Freiegeister
Morkin Member
'Blasphemy is a victimless crime' - Dawkins
Posts: 1,126
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Post by Freiegeister on Jun 14, 2004 0:52:36 GMT
My first impression of the interface (at least the main view screenshot) is fairly good. It certainly looks more polished than the current one. Agreed! With all that information there, the [Here] popup is almost unnecessary, as all the information is in front of you.
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Post by sparrowhawk on Jun 14, 2004 8:42:29 GMT
Well, good heavens! You live and learn as they say. There was me labouring away under a misconception for the last few years. Thanks for opening my eyes on that one David ![:)](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/smiley/smiley.png) I have not tried the scrollable div as yet. Looking forward to that too though! I have taken all of your comments about the list, buttons and locations of elements on board and will have a play around to see if I can come up with a better look/layout. Thanks
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Post by sparrowhawk on Jun 14, 2004 10:51:46 GMT
Here's a revised layout: www.westhaven.uklinux.net/vmidnight/screenshots/beta02-screenshot-4.pngI have not moved anything around as yet, but I've been playing around with different colours in the drop down and the also here list. As you can see from the drop down list of lords, those at dawn are listed first, then lords with some time left (now tell syou how much), then those at night. The colours can be changed of course! In the Also here list, I've gone for more muted shades. Old Rothrorn has been flown in especially just to show up as a neutral lord in the list. I'll try the div tag asap.
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Natmus
Morkin Admin
Fight the power!
Posts: 4,518
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Post by Natmus on Jun 14, 2004 12:46:36 GMT
It all looks very nicely confusing, Jean-Yves. I would suggest you find some uniform principle behind the colours so that a light or dark shade mean the same in different windows, and so on, you know the drill.
I have just one question, Jean-Yves. What is Gold good for in this game? I have a few lords currently running around with some of the stuff, and I was wondering what good it was for them ;D
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Post by sparrowhawk on Jun 14, 2004 13:33:39 GMT
I know, but the colours are changeable and are there at present to show the groupings. It's easy enough to change them to a better scheme. Gold won't make it to 0.2 unfortunately (I had hoped that it would, but feature x got in the way (you'll see ...) I may still manage to get it in to allow buying more stores, but that's unlikely at this stage. It will probably pop up in 1.x ![;)](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/smiley/wink.png)
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Freiegeister
Morkin Member
'Blasphemy is a victimless crime' - Dawkins
Posts: 1,126
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Post by Freiegeister on Jun 14, 2004 19:59:10 GMT
Here's a revised layout: www.westhaven.uklinux.net/vmidnight/screenshots/beta02-screenshot-4.pngI have not moved anything around as yet, but I've been playing around with different colours in the drop down and the also here list. As you can see from the drop down list of lords, those at dawn are listed first, then lords with some time left (now tell syou how much), then those at night. The colours can be changed of course! In the Also here list, I've gone for more muted shades. Old Rothrorn has been flown in especially just to show up as a neutral lord in the list. I like the muted tones, in the various grey/blues. That looks great! Another combination could be to make your allies white, enemies a colour (multiple colours for multiple enemies?) and the non-aligned with some sort of greyed out effect. Or alternatively enemies with a greyed out effect to show they're not yours and the non-aligned highlighted if you can recruit them. Same idea could be used in the other dropdowns as Natmus suggested. If you used a div, you could go real fancy and use icons for various things to indicate riders, warriors, health (and rollover title for the help text) and even add the characters shield or colours as a flag or to show race.
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merlin
Public Area Guest
Posts: 19
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Post by merlin on Jun 14, 2004 20:06:47 GMT
Please don't use too many colours from representing anything. The more colours you use the more likely us poor colourblind people will end up with a problem.
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Post by sparrowhawk on Jul 16, 2004 11:00:15 GMT
Due to lack of time for development at the moment, I'm thinking of releasing beta 0.2a on Tuesday without some of the features that I wanted to include. The missing bits are: - Games cannot end in alliance victory - you will need to break the alliance after defeating enemies and fight it out against your old allies. (Actually I'm rather tempted to keep it this way - there can be only one!)
