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**Glak** · December 13, 1999, 11:23

yeah I was thinking a small bar across the top would be a good place for customizable icons. It would also be nice if there was a little area with buttons that would control the screen. Like a page up, page left sort of thing so you could easily scroll the map. Half a screen and two screens would probably be good settings, and in between them could be a button to center on the selected unit.

**Mark_Everson** · December 13, 1999, 14:41

Darren:

Thanks for the summary. I will try to put up something more thoughtful when I'm not at work...

All:

I will have demo 4 out soon. It raises several interface issues all by itself! I think everyone playing around with what I have so far, resizing and moving around windows, etc., we can get an idea of how much screen space should be devoted to the main map etc. In parallel with that, a few demos, as Paul says, would be valuable in getting everyone going in their thought processes.

I think the fundamental things to keep in mind are:

1) Any interface spec we formulate needs to be fairly flexible. We just can't forsee every way the design will evolve from here. Part of the reason IMO that a lot of commercial games have lousy interfaces is that the specs are locked in before the game design has fully taken shape.

2) We need to provide the player with ways to get quick overviews of everything important. And also to be able to Affect those parameters in easy ways. You will see in the demo a crude way for the player to get an overview of the size of military threats in the whole local area (about half of Europe).

3) Allow the player to interact with things as turns are run continuously under the player's general instructions. This is necessary IMO to support the One-Evening game concept. It also supports an RTS-type game for those who are into that.

**Lord God Jinnai** · December 13, 1999, 15:12

Yea there needs to be something on the characters/dynasty's, which notable ones are there and a screen for managing ur rulering dynasty if app. Also a a screen to visit ur advisors and such.

**Paul Crocker** · December 14, 1999, 01:32

Darren: Nice summary of the interface. I think that you've hit the main points, and we may just need to debate the details. A prototype is probably in order to help guide the discussion (something that I'm finding out in my real-world job. People often can't really decide what they want unless you show them a picture - myself included!) I think that Glak's ideas re: buttons/icons should also be included (this falls in the details category).

Now for my question(s):
Are you interested in doing the artwork? I can possibly work up a demo over the holidays if not. Which leads us to the next question (mostly for the programming gurus out there)... How is the interface implemented in Clash? Do we give Mark (or the other programmers) some GIF's/TIF's for the buttons, borders, and bells/whistles and have them put them together? Or is there another method that is more preferable?

**Darren_McGuicken** · December 14, 1999, 09:32

All, re: customisable buttons/data onscreen...

Yeah, if our philosophy is to give the user what they want (no matter how ill-advised ), my first notion was that set up a series of 'optional toolbars' akin to Glak's customisable button suggestion.

ie. Keep the main screen as simple as possible by default but have a lot of alternative data panels for each of the main game models (eg. dynasty/character info, maybe?) selectable via a menu which the user could tick on/off?

It means someone with a 1600x1200 screen, for instance, could have the best of all worlds with a large main playing area plus access to all the detailed info they deem most important.

Someone playing at 800x600 would have to make the decision whther to keep a large playing map or spice it up... all vital stats, whatever we decide they may be, should be in a compulsory panel.

Yes/No/Heard it all before?

Paul: me? artwork? Shurely shome mishtake? I might be able to manage it in ASCII...

I was thinking of:



 ----------------------------

|                     |      |

|                     |  2   |

|                     |      |

|                      ------

|                     |      |

|          1          |  3   |

|                     |      |

|                      ------

|                     |      |

|                     |  4   |

|                     |      |

 ----------------------------

|             5              |

 ----------------------------

Hey, actualy that's not bad, given my incompetence as an artist

1) Main Map - compulsory
2) Small Map - compulsory?
3) Main Data - compulsory
4) Contextual Data - compulsory
5) Tagged onto the bottom of 1 or 4 could be one or more of eg. diplomacy info; detailed economy view etc, in civ-wide or province-wide forms.

[This message has been edited by Darren_McGuicken (edited December 14, 1999).]

**Glak** · December 14, 1999, 12:43

I just threw together a sample interface from screenshots that I had lying around. I didn't break up the map and main information section but the dividiging line is obvious. The components are:

bottom middle: text area, receive status reports, send and receive messages from other rules (both human and AI), enter cheat codes (useful for debugging and scenario design). Also useful for entering commands through text if you are one of those command line people.

bottom right: minimap, essential

top left: customizable toolbar like in IE. Some of these buttons let you do things like make TFs quickly or change visual settings while others bring up the important subscreens.

top: that little thing could be used for scrolling around the screen. Click the middle dot to center on the selected unit.

black area: most of this will be the map, the area on the right side (above the minimap) will be for the troop information, etc..

Well I didn't have time to finish it and I have to get to studying for stupid art history final tomorrow morning, grrr... memorize names and dates

oh the link to the page itself:
http://tcahalan.tripod.com/index.html

I made it with their trashy one minute thing but signing up took like five minutes. The page that it generated seems to have really bad html or something. I didn't bother deleting all their dumb text either.

