'OK' button on all dialog boxes.

Post by **Zhukov** » October 16th, 2006, 9:08 am

A small idea to remedy something that has bugged me for ages.

Often when playing campaigns a dialog box will flash up when I'm just about to make some action (moving, attacking etc) that involves clicking. The result is that the dialog disappears before I have had a chance to read. It's usually no more then an annoyance (especially considering the usual crappy dialog standards) but in a campaign where dialog is actually of importance (eg. UtBS) it can be a right pain the backside.

My idea is to simply add 'OK' buttons on the dialog pop-ups. As I am a coding illiterate I should avoid saying that this would be easy/hard to implement, but something similar already exists in dialog pop-ups which involve a choice, so I am tentatively assuming some degree of coding support for this kind of thing already exists.

Post by **zookeeper** » October 17th, 2006, 12:40 pm

I was very annoyed by misclicking dialogs away by accident, too. This has been solved somewhat in trunk now, by having every dialogue box be dismissable only after it has been visible for 30ms (the default, can be overridden in every [message]). My original proposal to only have a delay (something like 100ms perhaps) for the first [message] of an [event], but that didn't get implemented.

I think this should get a better fix sometime in the future when we make the dialogue look better generally (speech bubble -like appearance, fade-ins/outs, smart positioning, things like that). A good general fix would be to be able to mark [event]s as "invisible" (any event that is supposed to be invisible to the player, like setting variables and such) and then having all other events (the ones that trigger dialogue, for example) trigger a sound or other UI notice (and have them be undismissable by accident one way or another).

toms · Post by **toms** » October 18th, 2006, 4:17 pm

What about a 'See past messages' option??

Post by **zookeeper** » October 18th, 2006, 5:19 pm

toms wrote:What about a 'See past messages' option??

What's that?

Xeron_ · Post by **Xeron_** » October 18th, 2006, 5:48 pm

pressing a button to get the last dialogue wondown displayed again after you have removed it incidently

Post by **Viliam** » October 18th, 2006, 6:19 pm

Xeron_ wrote:pressing a button to get the last dialogue wondown displayed again after you have removed it incidently

I would prefer a list of all previous dialogs in this scenario. Not only to prevent accidental mis-clicking, but also to prevent forgetting what was said a few turns ago. Especially if I save the game during the scenario, and then continue playing a few days later.

All the messages could be just displayed in one large scrollable dialog.

Post by **zookeeper** » October 18th, 2006, 7:16 pm

Viliam wrote:
Xeron_ wrote:pressing a button to get the last dialogue wondown displayed again after you have removed it incidently
I would prefer a list of all previous dialogs in this scenario. Not only to prevent accidental mis-clicking, but also to prevent forgetting what was said a few turns ago. Especially if I save the game during the scenario, and then continue playing a few days later.

The best solution would IMO be to have a convenient way to watch the current scenario's replay mid-game. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure this will be deemed as too difficult to implement.

Post by **Kestenvarn** » October 18th, 2006, 9:49 pm

Could the stuff from dialogues be displayed like in the multiplayer chat log?

JW · Post by JW » October 18th, 2006, 10:41 pm

Kestenvarn wrote:Could the stuff from dialogues be displayed like in the multiplayer chat log?

How would this effect scenarios like DotG where the shops have their own choice-filled dialogue boxes?

Post by **turin** » October 18th, 2006, 10:46 pm

/me strongly opposes both speech bubbles and dialogue appearing in the chat area

Website · Post by **Sapient** » October 18th, 2006, 10:50 pm

There is a debug option that prints all dialog information to the output log, but that probably isn't what you're looking for.

The solution in 1.2 is to use a breif [delay] after spontaneous event messages.

The solution in 1.3 is to set the duration of the message longer than default, if so desired.

In both cases, this is up to the campaign designer.

Now that dialogs are true classes in 1.3, it wouldn't be that hard to save the last message dialog so that it can be displayed again.

Post by qk » October 19th, 2006, 8:32 am

zookeeper wrote:
Viliam wrote: I would prefer a list of all previous dialogs in this scenario. Not only to prevent accidental mis-clicking, but also to prevent forgetting what was said a few turns ago. Especially if I save the game during the scenario, and then continue playing a few days later.
The best solution would IMO be to have a convenient way to watch the current scenario's replay mid-game. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure this will be deemed as too difficult to implement.

hmmm, becase now is all action save for replay and you can use it in game, I think it`s not very hard to code midgame replay....but also it`s not trivial. could take same time (my prediction is about 20-30 hours)

Post by **zookeeper** » October 19th, 2006, 8:39 am

qk wrote:
zookeeper wrote:The best solution would IMO be to have a convenient way to watch the current scenario's replay mid-game. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure this will be deemed as too difficult to implement.
hmmm, becase now is all action save for replay and you can use it in game, I think it`s not very hard to code midgame replay....but also it`s not trivial. could take same time (my prediction is about 20-30 hours)

Just remember the word convenient before making the assessment. Convenient would include things like not blocking your ability to play while watching the replay, fluid replay controls, etc, none of which we have now.

Post by **irrevenant** » October 19th, 2006, 10:06 am

I believe the best solution is to add a dialogue log like Toms suggested.

IMO, this should work as follows:
(a) You activate it using an option in the Menu menu (just underneath "Scenario Objectives" or "Statistics").
(b) It opens a dialog window that lists all the dialog played so far from the scenario in a format something like:
---------
Konrad: Oh no, we are getting our posterieth soundly kicked.
Delfador: Verily.
Orc: Bwahahaha!
----------
(for bonus points you could have the unit icons next to the text - I wouldn't bother with portraits though).

(c) The dialogue dialog (hmm...) would contain a scrollbar (like in the Recruit dialog) and an "OK" button.

The reason I think this is the best solution is:
(a) it solves the problem to hand; and
(b) it's a handy feature to have anyway. Even without the clickthrough problem, human memory is fallible. And it's entirely possible that someone's saved mid-level and come back to it days later.

Many other games with character dialog have a conversation journal for similar reasons and it works well.

Post by **Zhukov** » October 21st, 2006, 12:24 am

I'm happy to hear that this has been addressed with the 30ms thing.

zookeeper wrote:The best solution would IMO be to have a convenient way to watch the current scenario's replay mid-game. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure this will be deemed as too difficult to implement.

If someone is at turn 37 and misclick some dialogue, I doubt they would want to watch through 36 turns of replay just to see something that happened on the current turn.

/me likes Irrevenant's suggestion.