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Re: Weird fuel behavior
Hi Stan,
Stan Shebs wrote:
Eric McDonald wrote:
I think this is true for 3D shooters (such as Unreal) or some simple
(many things are highly automated) realtime strategy games (such as
Warcraft), but not necessarily true for strategy games where there are
multitudes of forces of different kinds to track and manage, and there
is not heavy automation of their actions.
Theoretically you're right, but in practice nobody actually goes there.
Consider TOAW (The Operational Art of War), probably the most like
Xconq in terms of scope and intent. One screen with panes on the side.
I like the idea of panes on the side, as opposed to the bottom or top.
Makes the aspect ratio of the main map closer to that of a square.
Question is, are sides the most comfortable for the human eye?
Certain commands will pop up screen-filling lists, and there are
smaller popups for dialogs.
This is all I am proposing in terms of windows made from a GUI toolkit.
* simplicity of play - if you're forced to make everything fit in one
window, you think harder about how to design the interface for
efficiency. For instance, instead of switching to another window, make
a panel display an array of choices represented as icons small enough
to all fit in the panel.
The problem is that a panel is going to be near the edge of the screen.
If someone is using the mouse to move units, then he/she either has to
move the mouse over to the panel (something I am too lazy to do), or
else take his/her hands off the mouse and use keyboard shortcuts and nav
keys to make a selection. Whereas, a dialog window can popup centered
over the playing window, and minimal mouse movement is required.
One of my expectations for the SDL interface was that module designers
should be able to supply skins for the interface as well as the game
images.
I agree wholeheartedly with that goal. I think that skins can be applied
to GUI toolkit elements just as readily as to a pane or overlay.
Look at all the folks out there who like showing off screenshots of
their custom "desktop environments", complete with transparent eterms,
translucent window title bars, colored log messages scrolling by in the
root window, and whatnot. They just provide custom pixmaps for the
windows or something like that. I think I saw somewhere that similar
hackery can be done on Win32.
Eric