Great to see work being done on the GUI. Some comments below.
1. Buttons outside of the window frame ensure that it will be impossible to dock windows properly - or that user will find those buttons hidden by the edge of screen when moving windows to natural positions at the edge. Missing the buttons is much more likely to close the window and/or activate something else. In short, I really don't like this decision. Plus lots of buttons sticking in all directions give the window an extremely haphazard look.
2. Icons on top of the train minimap have a lot of unused space - they could be easily expanded to have some text, which would make adapting to/learning the new GUI much easier for all involved. Minimap can be made slightly smaller to provide extra space - it will still be large enough for most purposes.
3. Minimap itself is great!
4. People already commented on transparent background - that will be extremely distracting (to the point of window being unusable when there's lots of movement underneath).
Let's go through a short use case. You click add station and the list of stations appears. You can add a station by clicking on the station in the list or by clicking it in the small map. The map can be zoomed and moved around so you can easily find your station.
5. Is it possible to filter the list by typing a part of station name
without having to click the "search" button first? That would improve usability greatly (and not only here, but in many other places as well). May clash with hotkeys though.
Also, as you hover over stations in the list, the map will show their location.
6. Hopefully for as long as the station is within the minimap view, and only showing the
direction to the station if it's outside - otherwise scrolling through the list will result in the minimap view jumping all over the world like a rabid rabbit.
7. I really, really don't like current schedule view - it's bulky and wastes too much space. Have you tried using the entire area width? Something like this:
Code: Select all
1. Coal Unloading #12 {visit} {x}
Leave: IF inventory empty {x}
OR 30 seconds passed {x}
[add departure condition]
2. Central Bay {visit} {x}
Leave: IF 10 seconds passed {x}
[add departure condition]
This makes full use of viewport width, allowing for longer station names, and can be made mostly text, saving a lot of space compared to current button blocks. Separation of adjacent records can be made by different background tints.
8. When hovering over a station in a map view, it would be really nice if all other identically-named stations were highlighted as well. And in the schedule list, if there are multiple stations with the same name, this should be indicated (like "Coal Unload (3 stations)" or whatever).
9. Now this looks really cool. I assume there are two vertical panes (for categories and items within the category), with separate scrolling? Also, ability to filter by part of item name would be really useful here as well.
Finally a schedule can look something like this. The path of the train will be shown. We will try to paint the path the train is taking at the moment, it will change as the train takes different paths.
10. Now this is simply fantastic!
The fuel can be accessed from the separate tab and the color of the locomotive can be changed using the color picker.
11. Regarding fuel tab, I see you added a text with percentile next to the "regress bar" (or a progress bar that shows regress, whatever
). This may be nice, but now it looks like an indicator of train's entire fuel load. I suspect you're going to get some new bug reports that "I have fully loaded my train with fuel, but the indicator shows it's only 24% loaded, plz fix". Perhaps change the indicator to absolute number of MJ's or something? Not sure.
12. Color picker would really benefit from a palette of predefined colors - I suspect it would be useful in multiplayer, ensuring that once players decide to paint all iron trains teal, it will be the same teal everywhere, and not each individual player's idea of it.
Plus you could save time by selecting a color with a single click instead of careful slider dragging and typing specific RGB numbers.
13. Also, is there a need for two separate buttons for colorpicker? One should be enough - you click on a button with color, and you change color. And there's no need to change the pipette button to "accept" - clicking anywhere else in the window should just close the colorpicker, and whatever color was chosen in the process would remain.
Turn station names on or off.
14. Please remove extra graphics from the button, it makes it actually harder to understand. A simple "T" would be enough IMHO.
Change the angle of the station names.
15. Looks OK. I assume the game will keep two different settings for train station name angles? One for global map, and another for trains minimap? Or is it the same setting? Some confusion is possible here I guess, no matter what you choose.
Switch to map view.
Switch to camera view.
16. I'd suggest to make it a single switchable button, preferably overlaid on the map, Google Maps style.
Center view on the train.
17. I would really, really recommend to see this button separate (so it wouldn't be confused with just another map view mode) and in the top right corner of the
left pane. And much larger, it's too useful to be that small.
The small 'info' button you see on the right side will be a help button we will use throughout the game to help explain how different GUI work and when their elements mean. We will write more about this in some of the next parts of the FFF GUI update series.
18. Will we be able to turn these buttons off? Pretty please, with a cherry on top?
We also want to add a neat tool for advanced players. Control-clicking on any point on the locomotive's map (or any station) will add a 'Temporary stop' to it's schedule. The train will try to go as close as it can to that point, wait a few seconds and finally automatically remove the 'Temporary stop' from it's schedule. This is very useful for quick transportation. It also allows you to quickly 'hijack' an existing train and use it to get somewhere, since the 'Temporary stop' will be deleted and the train's normal schedule will be resumed.
19. Fantastic!
Another quality of life improvement will be a game option to automatically add some fuel from the player inventory when building vehicles (car, tank or locomotive), making rail transportation as simple as placing a locomotive on a rail, entering it and control-clicking where you want to go.
20. Awesome. Is it possible to also auto-refuel it en-route if the vehicle runs out of fuel while the player is riding it? That would be awesome squared.
I don't want to have to ctrl+whatever to copy the schedules. And it gets worse if I want to add a new station to it (copy/paste to every train). I think that a separate pane ("train groups"), would be in order. It would have the same station picker system. Then in the train menu, there would be a dropdown that has has 1+n options including: "Custom" (allowing the train to have a schedule), "Iron loop" (referring to the train group titled "Iron loop"), etc. When a group is selected, the group schedule would replace the custom one and would be greyed out.