- Doomdark's revenge scanario will not be complete in time (I have not worked out the arrays for positioning and sizes as yet, although if all the terrain types are subsitituted for LoM ones it would probebly works). Chris, have you sent me the domain info for DDR? I can't seem to find it (hint, hint
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- Text battle reports are not working properly yet, so 0.2 still has tabular reports. But this might prove useful for debugging as it's more clinical.
- Dragons can't eat horses or wolves yet!
- Disease is not fully implemented (all database changes are in place and the SQL written but not tested
- A new Upload shield gfx page won't be complete (you can pick your shield but not actually upload it as yet) about 80% complete
- Gold still has no effect
- No random start position option (may get that done in time though)
- No special combat bonuses for race x terrain type combos
- As stated elsewhere, the battle code needs an overhaul, but it works pretty much as before (except for alliances) so it will do for the immediate future
- The new paging on the games list and members list pages doesn't work correctly past page 1
- IE users won't get visual effect when mouse cursor moves over buttons - I probably will keep it this way, as I'd rather have it all driven from a CSS rather than hard-coding IE workarounds (sorry Chris
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However, none of the above are showstoppers I think, so if I release 0.2 and get feedback, at least you get the opportunity to get your teeth into the new features and find the inevitable bugs and useability issues that are bound to exist. I can then trickle feed the missing features in minor upgrades without affacting existing games.
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Post by sparrowhawk on Jul 16, 2004 12:17:46 GMT
Just to be on the safe side (given my track record), I'm going to say Wednesday. I'm just trying to implement a change that could result in a noticeable speed gain. Might work, might not, but I want the extra time to find out either way!
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merlin
Public Area Guest
Posts: 19
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Post by merlin on Jul 16, 2004 12:54:34 GMT
What info did you want? I Sent text file of the location descriptions, do you need something else... and in what format? Anything you need I can provide.
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Post by sparrowhawk on Jul 16, 2004 13:16:56 GMT
I can probably work it out - am I correct that ALL locations in DDR are in the format:
The terrain of domain ?
eg the Forest of Thisuk?
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Post by celebaglar on Jul 16, 2004 14:20:50 GMT
I can probably work it out - am I correct that ALL locations in DDR are in the format: The terrain of domain ? eg the Forest of Thisuk? Except for the Icy Wastes. ![;)](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/smiley/wink.png)
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merlin
Public Area Guest
Posts: 19
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Post by merlin on Jul 16, 2004 14:30:30 GMT
I can probably work it out - am I correct that ALL locations in DDR are in the format: The terrain of domain ? eg the Forest of Thisuk? Correct.
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Post by sparrowhawk on Jul 16, 2004 14:52:21 GMT
thanks, I can run some queries to generate the domains then ![:)](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/smiley/smiley.png)
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Post by sparrowhawk on Jul 19, 2004 8:36:58 GMT
-warning: geek stuff follows ![;)](//storage.proboards.com/forum/images/smiley/wink.png) Some good news - I managed to rationalise 8 (maybe 9-10 I can't quite remember) queries into just 3. This should hopefully make for a more responsive game. This stems from the nature of MU development - I wrote sperate scripts for each activity to avoid impacting working features, eg get lord and animal info ahead, get lord and animal info nearby, get lord and animal info here (things were complicated slightly by the fact that each script also did certain other things that were unique in each case). Putting all this at the start of the processing and simply keeping track of all results in arrays and variables has removed this duplication. I'd tried to simplify the process before but had approached it from a poor angle and had in fact overcomplicated things so had ditched the idea. Then at the end of last week I just decided to tinker with it again and it all came together without any major glitches. There is one further contender script for being rolled into the 2 queries above, I'll look at it asap (get armies within viewable distance).
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