The User Interface - Appearance and Organization

[toberas]

just a quick question that popped up. Won't there be problems with upside down icons when you can rearrange and add menu items?

[townscape]

It will mean that if you want to rearrange them you will have to replace the icons in question. Not the most modular way but i can always give out the source file for anyones editing.

Also on the topic of docks: We could use pallets (collections) for certain submenu choices which would display [park tiles, train stations, transport type, roads] of a certain style as the chosen current one.

Example: we choose a two-lane road in the menu. The build menu disappears and a pallet bar shows up at the right edge of the screen with the other similar choices like Single Lane, Highway, Avenue, Pedestrian

[townscape]

Also, tomkeus, can FTLK, or whatever language you are using, rotate the button it is using (maybe procedurally rotating depending on it's placement in the circular array) and have the symbols as a separate layer so they won't rotate with the buttons? Can we have special animations (like resize, replace image with other) at hover or press?

[tomkeus]

Never mind FLTK now. It's irrelevant.

I don't need to replace textures when I rearrange icons. I only need to change texture coordinates on the button. This also means I will have to use multitexturing (one texture for the button background, and one for the icon symbol) but it's no problem.

Background texture needs to be gradient as in your pictures and it can be small (32x32 pixels or 64x64 pixels). Same goes for the icon, but since it'll have to have some sort of transparency, I suggest you use grayscale image for the icon so I can use blend mode (see this link). I hope you can understand what to do once you read the text on the link I've supplied.

Each button in Panda3D has four states: ready, press, rollover and disabled so providing textures to display this states is also a requirement.

[croxis]

That was the link I was going to show

The GUI in panda are actual 3d objects, so the graphics become textures. This also allows us to freely rotate, stretch, spin or recolorize.  The actual icons can also just be black and white (see the blend mode in tomkeus link).  They gradient could also be greyscale and the base color of the button can be set in code. This opens the door for more easy ui theming where the user can define what color they want the ui.

[townscape]

Great, everything grayscale and .png? Won't even have to worry about color then    ..... of course I will

So can you be more specific about what enters in the Primary menu and transport menu? A more precise list of objects please

[Nique]

Its great if you render it in black/white so the end-user can set his own color scheme

So can you be more specific about what enters in the Primary menu and transport menu? A more precise list of objects please

I think it is the best way to design a button, without hard-rendering text on it. Because we want to make some things customizable (for future?).

[townscape]

I need to do icon symbols anyway

[Nique]

I need to do icon symbols anyway

True,

Anyway, nice design there 

[croxis]

we do have a chat room ya know

[toberas]

Example: we choose a two-lane road in the menu. The build menu disappears and a pallet bar shows up at the right edge of the screen with the other similar choices like Single Lane, Highway, Avenue, Pedestrian

Wouldn't it be more user friendly to just change the radial menu to the new situation instead of making it disappear and let something else popup at a completely different place. The 'favs' should maybe be renamed to 'related'.

Example: You build something in 'all' mode and after you've selected the item you want to build the menu indeed disappears like it should. If you later want to build something related you invoke the menu again. You toggle the mode and it will show you the related items to your last choice. This way the 'related' items can even be nested. So if you've built a certain type of zone it will show you the type of public services that go with that zone (or something like that). Although a 'favorites' dock seems more useful because users can set it up for themselves instead of devs controlling what should be related or not.

$ 0,02

[townscape]

With my suggestion I was trying to solve the functional issue which appears with non-sidebar build menus: you have to get through the whole menu path to get to the needed category again when you want another puzzle piece. But it's easy to fix if the scrolling plop menu in the end remains in the side.

My idea was to make it even more useful with "collections" - user or item default defined categories which would display choices in the scrolled menu which are related to the item you just selected to use. In combination with your suggested button it could toggle between "related" and "all".

I wanted to solve the issue of very long lists with 100 park tiles/ (fills in our game?) you needed to scroll through in sc4 which always annoyed me and lowered my enthusiasm for additional content. Also the numerical input field can use keyword quick-search, so you could easily find the needed item by typing it in.

[Jonathan]

can you not make a keyboard shortcut that goes to the last selected item and another for the last selected menu.

[toberas]

But if you hate the scrolling with long lists why would you choose to use a bar which will eventually lead you again to scrolling. Isn't that the beauty of the radial menu that when you have a lot of items in a submenu you could have them all displayed in a ring on the outer edge of the menu?

If all your items don't fit with the standard size of the menu you can have the most outer ring (in my example the main ring would be 'beautification' the subring would be 'parks' and then it will add another ring for the different kind of parks) to scale up or down according to the number of items.

With the dock you can toggle between the standard build menu with ALL items or your CUSTOM/COLLECTION (isn't that what it'll be?) build menu. This way you have access to everything in one single menu and you can switch modes if you want to. There's no scrolling because the rings will scale to accommodate all items. I don't see what the problem is with going though the first two rings to get to the third. Especially when you use a lot of the same items you'll remember the shortcuts very quickly. Ask anyone that plays Counter-Strike to name a couple of buy-menu codes and you'll get at east 6 in 10sec



example

[JoeST]

I think a tagging system would be nice... each item is tagged with arrays of keywords, for example:

* Road tool: ["construction"(one of the main sections), "roads"] would appear as the construction→roads→road
* Highway: ["construction", "roads"] => construction→roads→highway
* Rail: ["construction", "rail"] => construction→rail→track
* ZHouses: ["construction","housing"],["zones","green"] => construction→housing→Zhouses and zones->green->zhouses
* BusRailStation ["construction","road","busstops"],["construction","rail","stations"],["lots","stations","bus"]

...you get the gist.

Joe

[Jonathan]

why not an oval?
Benefits of the circular menu except with more room.


Also are you going for zones in the way SC4 had them, not like you draw a region, then up pops a properties (except way more userfriendly than properties) and lets you choose like max number of floors/height.  Whether the zone is com or res or ind or mixture of com/res.

[croxis]

Lol I was going to suggest a synaptic tag based search system too. Darn people keep beating me to it!

100 items for a category is simply too big and poor design. They will either need to be sorted into sub categories and/or use a tag based system to help filter.

[townscape]

"favorites" was part of my suggestion

yes I agree 100 items in a place is too much
but it can be true

should these items be organised in a circle or scrolled box is a debatable issue

[JoeST]

couldnt you have a scrolling arc? Like the items on that level are arranged on a corkscrew and when you get to the edges of the viewable  area, it simply twists round?....twould also mean you could have a quarter-circle menu that fits snuggly into the edge of the screen, rather than waste all that space :p

Joe

[croxis]

The function of a pie menu is that it adds direction in addition to order. A traditional line menu (sc4) only has order. This results in pie menus being drastically faster to navigate and use than traditional menus. Using a scrolling arc will eliminate the power of direction.