FreeOrion

It's intuitive in the sense that you visually pick up and drop the tech to where you want it: onto or off of the queue, or to a new place on the queue. Since we already drag-drop to move it within the queue, it makes "intuitive" sense to extend this functionality for enqueuing and dequeuing... And if you used the drag-drop method to enqueue, then similarly drag-dropping to dequeue would be even more intuitive...

Note that if you add the ability to drag onto the queue, it should be possible to drag onto a specific place in the queue, not just to the bottom like the current enqueue method...


The only difference is to avoid clutter... If you leave stuff on the queue that you don't want, it gets in the way. Every time you enqueue something, it goes at the *end* of the queue... if you've got a queue full of partly completed projects you don't care about, then you've got to scroll down the queue, find the thing you want, and repeatedly drag-drop and scoll the queue in order to get the new thing up to the top. Also, keep in mind that removing from the queue doesn't loose any progress you've made on something.


We could add those, but we wouldn't have space for a copy of each button for each tech on the queue... we could have a general set of buttons at the top that apply to whatever tech is highlighted on the queue. I'd have no objection to that... and it wouldn't have as much problems with accidental clicks...


The whole tree view isn't good enough? We could change the mouse cursor according to context while drag / dropping...


That was never the plan, and the categories aren't layed out to support such a thing... The current categories were for mostly planetary development and resource production and realted stuff, and some generic learning things. The ships and diplomacy and various other sub-games really need their own categories...


You cannot do either of these... hence my repeated suggestion that they capacity be added.


The point is that I shouldn't have to worry about accidentally clicking the button at all... I should be able to use a broad inaccurate gesture to grab and move the tech box around. If there's a little button, I have to either a) carefully click on it to do what the button does, and b) carefully avoid it to do something else. It's not that I'm incapable, it's that I shouldn't have to spend any time being any more careful in my gesture than is necessary. Lots of little buttons also add clutter and take up valuable screen space.


I agree... though given what I feel are problems with the X's, that doubleclicking recentres the tree view on the removed tech (which is probably exactly the one place you don't want the tree view after removing a particular tech), and that drag-and-drop is already used for reordering queued techs, I suggested drag-and-drop for enqueuing and dequeuing as well...

ok, thanks for enlightening me on the categories.


yeah right, i like this.

basicly i'm happy with drag-and-dropping the items back on the tree to delete them, but i fear that if you are going to delete 4 or 5 techs, it's gonna be a pretty annoying procedure.

what about the possibility to select multiple items on the queue(via shift or ctrl and/or drawing a selection rectangle) and then dragging them all at once.

I guess this is the same issue as with that hex focus select buttons I was suggesting earlier... (on IRC I think...?) I don't see a click and short drag as significantly more annoying than a single click... especially if the click and drag targets are pretty big, as they are in this case. It's not like you'd have to get the cursor over the small button each time to start the drag... and you could drop anywhere on the tree.

To be clear, were you / noelte talking about a a button on each tech box, or one on the top of the queue that functions on the selected tech(s)? Having a button that deletes the one selected tech, and selects the next tech below it in the queue would probably be good to have as well as the drag-drop... Since some people prefer buttons it seems, and as you could repeatedly click the button to get rid of a series of consecutive techs without having to move the mouse cursor. (assuming there's no confirmation dialogue... which IMO is unnecessary if it's just this one button, not a button on each tech's box on the queue)...


Sounds good to me.

We'll need to make the selected items more clearly marked than they are now (currently it's just a faint grey outline that's barely noticible)...

Some way to drag-select would also be good, so you can select several adjacent techs on the queue without having to hold shift. This might be difficult though, as we'd need some space near the techs that doesn't immediately select and drag a single tech when you mousebutton down on it... so maybe not.

i was thinking about a button for each item. having a single button which deletes the selected item is a bad idea imo, because it's one more click(select + delete) and you can't assume that the next item in queue will be the item you want to delete.

i'll provide an updated mockup for the research screen until the weekend, including all the stuff we've talked about in the last post.

EDIT: I'm referring to Geoff's post about the category selection buttons with the design mock up from earlier in this thread [/end edit]

Hey guys- Its been months since I had the time to post, but I try to keep current. The recent art/gui design decision look great & promise familiar functionality for most players (always a plus).

As for the display of tech category buttons issue, what about only displaying 3 tech categories at a time in larger buttons with a left & right arrow key on either side? Essentially, the categories would form a loop as the last category would point at the first. The player could cycle through categories and the center one would always be the selcted one.

