Tooltips and so-forth

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MikkoM
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Tooltips and so-forth

#1 Post by MikkoM »

[EDIT] Split from an unrelated thread.
Geoff the Medio wrote:
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.
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.
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.
So if I understand this correctly this is exactly the sort of system that I was referring to in the Ships: Roles discussion.

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.
Last edited by MikkoM on Wed May 02, 2007 2:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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eleazar
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#2 Post by eleazar »

MikkoM wrote:
Geoff the Medio wrote:
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.
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.
So if I understand this correctly this is exactly the sort of system that I was referring to in the Ships: Roles discussion.

Now if we would use these kinds of tooltips on the resource icons we could make them fool proof...
Yes, it is intended that any icon which might not be understood will have a tool-tip to indicate what it represents.
MikkoM wrote: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
These threads tend to be excessively long even when they stay on-topic. There's no reason to discuss "displaying simple images of planets surfaces" in this thread. I really don't see how tooltips are connected, perhaps you could elaborate in the thread you've linked to or a new one?

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MikkoM
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#3 Post by MikkoM »

As to my earlier suggestion, which I have by the way borrowed from Hearts Of Iron 2 Doomsday, on using the tooltips to show either the amount of stockpiled resources or the total production of the empire so that these two could be done by using the same icons does the fact that the tooltips are not interactive make this kind of a system impossible?

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eleazar
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#4 Post by eleazar »

MikkoM wrote:As to my earlier suggestion, which I have by the way borrowed from Hearts Of Iron 2 Doomsday, on using the tooltips to show either the amount of stockpiled resources or the total production of the empire so that these two could be done by using the same icons does the fact that the tooltips are not interactive make this kind of a system impossible?
"not interactive" mean tooltips can't contain buttons or other things for the player to interact with.

If i understand what you mean, it's a bad idea. Tooltips are only for supplementary information. Resource production and stockpile amounts for the empire need to be available at a glance (probably at all times), without unnecessarily requiring the player to put the mouse pointer over a particular location.

An appropriate tooltip for resource icons would include the name of the resource. The amount of that resource would be plainly on the screen at all times. In the case of potentially confusing numbers (for example: "Trade" 36 [+18] ) it can be appropriate for the tooltip to explain what the numbers mean like so:

Code: Select all

Trade
stockpiled: 36
current production +18

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