**Glak** · December 14, 1999, 15:07

? Not sure exactly what you mean. I think more stuff should be on the bottom than the top, otherwise it looks top heavy. As for right vs left it doesn't really matter but since the standard is to have things on the right I don't think there is really any reason to deviate.

**Lord God Jinnai** · December 14, 1999, 15:45

It doesn't matter too much for the top vs bottom, but i guess its just my eyesight since whenever there's too much on the right vs left it doesn't look quite right.

**Mark_Everson** · December 14, 1999, 18:44

The direction I'm kind of leaning in for the overall characteristics of the interface, is that no single approach will suit everyone's needs. What I think is the right way to do it, is to provide a series of flexible interface pieces, and give players the capability to rearrange them in any way that is best for the player. So our default main screen might look like Darren's or Glak's, but the player could change it in any way that fits their needs. Adding or removing components, and re-sizing and moving around whatever is there should be fully supported.

Clash should be so information-rich that I think players might want to have Several main interfaces depending upon whether their civ is small or large, whether they are currently focused on diplomacy, or conquest, etc.. So I think the player should be able to assemble any interface they want out of the interface components (Toolbar, main map, mini-maps, etc.). We could reserve alt-number key combinations to quickly shift "ViewStyles" among those the player has set up.

The concept of ViewStyles seems very powerful and natural to me. The programming aspects aren't all that difficult, especially if you know ahead of time all Clash interfaces will need to support it.

What do you think?

**Paul Crocker** · December 14, 1999, 19:07

I agree whole heartedly, Mark. I know that I'm quite particular about how I arrange my workspaces at work, whether it be for remote sensing/image processing, GIS, or even just my Microslop Office setup. If this is the way that we'll design the interface (I hope it is), then the questions that arise mainly pertain to which tools should be available to the user. Organization is key to help those designing the interface. Some sub-interfaces that keep popping up in the discussion include:

1. Main map
2. Mini me - 'er - Mini map
3. Tool bar
4. Model dialogues

Specifics may be in order for #3 and #4 (we could even customize these sub-interfaces). Can anyone think of sub-interfaces in addition to those listed above? If you're listing individual tools (map zoom, etc) it might be easiest to indicate that they are part of the tool suite (or separate from it if that's the case).

**Lord God Jinnai** · December 15, 1999, 01:56

Actually the interfact to be would be better if it was flipped digainoally from upper left so the bar's at the top and the smaller windows are on the left. It's just more visually pleasing to me that's all.

**Darren_McGuicken** · December 28, 1999, 15:21

GUI Component Design

[this is a follow-up to some stuff debated recently on the Diplomacy thread]

If each separate model interface is to follow the Customisable Display philosophy, it needs to be made up of small self-contained UI elements for each lower-level control. I think that's where the current weight of opinion seems to be

Is there any standard yet for making a GUI 'chunk', other than each component to be resizable/de-selectable? What other elements should they have in common? From toolbars/menu systems to layout & eye-candy?

If there is a consensus, would it be worthwhile knocking up some generic code for interface designers to import into their own code? A ClashComponent class? Or has this already been done?

[This message has been edited by Darren_McGuicken (edited December 28, 1999).]

**Mark_Everson** · December 28, 1999, 18:08

Darren:

I think if you are game, that would be a very valuable thing to code up. I'm embarrassed to say, that I can't think of much beyond what you suggested already in terms of functionality. But I'm sure we'll think of more stuff .

There's one thing that bothers me with the many-widgets approach. If each widget it has its own menu, then a lot of screen real estate is going to be wasted. I'm wondering if we could get away with having the only menu be on the toolbar (I'm assuming here that most of the view styles will probably have a toolbar associated with them, possibly a bad assumption). If we could somehow lose the menus on all but the toolbar, the interface would be both more attractive, and give us more area on which to put icons and other interesting things in terms of information for the player. If you assume we Do have a toolbar, at least one that can be called into existence with a hotkey, I think a decent solution is possible. In essence, each widget would register itself with the toolbar, as requiring certain menu items on the toolbar. Poof, all those ugly menus disappear. We could even put some work into making the menus on the toolbar look attractive, since they'd be the only ones we needed to worry about. The only wrinkle I can think of is when you have more than a single type ofGUI widget present. Then it's not clear when you change the, say, map square size, which map you mean. In those cases, it would have to assume or ask, which want it was for. But I don't think that's a big problem.

What does everyone think?

Thanks for addressing this important item. Let me know what you need from me to move forward.

**Darren_McGuicken** · December 29, 1999, 09:02

Re: toolbar/menu approach - I was thinking along exactly the same lines. It sounds clean and practical, as well as better-looking.

The only problem is that I've never tried to code such a system... still, I'm willing to learn!

I was going to put together a test diplomacy UI sometime soon, so I'll have plenty of opportunity for practice...

Of course, if anyone wants to offer coding pointers - I'm not a proud man

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