the side-panel, to show the side number(?): It does very little for those of us who are colorblind, could we have the team number overlay-ed?

No, the shape of the flag is not constant but different depending on which the WML coder defined.
Thus it is difficult to adjust the digit on the image. Not to speak from side-numbers > 9.
Just displaying it behind or before the flag seems to be a better solution imho.

Would you like to have the team colors additionally being adjustable in a preferences dialog, like the one I am working on for the orbs?

These proposed changes are still all overwrite-able with ThemeWML, right?

Yes, the new UI theme is, like the old, completely based on ThemeWML.

I'm asking, so I can maybe try to come up with something rather than just throwing rocks, or at least relax in the knowledge that the old Theme will continue to be available.

Do you want to have the old theme available from the preferences?
Currently the new one just replaces the old, including the images.

Offering the old theme is no problem if there is demand for it.

Thanks.

You are welcome.
Thank you for the feedback and suggestions.

[Crow_T]

Please, for the sake of cosmos: Take the end turn button, you know its the must press thing in all gameplay, give it shape of a square, move where ToD stands a bit to right and squeeze it in there between edge and ToD display.l

I kind of agree with this, I'd prefer the end turn/scenario button to be in the upper right corner though. Lower right just seems inconveniently located for a pretty common button. The issue with moving it: breaking muscle memory.

[zookeeper]

And how would another location be more convenient than the current one?

If anything, lower right is the perfect location precisely because there's nothing else there.

[Crow_T]

Simply move your mouse to the upper right, then to the lower right- which one is more comfortable and natural to do? To me it.s more natural to go to the upper right, when traveling to the lower right one has a tendency to go down then right. Kind of a bad place ergonomically. But it'll never change so it's moot.

[doofus-01]

Would you like to have the team colors additionally being adjustable in a preferences dialog, like the one I am working on for the orbs?

That would be nice, I think it would solve the issue for good.

Do you want to have the old theme available from the preferences?

That would be a nice feature, I'm not sure how many people would use it though. EDIT:Forgot it was already possible to change themes in preferences... So just adding the "classic" to the list, that sounds good.

[Turuk]

Do you want to have the old theme available from the preferences?

That would be a nice feature, I'm not sure how many people would use it though. EDIT:Forgot it was already possible to change themes in preferences... So just adding the "classic" to the list, that sounds good.

+1 to doofus-01's request for the classic theme to be available in case players want it, it never hurts to have options.

Simply move your mouse to the upper right, then to the lower right- which one is more comfortable and natural to do? To me it.s more natural to go to the upper right, when traveling to the lower right one has a tendency to go down then right. Kind of a bad place ergonomically. But it'll never change so it's moot.

I think the debate of how comfortable/natural to move one way over the other depends on the user and their mouse settings. Both are equally simple for me, whereas you find up and right to be much more intuitive.

[fabi]

Please, for the sake of cosmos: Take the end turn button, you know its the must press thing in all gameplay, give it shape of a square, move where ToD stands a bit to right and squeeze it in there between edge and ToD display.l

I kind of agree with this, I'd prefer the end turn/scenario button to be in the upper right corner though. Lower right just seems inconveniently located for a pretty common button. The issue with moving it: breaking muscle memory.

Moving the button to another location and adjusting the rest of the UI around the change is not that difficult.
You can give it a try yourself and even upload the result to the add-on server to give others the chance to participate on your effort.

When 1.12 is released and there is more time again, I am happy to help you with it.

[GunChleoc]

Is it possible to make the "End Scenario" button a bit wider? I have already shortened my original translation "Cnàmh-sgeul deiseil" to "Cnàmh-sgeul deis", but the text is still almost touching the edge of the button, which isn't very pretty.

[Blarumyrran]

I'd think keeping both themes available will be a huge overhead for further GUI development in the long run?

[fabi]

I'd think keeping both themes available will be a huge overhead for further GUI development in the long run?

What makes you think so?

