Re: Another Possible Solution to the Occupants Display Problem

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu>]

On Mon, 6 Sep 2004, Jim Kingdon wrote:

> > The fact that we are clicking on a button in the transport box rather
> > than the transport itself makes me think we are okay in this regard.
> 
> Sure, making it consistently a button would work.  What muddied those
> waters was the question of what to do at 8x8, where there is no room
> to draw a button.  Maybe just make people zoom in before they can
> click to bring up the occupant popup.

Well, if a cell is either so small that the popup button cannot be 
drawn for any transports in it, or if a cell contains so many 
units that they are too small to show any popup buttons, then 
perhaps it would be good to extend the idea of the popup 
"ellipsis" button to the cell itself. The popup button would be 
drawn in the cell itself, depending on the ratio of cell size to 
number of units contained therein.... 
Psychologically, I don't know what impact it would have for a 
player to see a single button in the middle of a cell, when the 
cell may contain dozens of units. I suppose that, after a while, 
one would become conditioned to fear and respect any cell 
displaying an ellipsis button with an enemy emblem next to it. (In 
the case where a cell contains a horde of seen units of mixed 
allegiances, I would probably still opt to place the banner of the 
first seen enemy unit next to the popup button, _even if there are 
friendlies in the cell, a possibility with ZOC == -1).

And, I think that for really small cells, where a button cannot be 
drawn, that the cell itself should be the button. Occupant display 
issues not withstanding, this would probably be an improvement 
over squinting and hoping that you click the right pixel. Instead, 
it would simply be click and then choose a decent-sized unit (or 
cell) image in the cell popup window. Or, if the player changed 
his/her mind, then he/she would just hit escape. Not much effort, 
_probably less than squinting and "precision-clicking". Of course, 
I don't know whether there is a big demand for playing Xconq at 
such low magnifications.... (Build it and they will come?) 

> How about one icon for each material.  Mouse over the icon to get the
> numbers ("5/200").  Perhaps the icon itself would have a greyscale
> border from light grey to black for how much is present, or a red
> border if LowSupply, or a bar similar to the damage bar (although this
> is a problem if reaching capacity is rare) or something.

I like this idea, especially the standout border for which 
individual materials are needed. Maybe even do a flashing border 
for materials that the unit is starving without.

I think the existing mouseover panel in the SDL interface could 
accomodate any info we would want to display regarding a material, 
though a "tooltip" might also be nice to add at some point.

Eric