Design A New Lobby Client Interface.

[aegis]

custom widgets in a gui program are a good way to make it look out of place and normally be more bloated

[AF]

custom widgets in a gui program are a good way to make it look out of place and normally be more bloated

You can get tablets for that

[Tribulexrenamed]

Speaking of which, new lobby client skin/layout should match the new site design.

+1

[maackey]

Well, both springlobby and tasclient have some good designs, so I tried to make the best of both worlds.

NOTE: this is just a real quick sketchup and is probably missing some stuff. But I think I have all the important things, and would like some thoughts about it.

Each tab on the right would replace the chat/battlelist/playerlist with the respective window.

Single player would go to a page with a list of Mods you have down the left, (possibly some artistic banners specific to the mod), which you click and they open up the right for either single battle, campaign, etc... I'll make another mockup for that later.

Options would have ALL the options of both spring and the lobby/connect to server/admin/ whatever else, in sub menus if needed.

The Download stuff would go to a page on the spring wiki with instructions on where to go to get stuff. AND/OR it could be an automatic downloader like the Spring Downloader (previously the CA Downloader/Updater) or something like springlobby's torrent system.

If there is anything else I missed, (most likely) it would go under the other tabs and have its own little page.

Its the perfect combination of TASClient and SpringLobby!

[Hobo Joe]

Why would you mix TASClient and SpringLobby? SpringLobby is clearly superior.


I don't think making a new lobby/changing the old ones is really important. What would be more awesome is a proper in-game GUI for things like graphics, sound and whatnot. THAT would be truly awesome.

[AF]

any people have qualms with spring lobbies GUI and prefer tasclient and vice versa, yet few people have really analyzed why some people prefer one and some the other.

[SpliFF]

When designing a lobby please do not repeat TASclient's mistake and assume Spring is a Windows game. That means not using Microsoft technologies like .Net, C#, XNA or anything that requires Win32 API.

The lobby should compile and run without hacks like Wine, on Windows, Mac and Linux. There are plenty of libraries that will do this such as WxWidgets, GLUI, Qt, fltk and others. If you go with Python please try to minimise the amount of Python and library bloat that must be downloaded (consider py2exe).

I would personally like to see something based on Gecko or Webkit so pages, skins and mod information can be provided using modern HTML + CSS3.

[aegis]

I'm pretty sure I can actually package a python lobby extremely small for windows because spring already ships with the python interpreter dll.

[imbaczek]

Sane GUI libs ain't that small though.

[aegis]

my lobby has a highly modular system

if I were to write a gui module using windows' built-in gui libs... ^_^