[interface] Radial menu

[Spixi]

Hi community,

many games use radial menus for quick access to context-sensitive actions. This trend has also been adopted by other applications in mobile and desktop environments.

These are some examples for radial menus, which are also known as "pie menus"

Menu from easyGestures, a Firefox plugin

PieMenu.png (4.51 KiB) Viewed 2715 times

Radial menu from The Sims

sims.jpeg (7.59 KiB) Viewed 2715 times

Radial menu concept of Howard Moen, dribbble.com

My idea is to include pie menus in Wesnoth. The benefits are: lower misclick rate, a better overview and enhanced user experience:

Existing menu in Wesnoth

Mockup for new Wesnoth menu

new.png (218.94 KiB) Viewed 2715 times

What do you think about this idea? Feel free to post your thoughts.

[Sire]

I am not a fan of radial menus and prefer my list menus. Yes, Radial menus have their place when wanting to do something with a control stick, but when using mouse and keyboard, I find the simplistic lists superior.

However, if one wants a radial menu option alongside the existing list, then go for it. I'll stick to what already exists, but if someone finds the radial menu better, there's nothing wrong with more options.

[tekelili]

I am not fan of radial menu for BfW enveiroment. What I would enjoy is mouse wheel sensitive menus...

[Inky]

A little off topic, but my opinion on the right click menu:

Personally I've never used the right click menu and just use the hotkeys instead. To me the only two useful commands on there would be Recruit and Recall (it's more reliable than clicking a hex and then using ctrl+r), but they are in the middle of nowhere - maybe they could be moved to the top?

Next unit: I don't think this belongs in the right click menu. I think a more user friendly option would be two arrow buttons (previous unit, next unit) on the unit info panel, just above the End Turn button.

End turn: This already has a huge button so I don't think it needs to be in the right click menu.

Also, I think the commands for ending a unit's move for the current turn (Space) and ending a unit's move for all future turns (Shift + space) could be added to the right-click menu (or the unit interface) as they can be very useful (when you have a ton of units), but are quite obscure.