0 A.D's Built-in Encyclopedia

[Vantha]

14 hours ago, ShadowOfHassen said:

I tried it and got this error:

 

 

But seriously, what you have in the video looks amazing!

Does everyone get this error? I was able to reproduce it only once, it seems like an issue with the PNG decoder. Have you tried simply reopening the game? And pressing 'suppress' should enable you to resume the game anyway.

 

11 hours ago, Norse_Harold said:

The drop-down box for selecting a civilization is not obvious to a first-time user. I think that it should have a label, like "Choose a civilization: ".

Good point. The dropdown is an instance of the same class responsible for the civilization selection dropdowns everywhere else in the game (like above the structure tree). And actually, I intentionally hid the automatically created "Civilization:" text. I thought the dropdown was self-explanatory with the context. So, how about showing "Choose you civilization:", but only as long as no civilization is selected?

 

11 hours ago, Norse_Harold said:

An image in an article makes it more interesting and more likely to be read. I wouldn't say it's required to have an image in every article, but I would encourage adding an image here and there.

I agree. And adding images inline images is already possible with the TextRenderer by using tags. 

7 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

If only to call the object's UI portrait.

Plus, I implemented a feature to add "title images" above the articles (where we could show the portraits). The only problems with it I see are: Firstly, I'm not sure where to place it on the page, there's not much free space. Secondly, we don't have images for every article and many articles do not primarily describe one unit or building, I'm afraid some portraits would fail to thematically fit with the texts themselves.

 

11 hours ago, Norse_Harold said:

Ensure that the layout works properly with different screen sizes

Yes, I am aware of that. I tried keeping it in mind while building the page, but I'm pretty sure there will still be some issues of overlapping UI elements on smaller screen sizes. But that won't be very hard to fix.

 

11 hours ago, Norse_Harold said:

Ensure that there isn't a stack overflow or other type of error if a lot of page navigation history is accumulated

The navigation history is stored in a simple array, so it probably won't cause issues over short periods of time. But I will test it. And I suppose the best solution would probably be to to limit its length to (let's say) 20. (Meaning you can't go back more than 20 times)

[ShadowOfHassen]

1 hour ago, Vantha said:

Does everyone get this error? I was able to reproduce it only once, it seems like an issue with the PNG decoder. Have you tried simply reopening the game? And pressing 'suppress' should enable you to resume the game anyway.

I don't know if its persistent with anyone else, but I get that error consistently when running the latest AppImage of the release candidate with the mod.

[Vantha]

37 minutes ago, ShadowOfHassen said:

I don't know if its persistent with anyone else, but I get that error consistently when running the latest AppImage of the release candidate with the mod.

What happens when you press 'suppress'?

[ShadowOfHassen]

4 minutes ago, Vantha said:

What happens when you press 'suppress'?

It vanishes but the menu is glitchy and unreadable. What version of 0 A.D. did you use to make the mod?

[Vantha]

17 minutes ago, ShadowOfHassen said:

It vanishes but the menu is glitchy and unreadable. What version of 0 A.D. did you use to make the mod?

I used the A27 release candidate, but have also (successfully) tested it on the latest development version.

[Stan`]

@Vantha did you, by any chance use any texture that is not a power of two (eg. 135x168) and not 128x128 or 128x512 etc. That will break the game on most oses when in release mode.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

3 hours ago, Vantha said:

Does everyone get this error? I was able to reproduce it only once, it seems like an issue with the PNG decoder. Have you tried simply reopening the game? And pressing 'suppress' should enable you to resume the game anyway.

I get it, but Suppress bypasses it

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

3 hours ago, Vantha said:

Plus, I implemented a feature to add "title images" above the articles (where we could show the portraits). The only problems with it I see are: Firstly, I'm not sure where to place it on the page, there's not much free space. Secondly, we don't have images for every article and many articles do not primarily describe one unit or building, I'm afraid some portraits would fail to thematically fit with the texts themselves.

I can work with you to create relevant images. As far as space goes, they can be as large as the space allows. 64x64, whatever, Then bigger images in the article itself.

[Vantha]

6 minutes ago, Stan` said:

@Vantha did you, by any chance use any texture that is not a power of two (eg. 135x168) and not 128x128 or 128x512 etc. That will break the game on most oses when in release mode.

I'm pretty sure not. As far as I know that throws a different error.

[Vantha]

6 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I get it, but Suppress bypasses it

After suppressing, is there any texture that isn't correctly loaded in?

[Stan`]

8 minutes ago, Vantha said:

After suppressing, is there any texture that isn't correctly loaded in?

In theory it should appear in the logs as well.

[Vantha]

Can someone share their log files after the error occurs?

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

10 minutes ago, Vantha said:

Can someone share their log files after the error occurs?

Unfortunately, I no longer get the error. Only occurred once.

