[crossfire] skill window

Brendan Lally brenlally at gmail.com
Tue Apr 20 12:45:53 CDT 2010


On Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:18:27 -0500
Kevin Bulgrien <kbulgrien at att.net> wrote:

> I imagine that
> the intent was to set up some kind of feedback mechanism to help
> client development. 

Pretty much, and also allow a way to determine if there is a desire for
new layouts to be created (the point of making the wiki comment that I
did was that if there was anyone who thought along similar lines, then
that would give me sufficient reason to create it).

> I do hope to move along and be over with
> this, 

Absolutely. I'm sorry that a lot of this discussion has generated more
heat than light, and I wish to apologise for the role I have played in
that.
In retrospect I should have asked the 'how are client layouts being
updated now' question and then left the 'how can client layouts evolve
and be maintained over time' issue for another thread at a later
date. I am also now of the view that my earlier proposal was
over-engineered.

> I will be more than happy to rework a .glade
> to your specifications, and plan to do so based on what I saw on the
> wiki.

I appreciate the offer, but please don't feel like there is a need to
do so for my sake. There are lots of UI changes that ought to
take place over the next few months in order to make it easier to use
some of the existing game features, and these may well require
additional thought in terms of how an interface layout should represent
them. As such, it is likely that my local copies of the glade files
will end up being a bit of a mess as I test things.

To give you some idea of what I am thinking of:

Medium term (ie, after the next release) I am looking at:
* A 'knowledge browser' that doesn't involve typing in numbers to recall
knowledge (preferably one that is ordered into categories, and
somewhat crosslinked - ie, clicking an ingredient in a recipe should
show you a recipe to make that ingredient if you know one).
* A 'quest log' that will show information about current and completed
  quests.

As I'm thinking currently, these might go into the 'player' menu,

Longer-Term I am also thinking in terms of:
* A nicer interface to the 'who' command, so that it brings up a list
  of players and allows 'tell' commands to be sent more easily (without
  typing in an (often difficult to spell) player's name) 
  Possibly there could also be additional controls exposed for dms,
  things like muzzle and kick.

* And then additional things like toggle buttons the 'obscure but
  useful commands' such as brace, bowmode, peaceful, afk, etc. 

I still don't really have a clear idea of where any of those could
fit interface-wise, so that's something I'll be looking to discuss in
more detail.

Ultimately I want to be able to reach a point where:
* it is possible to play crossfire without needing to type anything
  other than to chat with other players/NPCs. 
* None of the command-based functionality is lost since that gives a lot
  of power to keybindings (I just don't want to *need* to use them just
  to play the game).
* The interface doesn't become cluttered.

There would be times where these three aims would be in conflict, so
I would welcome any discussion/thoughts on the most effective approach.


There is a separate discussion to be had around creating more default
keybindings for the client. The current approach is to explain right
at the start of the game how to bind commands to keys, my view is that
this is an intermediate/advanced topic, and shouldn't be something that
a new player should want or need to care about until they are a few
hours into the game.

Brendan



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