Textui reform (warning: long and full of C)

[t4nk]

Finally I was thinking about the prompt line, and how maybe some questions should appear in windows instead... in a store when you're buying, you are not looking at the top of the screen, likewise with the options menu when you change the numeric options. I guess looking at the popup that happens for keymap changes made me wonder if modal dialogues might be better in some places.

Well I got around to doing it:

https://postimg.org/image/ffp99bhwd/

Where can I place other prompts and messages, though? Some stores have tons of stuff...

https://postimg.org/image/fbgs8uckl/

[MattB]

Had to look up 'bikeshedding', found this...

yak shaving

     - Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.

Awesome phrase, but ironic, really...

[t4nk]

As far as I know there are no showstoppers, though The game is completely playable. Sure, there are plenty of things that could be done to improve it, but this is true for all software (certainly true for Angband).
Well, from what I heard the ncurses client are important for Angband's devteam, and I have a feeling they would prefer if I did that? And maybe I wll, or maybe I won't. And if that (or anything else) is a showstopper, then textui2 will eventually bitrot and become abandoned.
This is fine. It's the process that matters, not the end result. I had fun working on it, but now that I have it - well, I don't even actually play Angband
Also, I enjoy bikeshedding, so feel free!

[AnonymousHero]

@t4nk: If I were you I'd focus first on landing this, i.e. to fix any remaining issues that are showstoppers rather than getting carried away with 'distractions' (such as the character sheet). That way lies endless bikeshedding.

(Not that it isn't valuable to gather input and feedback, but IME it's very easy to go off into the weeds on things like this and end up not getting things merged because they end up languishing in a branch while the rest of the code moves on...)

[t4nk]

[list][*]From a development point of view, the most important consideration should probably be making the character screen modifiable and extensible to support the creation and maintenance of variants, no?

Certainly not! The most important thing is to actually make something that kind of works. This is called "worse is better" (https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html) (edit: here's the correct link - https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html)
Anyway, the goals of this project are outlined in the original post, and have been accomplished (except I don't want to work on separating tilesets, cause I don't like tiles).

rIn my opinion the character screen could stand some major reorganization anyway, especially to facilitate that, but seeing how players are pretty used to the way it is now, I'm sure the more active players could provide a lot more useful input on a new layout than a filthy casual like me could ever dream of

Well, there was this thread about Angband's appearance (including char screen): http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=7680
All in all, I guess Angband's players dont care about these kinds of things very much, and people who do care don't play Angband, because its too ugly for them

As for increasing the size of char screen, I want to keep the biggest terms at most 80x25 grids (as is traditional for Angband), because some people keep talking about ports to tablets and what not...

[tumbleweed]

So after pondering the character screen some more, I have come to the following conclusions (which might very well be beyond the scope of the changes you are looking to make):

• From a development point of view, the most important consideration should probably be making the character screen modifiable and extensible to support the creation and maintenance of variants, no?
• In my opinion the character screen could stand some major reorganization anyway, especially to facilitate that, but seeing how players are pretty used to the way it is now, I'm sure the more active players could provide a lot more useful input on a new layout than a filthy casual like me could ever dream of.

Also such major changes to the character screen would warrant a thread of its own, maybe even in the Vanilla sub-forum to get more eyes on it.

(Stop me if I'm getting ahead of myself and everyone else. I'm just throwing around whatever comes to my mind here.)

[tumbleweed]

As for alpha blending grey, it seems to me the main thing it accomplishes is making background brighter, which is kind of counterproductive? Note that grey is used for borders of ui elements...

To me it makes things look pretty disabled (especially in combination with grayscaling - think "grayed out"), but then again maybe I'm just still stuck in the olden Windows days.

Tell me instead what to do with the character screen It is now like this and I don't like it very much:

https://postimg.org/image/5lp28jp97/

I do think it's an improvement over the old one, but opinions are welcome

I can relate, I always thought the character screen is a bit unclear.

With more padding between the columns and aligned character bio it may look marginally (hah) more tidy: https://postimg.org/image/47nvua8sp/

I attempted to give it a little more structure (with an admittedly very naive approach) but I think it actually ended up pretty terrible: https://postimg.org/image/l6wu9jk09/

Another thing that briefly crossed my mind was putting all the directly combat/environment related stuff on a tab of their own, but most notably I'd expect that to be a massive waste of space...

[t4nk]

Well greyscale is a cool effect, but it's impractical to do (for technical reasons). As for alpha blending grey, it seems to me the main thing it accomplishes is making background brighter, which is kind of counterproductive? Note that grey is used for borders of ui elements...
Tell me instead what to do with the character screen It is now like this and I don't like it very much:

https://postimg.org/image/5lp28jp97/

I do think it's an improvement over the old one, but opinions are welcome

[tumbleweed]

Here's a mock-up of what I had in mind earlier:


Or here's another idea - grayscale everything below the modal dialog (possibly while tweaking brightness/contrast as well), for example:

[t4nk]

To be honest I find the red shading to be a lot more obvious there.

Maybe try some dark or medium gray instead of the black you seem to have used for the second pic?

I just made it darker.

https://postimg.org/image/6yl0lsm9f/

That should be legible enough.

[tumbleweed]

https://postimg.org/image/tj0wt5zpr/
Like so? (except probably not COLOUR_RED , more like https://postimg.org/image/5itj6g7mt/) Good idea.

To be honest I find the red shading to be a lot more obvious there.

Maybe try some dark or medium gray instead of the black you seem to have used for the second pic?

[t4nk]

Cool, first real bug report

[takkaria]

Thank you. This is pretty clear now.


And also button up (1026).
I disabled finger events processing. Does it work?

Yup! Thanks

[t4nk]

So I can click on stuff on the main term - the pathfinding works fine. But when I click anything on the top menu nothing happens. I suppose this isn't anything related to trackpad usage in that case.

I'm getting FINGER DOWN/UP events printed when I click up there:

Thank you. This is pretty clear now.

EDIT: I added a similar fprintf statement for MOUSEBUTTONDOWN and I can confirm that's being sent too.

And also button up (1026).
I disabled finger events processing. Does it work?

[takkaria]

takkaria, I added some debugging dumping to the frontend (concerting finger events), could you try to use your trackpad for half a minute and then send me the report? (via email, or just post here)
Finger events are really stuff for tablets and the like, though... and I see no evidence that main-cocoa.m listens for them in particular? of course, I don't really understand Objective-C...

So I can click on stuff on the main term - the pathfinding works fine. But when I click anything on the top menu nothing happens. I suppose this isn't anything related to trackpad usage in that case.

I'm getting FINGER DOWN/UP events printed when I click up there:

OTHER event: 512
FINGER event DOWN:
x 0.613220 y 0.184647 dx 0.000000 dy 0.000000 pressure 1.000000
FINGER event UP:
x 0.613220 y 0.184647 dx 0.000000 dy 0.000000 pressure 1.000000
FINGER event DOWN:
x 0.595688 y 0.147049 dx 0.000000 dy 0.000000 pressure 1.000000
OTHER event: 1025
FINGER event UP:
x 0.595688 y 0.147049 dx 0.000000 dy 0.000000 pressure 1.000000
OTHER event: 1026
OTHER event: 1025

EDIT: I added a similar fprintf statement for MOUSEBUTTONDOWN and I can confirm that's being sent too.