This would neatly solve the dislpay issue for the buttons that Geoff mentioned and allow for any number of final categories. I seem to remember Tyreth & Aquitane both mentioning 10 categories as the expected total in 1.0

Anyway, keep up the good work!

'Ling

Underling: The point of the category icons / buttons is to act like the tabs at the top of a file folder, allowing you to easily and quickly jump with one click to the particular folder / category you want (or perhaps toggle that category's techs into or out of the view, if I had my way...) If you could only look at three at a time, and could only switch from your current one to the one before or after, it would be quite inconvenient to switch categories in a random order... thus defeating the purpose of having the buttons, and partly defeating the purpose of having categories in the first place.

Singularity of Transcendence has been uploaded. Its an 8 bit png.

I was thinking about one button each, too (as pd did). If you have to delete a sequence of techs, you would delete one after another without the need of repositioning the mouse. That's because the next item delete btn would be at the same place where the one of the already delete tech was. And usual that button would be at the upper right corner and no issue for incidental clicks at all. If you are dragging things, you usually target the item center not the border.

I haven't used drag&drop much, so how are new techs added to the queue. Also only by dbl-click? If so i'm not sure why zach did it this way.


And i also prefere seeing ALL tech category tab at once (without scrolling). If they don't fit into one row, we have to go for two.

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reading this, i had to think about what i had proposed in my original mockup.
tabs are nice but they still are kinda limitid. they only allow showing one selected category or all of them.

in my mockup i proposed a 'filter system' - what i mean with this is, that every button can be either active or inactive and thus you can still easily select to have only one category or all of them shown, but you can also easily set up a combination of 2 or 3 categories for examble.
i think it's a much better solution than tabs in this case.

opinions?

Would be fine with me. we could use the left button to toggle on category (on/off) and the right to select a category solitairy.

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If the button(s) are (all) off on the left side of the tech's box, I guess it won't be a problem, as most drag-and-dropping would be done from the right side, since that's closest to the tree anyway.

Just make sure the buttons have some mousover highlight feedback (which we need a lot more of throughout the UI in general, actually... particularly on the galaxy map...)


Uhm... I'm not sure what you mean by this... You haven't used drag and drop much in general, or just not in FO? And what's your point, either way?


AFAIK the only ways to add techs are to double click on the tree view, or to select the tech and click the "add to queue" at the top above the picture. In either case, you can only add to the bottom of the queue (whereas drag and drop from tree to queue would let you drop it into a specific place on the queue, hopefully...)


I (re)suggested exactly the same thing immediately after the quoted text...




Huh? "left" and "right" buttons...? I think pd was (and I was) only talking about a single toggle button per category. We don't need two buttons each... and shouldn't have them, as they'd take up space, and would be difficult to understand the different functions of...

And, nearly the same functionality could be achieved with toggles for each category, plus two extra buttons: "All" and "None", which toggle on all categories, or toggle off all categories, respectively.

ok, sorry then. i wasn't quite sure what you've meant by this.

edit:

right.


yep, i had an 'all'-toggle(maybe a tiny checkbox or radio button) in mind too. and yes, a 'none'-toggle makes sense too.

i'll include this stuff in the mockup.

By repeating, I just meant to point out my (continued) support of the idea.

Maybe i should have said >mouse< button?

Placing the buttons is up to pd (left is a little bit odd). Mouseover is easy to do, all button should already highlight their borders?

BTW: You took apart what is was saying about drag&drop and of cause i was talking about fo.

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oooh... ok.

I'm thinking we should get away from the current scheme of having left and right mouse clicks be the only way to do two different things when clicking on the same UI widget... It's arguably a rather bad UI design principle, as might be inferred from Mac's shipping with only a one-button mouse...

So rather than having one button do two different things depending how it's clicked, we should generally have two buttons to do the two things... be it toggle categories, or change focus, etc. Right-click context menus, or right click as a shortcut are ok... but only if there's some other way to do the same thing using only left clicks.


Probably the whole button should highlight (as in change colour and/or get brighter).


Ok... I was just a bit confused, since you were saying you don't use drag and drop, but there's no way to use drag drop to enqueue / dequeue, so it seemed like you might be making some other point that I was missing, since if you couldn't do something, I didn't see why would you'd point out that you don't do it... but nevermind.