Geoff the Medio wrote:I'm quite keen on icons with tooltips to convey lots of info without too much text clutter. The functionality exists in GG, though isn't presently enabled in the FO engine, though changing that wouldn't be a big job, AFAIK.5) We can do little tooltips for a few second mouseover, right? Not that i'd want to put too much into tooltips, but they can give you the freedom to use more icons— which makes internationalization easier.
So if I understand this correctly this is exactly the sort of system that I was referring to in the Ships: Roles discussion.tzlaine wrote: GG (my GUI library, on which FO is built) has very extensive support for tooltips. You can have arbitrary levels of tooltip, such as one tooltip for a 0.25-second hover, a more expanded one for a 1.5-second hover, or a really expanded one for a 3-second hover, or whatever. You can also put anything in them, not just text -- graphics and so forth are ok, but they're not interactive, so no buttons or anything like that. I'd really like to see all our UIs have tooltips, but haven't gotten around to putting in good hooks for non-programmers to use.
Now if we would use these kinds of tooltips on the resource icons we could make them fool proof since there would be a text which would give the player the exact name of the resource that the icon represents and maybe even some brief info about it. This way we could also display the amount of stockpiled resources and the total resource production of the empire by using the same all ready in place icons, since one of these figures could be displayed as they are now displayed where as the other would be displayed in the tooltips.
Also if it is possible to put graphics into these tooltips could the problem, or at least I would like to call it a problem, of displaying simple images of planets surfaces which I proposed in this thread:
viewtopic.php?t=1581
be solved by using tooltips? This way the images wouldn`t take away the space in production screen, but would be still in the game to give the players a better insight on the conditions in which the ordinary citizens live in and so spark up the players imagination. Now maybe these images should then be smaller than in the thread I linked to and maybe this discussion would be better suited to the 0.6 designing process since it deals with ground, but I really feel that these kinds of images if they are done like the other excellent graphics in Freeorion could give the players imagination tools to work with and so would deepen the game experience.
Edit: Added quoted information about the possibilities of the tooltips.