What the lobby should look like

hunterw · Post by **hunterw** » 13 Aug 2007, 19:54

they are also the only way to commshare

but yea add country flags

something tells me all this is for naught

TradeMark · Post by **TradeMark** » 13 Aug 2007, 20:00

What if there are 12 teams or 16? Like when i play Speed Ball V2, there is always 12 different teams.

imbaczek · Post by **imbaczek** » 13 Aug 2007, 20:15

several solutions:
- arrange the windows in a (vertically scrollable and squished) grid
- revert back to the old interface
- add a horizontal scrollbar
my preferences would be in order from top to bottom.

BoredJoe · Post by **BoredJoe** » 13 Aug 2007, 20:19

I've changed the colours on the ally team bits to some icons i just made up.

TradeMark wrote:What if there are 12 teams or 16? Like when i play Speed Ball V2, there is always 12 different teams.

Then you'd change the mode to "FFA". In FFA mode there would just be 1 list of people, each with a different ID, each ID gets a different team.

TradeMark · Post by **TradeMark** » 13 Aug 2007, 20:21

BoredJoe wrote:
TradeMark wrote:What if there are 12 teams or 16? Like when i play Speed Ball V2, there is always 12 different teams.
Then you'd change the mode to "FFA". In FFA mode there would just be 1 list of people, each with a different ID, each ID gets a different team.

And what if i suddenly want two people in same team to share coms or etc?

But yeah, that kind system is still better than normal...

BoredJoe · Post by **BoredJoe** » 13 Aug 2007, 20:22

TradeMark wrote:
BoredJoe wrote:
TradeMark wrote:What if there are 12 teams or 16? Like when i play Speed Ball V2, there is always 12 different teams.
Then you'd change the mode to "FFA". In FFA mode there would just be 1 list of people, each with a different ID, each ID gets a different team.
And what if i suddenly want two people in same team to share coms or etc?

they both pick the same ID

TradeMark · Post by **TradeMark** » 13 Aug 2007, 20:23

BoredJoe wrote:
TradeMark wrote:
BoredJoe wrote: Then you'd change the mode to "FFA". In FFA mode there would just be 1 list of people, each with a different ID, each ID gets a different team.
And what if i suddenly want two people in same team to share coms or etc?
they both pick the same ID

What about adding two in same team without comshare, and others would be just alone with their teams... 16 different teams, team 1 has 2 dudes, other teams 1 dudes.

BoredJoe · Post by **BoredJoe** » 13 Aug 2007, 20:27

TradeMark wrote:
BoredJoe wrote:
TradeMark wrote: And what if i suddenly want two people in same team to share coms or etc?
they both pick the same ID
What about adding two in same team without comshare, and others would be just alone with their teams... 16 different teams, team 1 has 2 dudes, other teams 1 dudes.

uhhh... ctrl+ select the two people that want two different coms in the same team, right click and select either "share team" or "share comm" depending on your wishes, lol.

tbh, i dont really know what to do in that situation, maybe a button on the side to share comms/teams, and some way to know the two players are on the same team, but its such an obscure situation really, i dont think i've ever seen it happen.

TradeMark · Post by **TradeMark** » 13 Aug 2007, 21:33

BoredJoe wrote:but its such an obscure situation really, i dont think i've ever seen it happen.

Good programmers never think: "i think it would not probably maybe perhaps never ever happen, so i wont code it".

Neddie · Post by **Neddie** » 13 Aug 2007, 21:51

There are few good programmers then. I find the newest generation of programmers quite detached from the customer, preferring to implement their own features rather than cater to what the user needs...

That is one thing which is so much better about Spring in general.

Erom · Post by **Erom** » 13 Aug 2007, 22:51

neddiedrow wrote:There are few good programmers then.

This is the truth in many things.

SwiftSpear · Post by **SwiftSpear** » 13 Aug 2007, 23:11

neddiedrow wrote:There are few good programmers then. I find the newest generation of programmers quite detached from the customer, preferring to implement their own features rather than cater to what the user needs...

That is one thing which is so much better about Spring in general.

That's because the vast majority of the time the coder a team will bring on to work a project will have virtually no knowledge about the system needs from the customer/staff points of view. The best coders there are today are the ones who are really damn good at educating them selfs on how people interface with a system before they ever write a single line of code.