[AI]

There has been very little maintenance work (mainly updating image paths when images were replaced) on dfool and experimental themes for years until they were finally removed this year. Default hasn't seen much more work on it.

[Chewan]

Based on the assumption that this project is still under development
I´d like (rather than a bug report) to address a matter that GunChleoc has made aware twice in this thread:
space for translated strings that are "a wee bit longer" than the English words.
IMO, there's a relatively large number of truncated lines - whether in the right pane, the setting options or
the replay menu bar, for example. Specific case – the sidebar:
The words "Defense" and "Level", or rather "def" and "lvl" (as there's no space to write them out in full),
information that is important to be readily seen to my mind.
I can't think of 3 digits-abbreviations in common use in other languages that would fit here,
and a meaningful abbreviation that shows ellipsis’d somehow fails its purpose.
No different than these three dots next to the team flag... I have never discovered their meaning.

As to the replay menu bar ( with the translation of "replay" generally truncated):
The five hover buttons no longer show the description of their purpose.

Whilst otherwise fully appreciating the work of all developers supporting the game UI improvement,
I wonder if someone else considers the introductory storyboards at the beginning of a new scenario
not easy to read: in spite of keen eyesight, the fine white writing/font only faintly discernible against
the light background of the map.

[iceiceice]

Okay: First of all, thanks for mentioning this problem about the replay viewer tooltips not working. This one had extremely obscure origins... I have fixed it now, on 1.12 and master. Here is the bug report that I made for it.
https://gna.org/bugs/index.php?22646

Second of all: About the "replay" translation being truncated.

I'm not sure how we can easily fix this. The way the system is currently set up, themes are assembled by specifying rectangles where things shall appear. Some of the gui has layout engines that can move stuff around if their size changes, but I think text labels just don't work that way right now, you have to specify a fixed size.

Two things we could do:

1. Just increase the size of that label. But, how much should it be increased?
How about, you tell me.

The replay viewer menu bar is controlled by some stuff in this file: data/themes/macros.cfg, near the end.
You should see this line: https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/blob ... s.cfg#L532

The "+60" in that line means that the label for "Replay" is 60 pixels wide. So I'm not sure if it should actually be 75 pixels wide? 90 pixels wide? If you want to play around with it and suggest what it should be, I guess I will commit that. But possibly only on master, because this stuff all has to work on the Pandora where generally there are no pixels to spare at all.

2. This doesn't really fix the underlying problem. It might be that, really we want for theme labels to have an "expand to text contents" option? Unfortunately I'm not an expert on gui design nor particularly knowledgeable for how this layout stuff works in this project... I would worry that it might conflict with other stuff, or create more issues than it solves. In general dynamically changing layouts when stuff is changing sizes unpredictably is just really hard to do... getting the text cut off may be a lesser evil, I'm not really sure.

This may also be something that is fixed in gui2?? I don't really know for sure.

[GunChleoc]

Thanks for looking into this.

For my language, "Replay" will need to fit "Ath-chluiche". If this gets truncated to "Ath-ch..." or someting, this will read as "re-p" and the user will wonder what that's supposed to mean. So, as long as we don't have dynamic labels, the only option we have is to make them wider for all languages. Or find a good icon and add a tooltip.

The bigger problem are the unit stats though.

[iceiceice]

Re: Replay label

Ok, I decided to boot up into Pandora resolution to see if we actually have room to change it. We actually had a lot of space, so I tried tripling the width of the replay label, to 180p. Here's what it looks like in English and in German:

http://imgur.com/a/NqoKo#0

That seems to be the maximum amount of space we could fit, and it is just barely enough.
It makes the English version look a bit dorky though with all of that dead space.

It seems like really the ideal solution would be to have an icon like you are saying, maybe like one of these I imagine?

Edit: Spoilered the images

Spoiler:

Re: HP, XP, LVL

What do other games do about that?

My feeling is maybe its better to just leave those abbreviations untranslated and rely on the tooltips. I guess the translator can just leave them without changes if they agree with that.