[crossfire] skill window

[Brendan Lally]

On Thu, 15 Apr 2010 22:17:24 -0500
Kevin Bulgrien <kbulgrien at att.net> wrote:

> > Questions:
> > 
> > 1) Can the skills and experience pane now disappear?
> 
> Other layouts might be other player's favorites, so making sweeping
> changes seems to take some extra thought about who it affects.
 
Ok, so taking all of that, then it is even less clarity over who can
'bless' a change to a layout, particularly if the author of a layout
isn't the same thing as a user. Because there are multiple respondents,
giving different verdicts, the mailing list probably isn't the ideal
place to try and collate those, so I have created a wiki page:

http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/gtk-v2_ui_updates

Where these responses can be collected.

The other advantage of this approach is that if no verdict or comments
are given after a month or two, then it is probably safe to consider
that layout unused and unloved, and then to consider it for
exclusion from future releases and ultimately removal from the SVN
repository.

Obviously if there are vastly differing and strongly held sentiments in
terms of what should be done for any given layout, then that makes the
case for creating another new layout.
 
> > icons for all of the skills (implemented by sending a face number
> > along with the reply_info skill_info response)
> 
> Its fine, but I'd note that graphics blows out the vertical space
> requirements, so some consideration might be given to allowing them to
> be turned off or made quite small so as not to expand every line.  The
> thing I like about your dialog now is that it is pretty tight and
> readable.  I'm not really sure that I see a lot of value in skill
> graphics myself except as eye candy - which tends to aggravate things
> if you happen to have a really small monitor, but can be nice if you
> have screen real estate to throw away.

Ok, I can certainly see that point, OTOH there are 44 skills and it is
a scrolled window which is sortable, a few of these are mutually
exclusive anyway, and a couple are switched off, so you are probably
looking at not more than 40x32 pixels = 1280 pixels

For many players on modern systems, that entire list probably fits on
screen or very close to it, for the rest, then sorting by level is
probably going to show them the skills they care about anyway (after
all, when was the last time you gained jumping experience?)

> > The 'character' pane on the client to show the icon for the skill
> > rather than the name, and clicking on the icon to trigger the
> > callback for the skill window in the same way that the menu entry
> > does.
> 
> Not sure I know what you mean by the 'character' pane.  If you mean
> the core stats, I'm not in favor of the text version of the readied
> skill going away on all the layouts... but maybe I'm not groking what
> you want to do.  Whereas some people like pictures, I tend to like
> text for that. I think graphics are ok for fairly static things like
> button bars, but I would find the readied skill shown only
> graphically to be frustrating.
 
That is what I meant, I can see why you might not like that, so maybe
it is something that should be altered on a per-layout basis.

Brendan