BoredJoe · Post by **BoredJoe** » 13 Aug 2007, 23:41

TradeMark wrote:
BoredJoe wrote:but its such an obscure situation really, i dont think i've ever seen it happen.
Good programmers never think: "i think it would not probably maybe perhaps never ever happen, so i wont code it".

Well you could do it if you made a team game with enough teams, The reason I dont like it is because it would stop it from being a true FFA, it would make the interface more confusing and would be adding functionality that would be used in about 1 game in 1000.

An interface should be clean, intuitive and ideally require little to none training for the user. I can't count the times i've had to tell a noob he's actually comm sharing, and not on the same team.

manored · Post by **manored** » 14 Aug 2007, 18:11

Thats true, But I think that all imaginable combinations of comsharing and being in the same team should be possible... maybe add some button that opens up a hiden part of the interface that is used to set up games like that? :)

KDR_11k · Post by **KDR_11k** » 14 Aug 2007, 23:14

A mod-defined mod options area would be nice so e.g. comshooter could implement a respawn rule and you can define the frag limit there or 1944 could declare a team victorious that holds enough control points for a given amount of time if you set the game mode to capture and hold.

SwiftSpear · Post by **SwiftSpear** » 15 Aug 2007, 01:18

KDR_11k wrote:A mod-defined mod options area would be nice so e.g. comshooter could implement a respawn rule and you can define the frag limit there or 1944 could declare a team victorious that holds enough control points for a given amount of time if you set the game mode to capture and hold.

Aye, but I think spring server needs modifications for that as well...

altie · Post by **altie** » 18 Aug 2007, 22:15

Has anyone worked on implementing this yet? I'm about to take a crack at it.

AF · Post by AF » 18 Aug 2007, 23:51

Ok I shall step in here.

Under TASServer this cannot be fully recreated.

Ontop of that it uses th current battle layout as a basis despite its flawed design which means its inheritting problems and more problems arise that are unforeseen because of this.

For example thats a rather small space for chat is it not? The existing chat pane is already not tall enough especially in autohost games.

There're a lot of options on show all at once isnt it a bit too busy? That player list isnt very wide isnt there going to be truncation on most usernames?

And that Game type bit? Is that a set of controls or an info panel? Wont that list of team boxes get very annoying when your in a 10way ffa? They dont look very wide either, not very accomodating to usernames longer than that bored joe one. All those horrizontal scrollbars, eek.

And those 4 checkboxes look cramped, what if extra checkboxes need to be added where will they go? Or another game end condition?

And ontop of that we already have lots of GUI glitches in tasclient and its forks as it is, all of this is going to make them that much more obvious, thigns that most GUI toolkits provide as standard these days, things even Windows itself forces upon windows that atsclient is breaking.

Like drawing overlapping controls on the window border:

And why is it making the border twice as thick? This is supposed tbe the "Windows" option in the skin tab yet it just looks like the skins with a blueish colour border. No skin is just a bad. Its trying to draw off the window too!

What! No minimum size? So you can resize ti down till its just the minimum size windows enforces thats just the close/maximize buttons and a program icon? No, it even breaks that convention too! You can maximize it so it goes into negative sizes! And then it just draws a garbld line where the border should have been

Controls positioned so theyre overlapping window borders?

Should we not fix the glaring errors before we start adding new features?

AF · Post by AF » 18 Aug 2007, 23:59

Resizing the battle dividers beyond the window borders anyone?

Oh noes the battle window too!

Null garbage space where nothings being drawn? Why do I have 2 textbox controls?

edit: oh wow look in the background of that last one you can see a second channel textbox drawn on the other side of the battle divider!

REVENGE · Post by **REVENGE** » 19 Aug 2007, 00:24

AF wrote:Resizing the battle dividers beyond the window borders anyone?

Oh noes the battle window too!

Null garbage space where nothings being drawn? Why do I have 2 textbox controls?

edit: oh wow look in the background of that last one you can see a second channel textbox drawn on the other side of the battle divider!

Isn't this because the delphi coded interface is from old delphi and not designed for vista?

Spring RTS Engine

What the lobby should look like