Spring RTS Engine

Which widgets are needlessly enabled in CA?

How should we go about streamlining and optimizing CA's Lua?

atm? Probably none. All chili widgets are disabled in stable except for gesture menu which isnt real chili widget.

MidKnight wrote:Which widgets are needlessly enabled in CA?

How should we go about streamlining and optimizing CA's Lua?

Make disabled at start/delete these widgets:

Are you kidding? Disable at start? Some of those widgets are important or even essential to CA gameplay - the Jumpjet GUI, land/fly, etc.? Seriously? And is anybody out there really complaining about Ally Cursors?

The problem is how the Widget list is organized - it's cluttered up and a player can't crawl through them. It feels messy. CA is reorganizing the widgets into a nice, user-friendly "options" menu.

Pxtl wrote:Are you kidding? Disable at start? Some of those widgets are important or even essential to CA gameplay - the Jumpjet GUI, land/fly, etc.? Seriously? And is anybody out there really complaining about Ally Cursors?

Yes seriously. Those are all the widget (excluding lups) that bother me about CA. I play without them and they are in no way essential.

i agree that the list should be better. for example, when i play on a pc with low tech graphics card, i would like to see easily which widgets are graphics only. then there could be a list of widgets that may be CPU intensive.

The widget list in ALL games and mods should only include those essential to the game/mod. Everything else should be optional for many reasons.

Well there is crude menu - its meant to replace widget lists for all but advanced users.

It will include standard options known from normal games instead of chaotic widget list.

JAZCASH wrote:The widget list in ALL games and mods should only include those essential to the game/mod. Everything else should be optional for many reasons.

Regret wrote:Yes seriously. Those are all the widget (excluding lups) that bother me about CA. I play without them and they are in no way essential.

LuaUI itself is not essential.

For the future, the player shouldnt have to even look at the widget list. The widget list is a programming-side thing. Everything should be accessible through the menu.

The current crudemenu setup is pretty bad though, some parts of the menu have very little under them and others are buried 5 levels deep.

widget spam ownz my fps
the only widgets a real man needs are factory gaurd and metal makers

1v0ry_k1ng wrote:widget spam ownz my fps
the only widgets a real man needs are factory gaurd and metal makers

Metal makers in CA??? get out...

also a real man can macro his metal makers

1v0ry_k1ng wrote:widget spam ownz my fps
the only widgets a real man needs are factory gaurd and metal makers

I use neither of those

Saktoth wrote:buried 5 levels deep.

Which item is buried 5 levels deep?

The less deep it gets, the larger the menu needs to be and people with tiny screens can't see it all.

Thats why there is scrollbar control :)

Treeview will help.

Licho wrote:Thats why there is scrollbar control :)

I'd like to try to avoid scrolling for menus, you'd have to scroll down every time you start over. That doesn't save you any time over deeper menus. One is more clicking and one as more dragging.

It does save a lot of time!
You assume people know in which branch it is.
But they dont. So they have to explore each branch without easy way to go back.

Its very frustrating.
Compare that with scrolling which is intuitive since it exists everywhere.

Menu has 3 submenus, the first two with two options.

Menu > settings has 7 submenus.

Lowest Settings has one option.

Video has 9.

Menu > Settings > Video > Graphic detail (4 levels deep). 13 options. These are only for 3-4 options in 3 settings, and would be better served by radio buttons or a drop-down list. The menu is rife with this kind of stuff, actually.

View is similiarly huge.

Effects, however, is back to only two options.

Menu > Settings > Misc > Mouse Settings is large, 4 levels deep.

Okay, so there are none 5 levels deep.

Game, on the other hand, has 10 options and one submenu.

So what does crudemenu need from chilli?

A. Drop-down menus.

B. A way to display toggle buttons on the button itself (All these buttons marked 'Toggle X' is bad, a light or tick boxto the left of the panel or such would be better).

C. Tabs for the menu. You shouldnt have to scroll through options then be taken to a second page, the categories should be on the side or top, with the options in a main panel. You can use a technique other than tabs but you need some way of organizing them. Ideally, you should never have to go two menus deep, everything should be categorized properly. Hell even springsettings does this. A few exceptions may have to be made for things like the Night widget, but all the important stuff should be on the main page.

That may help.

Modern options often use treeview on left displaying categories and pane on right category content.
Problem is it needs someone to code simple chili treeview which is some 4 hours of work and then integrate it into crude which is *nobodybutcarknowshowhard*

Honestly, a treeview doesn't seem worth that effort - I usually find treeview-based options panels to be annoying, since you never know whether the options you seek will be located on parent or child levels of the tree.