[crossfire] Improved/redone client.

[Alex Schultz]

Mark Wedel wrote:
> Keybinding interface: I don't think anyone mentioned this, but I know people 
> have said they don't like the current interface in the gtk2 client (which is 
> really the same as the one in the gtk client).  Not positive how to improve it - 
> it seems with the number of spells, etc, we're always going to have a lot of 
> keybindings in crossfire, but would be interested in hearing ideas.
>   
Well, a few things about keybindings:
-In the gtk2 gui, the selections 'run', 'fire', 'alt meta', and 'stay in
edit mode' are not very intuitive to new players
-If you try to make a keybinding over a key that is already bound
something, it shouldn't just append to the list, it should warn you and
if you choose to continue, remove the old binding first.
-One idea that might be good, is while it is waiting for you to press a
key to bind to, it should come up with a graphical display of the keys
on the keyboard, and with color coding showing which keys are already
bound. Tooltips when hovering over a key show what is bound there and
clicking a key counts as if you pressed that key.

> Pop up inventory window:  I'm perhaps seeing this more as a secondary interface 
> to the inventory, not the only way.  So the existing scrollbar exists, but when 
> dealing with lots of store, or perhaps more advanced operations, a pop up window 
> could provide a better interface.  OTOH, having two different interfaces would 
> seem confusing.
>   
IMHO there are two main problems with popups:
-window managers doing strange things
-interferes with realtime gameplay
And though I like popups for saving interface space, the only ways I see
to deal with both of those issues would be to work around the window
manager, and that doesn't seem reasonable to do unless one is also
abandoning gtk and making an interface more akin to, for the sake of
example, the battle for wesnoth.

> Inventory control via keyboard:  I'd be interested in how people think that 
> should work - I really can't envision much any reasonable way to control the 
> inventory only by keyboard, whether we use gtk2 widget or write our own.  I'd 
> personally consider this to be a pretty low thing to do.
Personally I think this would make a big improvement if it could be
pulled off in a reasonable manner. The best I've seen for keyboard
inventory control in large inventories, would be how nethack does it
even in it's gtk interface. That keyboard interface might work well if
we used popups, however see the popup issues above. One could do
something though with giving focus the inventory list and allowing
keyboard scrolling of it and pressing keys to apply from it or drop etc.
however one would need to make it VERY obvious to the player when they
have focus on that, and also would have to make it very difficult to
accidentally trigger while easy to trigger manually (and for fairly
obvious reason I don't think focus on click would work well for it...)

Alex Schultz