[Vantha]

47 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I can work with you to create relevant images. As far as space goes, they can be as large as the space allows. 64x64, whatever, Then bigger images in the article itself.

Where would you place them on the page? Images would be great, but the articles themselves should remain the focus point of the layout.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

10 minutes ago, Vantha said:

Where would you place them on the page? Images would be great, but the articles themselves should remain the focus point of the layout.

I have mockups above that show exactly what I would do.

[ShadowOfHassen]

44 minutes ago, Vantha said:

Can someone share their log files after the error occurs?

I have to go to work but I can find the logs this evening. 

[Vantha]

 

2 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I have mockups above that show exactly what I would do.

Hmm, not sure if I like the large square portraits. They take up so much space.

Edited June 10 by Vantha

[nifa]

great work! Not necessary but a another nice feature would be buttons to "turn pages", so you can read it like a book. E.g. after reading about the first Athenian hero I would like to go straight to the second one on the next page instead of going one level up to the category above and down again.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

1 hour ago, Vantha said:

I'm up put join him hi j

Hmm, not sure if I like the large square portraits. They take up so much space.

Well, you don't want a wall of text do you?

[Vantha]

38 minutes ago, nifa said:

great work! Not necessary but a another nice feature would be buttons to "turn pages", so you can read it like a book. E.g. after reading about the first Athenian hero I would like to go straight to the second one on the next page instead of going one level up to the category above and down again.

Interesting idea. We currently only have the section for related articles on the right (which is currently empty because they have to be filled manually). Adding a button below the articles that simply opens the first of them (i.e. "the next page") won't be hard to implement. I'm sure some players would prefer the feeling of leafing through a book rather than of clicking through menus.

 

37 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Well, you don't want a wall of text do you?

No, of course not. I'm still unsure what to go for with the images.

[nifa]

1 hour ago, Vantha said:

Interesting idea. We currently only have the section for related articles on the right (which is currently empty because they have to be filled manually). Adding a button below the articles that simply opens the first of them (i.e. "the next page") won't be hard to implement. I'm sure some players would prefer the feeling of leafing through a book rather than of clicking through menus.

I would prefer to open the next page alphabetically, like they are shown when going one step up to the category. So e.g. if you'd like to find a specific animal out of the 50 animals in the game, you could just pick the first one (African Elephant starting with "A") and then just turn page by page through all of the fifty animals until you finish at Zebu (Z). Makes it easier than going back and forth fifty times.

Icon could be something like these, in ancient style of course:

turn page backwards:

turn page forward: the same but mirrored.

If the design is made to resemble a papyrus roll I know turning pages is kind of strange though

[ShadowOfHassen]

As promised here's my logs @Vanthalogs.zip

[Vantha]

2 hours ago, nifa said:

I would prefer to open the next page alphabetically, like they are shown when going one step up to the category. So e.g. if you'd like to find a specific animal out of the 50 animals in the game, you could just pick the first one (African Elephant starting with "A") and then just turn page by page through all of the fifty animals until you finish at Zebu (Z). Makes it easier than going back and forth fifty times.

Icon could be something like these, in ancient style of course:

turn page backwards:

turn page forward: the same but mirrored.

If the design is made to resemble a papyrus roll I know turning pages is kind of strange though

Ok, I can picture what you mean now, that might indeed be useful to have. I'll see what I can do.

 

1 hour ago, ShadowOfHassen said:

As promised here's my logs @Vanthalogs.zip

You've downloaded the mod from the GitHub repo, correct? Deleting the .gitattributes, the README.md, and the Setup.js should get it working.

By the way, if anyone is interested, Setup.js is the script which I'm using to make the directories, extract the data from the xmls, categorize them, and create the json files. I'm running it with NodeJS and its filesystem and xmlBuilder package.

[ShadowOfHassen]

3 hours ago, Vantha said:

Ok, I can picture what you mean now, that might indeed be useful to have. I'll see what I can do.

 

You've downloaded the mod from the GitHub repo, correct? Deleting the .gitattributes, the README.md, and the Setup.js should get it working.

By the way, if anyone is interested, Setup.js is the script which I'm using to make the directories, extract the data from the xmls, categorize them, and create the json files. I'm running it with NodeJS and its filesystem and xmlBuilder package.

So that got the error fixed when I immediately launch the encyclopedia but it sometimes runs the same error when clicking through articles and when I hit suppress it messes up the UI. I try to reproduce it, but sometimes it doesn't. (Do you want more logs?)

Still the UI looks pretty amazing. Good job!

[Vantha]

9 hours ago, ShadowOfHassen said:

So that got the error fixed when I immediately launch the encyclopedia but it sometimes runs the same error when clicking through articles and when I hit suppress it messes up the UI. I try to reproduce it, but sometimes it doesn't. (Do you want more logs?)

Still the UI looks pretty amazing. Good job!

Thanks.

Well, the log files didn't contain any error messages last time... Is the crash message the same as before?