Fortress for Mudlet - GUI

Irruel

I have a partially-finished Mudlet GUI for Fortress. I don't get a huge amount of time to spend on these projects, but I will put the effort in to complete the GUI and put it here to share.

The GUI will be quite simple, but created in such a way that individual customisation/additions is easily done.

The core GUI will consist of:

1. buttons/toggles down the left side for controlling Fortress system stuff. This will be customisable - there is a table with the details of most system toggles/commands that make sense to be here, and another table where you list which ones you want to actually be created as GUI objects (and in which order).

2. A channel cap zone, top right.

3. A map display zone, bottom right

4. An option to compress the chan cap and map display to use one third of the vertical space each, rather than one half, freeing up the third third for personal additions.

5. An option to create top and/or bottom bar spaces (basically, these are already created, but I'll comment out those sections as not everyone likes such complex GUIs.

6. The stylesheets are all done with CSSMAN, which means people can skin the look as they please. By default, it'll all be boring white borders.


Questions:
1. Should I include a display of afflictions on self?
2. How about a display of defenses missing? (This one is particularly difficult to get data for if you use Fortress to manage your defs)
3. Are there any other GUI components that people feel really should be in every GUI, and not left up to individuals to add on their own?

Rashar

I personally like seeing enemy afflictions, and my own. But I'm so used to TW at this point.

What I really want is the Amberlea magic stick figure of broken limb doom.

And something very visible to tell me when people are locked, since that little addition to the prompt is something I miss half the time. Irrelevant, as I don't use that system, but hey. That's my half cent.

Serrice

If anyone ever used old earthshaker, my system's UI is basically that. A list of my own affs and a list of my enemy affs in neatly ordered rows on my left side. Self and enemy limb damage next to it.

If an opponent is locked, all their affs will be colored red. If they're in a kill state, they're all colored blue. Limb damage is highlighted based on how close they are to a break and resto status. Full Tekura combo, yellow, half-Tekura combo, red, broke, blue, restoing, green.

Self-aff display is really useful. You can see at a glance for example, what affs are sticking for an inordinately long time and try to remedy that. (asthma+slickness seems to be sticking for uncomfortably long? Time to manually shrug/fitness!)

Irruel

Enemy affs is a bit of a must-have, but as that depends on the other tartracker I mentioned in the other thread, it'll probably wait for version two. On the other hand, having it in place may help with using the tartracker so maybe it's worth putting in straight away.

I'll throw up a sample screenshot once I get home this evening, and we can vote on it or something.

Rashar

Man, those highlighted affs for locks sound really, really helpful.

Daskalos

Great work, Irru!

Irruel

An update on where I'm up to with this.

Ignore the colour scheme. I set the buttons to sienna just to make sure the default white borders can actually be as easily rewritten as I claimed they would be. All of the modeal buttons work - except for reset. I'll figure that bug out eventually...

There is no chat-cap yet. It will go where boxes 6 and 7 are, which will be combined into a single box 7.

The self-aff view is done. It's got a relatively small miniconsole dedicated to it.
Box2 above it is for enemy affs. At this early stage it will be a simple list, all in white. Later, it can have colours or whatever.

In the screenshot, you'll see that I've done a significant amount of work in gagging the:
[Fortress]: outc bloodroot
type messages and replacing them with (stuff) (in) (brackets)

(wtf is with systems with spamming the user out with info echoes? Citadel/Fortress is one of the worst, but every single system I have ever seen, with the single exception of IMTS, does this to some degree. At least with Fortress they show up as normal text from the mud so they're easy to fix. But if you prefer being spammed by the standard formatting, it's as simple as disabling the triggers. They are completely self-sufficient triggers, no associated scripts)

Good news with the aff tracking system in the other thread - Elyni has offered to plug it into Entropy, which means we'll have people from that system testing it as well. Reading that message this morning gave me loads of motivation to complete both of these projects

Rashar

That looks neat.

Irruel

Edit: I attached the wrong screenshot, will have to post again with correct one as it will not let me change it.

Current state of the UI

Things to do before sharing:
Make the single push button type (reset, top left) work.
Add map zoom
Decide whether the scrollbar should remain where it is or be far right of screen (opinions?)
Go through and do a last minute code-tidy

Things to do after sharing, for version 2:
Change aff view to be horizontal rather than vertical list
Change taff view to be horizonal
Move both to bottom pane, just above command line.
Add whohere list, in horizontal view, with the affs/taff lists
Widen the chancap to take up the whole space under the map rather than being so narrow

Irruel

Here is the correct screenshot

Irruel

Just to see what the scrollbar looks on far right.
Little rough as I just did this the quick-and-dirty way to see what it looks like.


The main reason for considering it is that if we use horizontal lists for things, then we can potentially use the full screen width for it rather than just the with of the main output.

Just so it is clear, rather than:
Affs:
paresis
stupidity
asthma

I want it all in a single line:
paresis - stupidity - asthma

I think this is both better use of screen realestate, and also puts the information right where people (meaning I, and maybe others?) stare anyway - at the scrolling text.

Irruel

So I had time to spare today. Made some changes as the narrow chat window was frustrating me and I really wanted to see if the horizontal lists would work well or not.

Check it out, let me know what you think.

Disclaimers:
1. I've borked up the border on the chat window. I need to read up a bit more on CSS but once I do there will be a single border around it. At the moment all I've managed to do is give the channel tabs an unwanted background

2. The colours on the horizontal lists (the info bar) are roughly chosen. I'd never leave them as they are. Also, they're easily customisable, and the bar is dynamically created from a list:
infobar.list = { "taffs", "maffs", "enemies", "allies", "others",}
so there's no need to have them all there if you don't like them all. Also, you can change their order by changing that same list.

3. The formatting of the horizontal lists isn't quite right. It will have equal spacing either side of the hyphens and potentially different colours for different affs...

But right now I'm all GUI-ed out (gooied out? Doesn't sound 'right' somehow >.>) so that's it.

I'm confident the GUI will be shareable sometime this weekend.

Daskalos

This is looking great, Irru.

Rashar

I really, really like the way those affs are laid out.