Removing Or Adjusting Support For Square Maps

[k776]

With the addition of the new idle workers button, we're starting to need to think about design, since the buttons position and style is not ideal.

With the circular maps, we have some great triangular sections around the map to place some buttons, like a nice triangle 'idle workers' button (anyone want to have a crack at some mockups?)

However, when a map is a square, we cannot use these spaces. Rather than have two different GUI's, I propose either:

* Removing support for square maps, forcing circular all the time (which makes sense when it comes to camera rotation)

OR

* Rotating the square maps 45 degrees to become a diamond, and scale it to fit within the circumference size of circular maps.

Either of these would allow us to be confident of the space around it not covering up part of the minimap, allowing us to utilize the space for four buttons, like idle villagers, diplomacy, stats, and flare.

What does everyone think? Maintain support for diamond maps or go with circular ones?

[Ykkrosh]

Diamonds probably wouldn't make sense since they wouldn't match the default camera angle (which is looking northwards across the square map). I think it's best to stick with a single design, rather than being continually indecisive about map shapes, so just go with the circular minimap in the GUI. For compatibility with old square maps I can make it draw them in the minimap with suitable scaling so they fit, with some black around their edges, rotating like circular maps do, so it won't look particularly pretty but there's no rush to get rid of all those maps immediately.

[Pureon]

That sounds like a good compromise to me Ykkrosh.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Philip's notion sounds like the perfect compromise, actually.

So, for the buttons, we apparently have 4 spaces for 4 buttons. Either that or if we get support for overlapping buttons we could prolly fit two in the upper two corners and one in the bottom two corners for the possibility of 6 buttons. Let's just assume 4 buttons for now. The question is then, which 4 buttons are the most important?

Probably:

Minimap Zoom Toggle

Idle Workers (should cycle through these in this order: Female Citizens, Fishing Boats, Traders, Merchant Ships, Citizen Soldiers [infantry], Citizen Soldiers [Cavalry], then back to Females).

Score Toggle

Minimap Flare

Idle Workers could possibly go to the 'Population' icon in the ribbon. Click that and it cycles through the workers. Doing this we could then put 'Friend and Foe' or something else around the minimap in its place.

[k776]

Sounds good.

@Mythos: You want to try some mockups for the end look. Philip will need to do some programming around triangular click boundries, so the sooner we have a good idea of the finished product, the sooner he can start on those, hopefully for the Alpha 5 release.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I'll see what I can do. Looks like I failed to upload the GUI .PSD file to the Art SVN before my hard drive went kaput. I'll just make do.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Is this adequate to begin?

[k776]

Looks good. Now just need one of them to have an icon for idle workers. I'm thinking bottom right one?

[feneur]

My comment is just a big:

[SMST]

Why did you actually introduce circular maps in the first place?

(They look so incredibly wrong. No offense, but I really don't like them.)

[k776]

I think the idea was that they rotate a lot better than square ones, and as you can see from the mockup, they provide more space for GUI elements, like buttons.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Try these out for size. I committed the texture for the idle button (bottom right) to the game.

There is a lot of wasted space in the texture because the button is slightly larger than 64 pixels on a side so I had to go up to a 128x128 texture. So, if I fiddle with the shape of the buttons a bit I may be able to fit it into a 64x64 texture.

[historic_bruno]

Try these out for size. I committed the texture for the idle button (bottom right) to the game.

I like it

[Ykkrosh]

There is a lot of wasted space in the texture because the button is slightly larger than 64 pixels on a side so I had to go up to a 128x128 texture. So, if I fiddle with the shape of the buttons a bit I may be able to fit it into a 64x64 texture.

I'd suggest not spending any effort on that - it's only a few tens of kilobytes of memory so it really doesn't matter.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I'd suggest not spending any effort on that - it's only a few tens of kilobytes of memory so it really doesn't matter.

Would you recommend going ahead and committing the other 3 buttons as well? Should I make "mouseover" versions or will we do the same thing as we do with the other UI buttons (apply that slightly white tint)?

[Ykkrosh]

Why did you actually introduce circular maps in the first place?

I think the main reason was that we want to support camera rotation, and most games seem to rotate the minimap to match the camera orientation, which makes sense since it should reduce players getting confused about which direction they're moving in; and rotating square minimaps is ugly, so circles work better. It seems some people prefer circles and some prefer squares and there hasn't been evidence of a large majority either way, and I don't remember anyone giving a non-preference-based argument for square maps, so we went with circles.

Would you recommend going ahead and committing the other 3 buttons as well?

I don't see why not.

Should I make "mouseover" versions or will we do the same thing as we do with the other UI buttons (apply that slightly white tint)?

I think I'd kind of like to get rid of the GUI's automatic shading thing at some point in the future (since it adds complexity to the GUI renderer, and the renderer will probably need to be rewritten at some point (since it's a bit slow)), so it's probably nicer to use separate mouseover textures, if it's not much trouble to create them.

[Mythos_Ruler]

It's actually rather simple to do in Photoshop.

[fabio]

The circular minimaps are broken here. Example on current build from svn on Linux with Death Canion:

Is it a known issue or it's only for me?