Improving ToEE's User Interface

With Arial 10, four lines is all that can fit in the largest mini box. But you can put enough text for 10 lines in a dialog file if you want; it will just go up over the bounding box. Nothing stops that from happening in-game.

I assume the game would need to call a fourth, larger mini box to fit more text, but there is no such box.

Interestingly the game sizes the dialog history box on the fly. No such luck on the minis.

I don't think so ... this should be a wholesale conversion or it will look shoddy and sort of half-assed. (It might be different if we added other cool-looking fonts, but Priory and Arial go together like oil and water. Stylish D&D vs. cat scan results.) I don't believe in doing this stuff half way, because half way is just that. Besides, that example is just one of no doubt many. We can't shy away from them all.

 

Cool, I'm sending Kelly Hu over now.

I'm curious though - what box are we using now? I don't particularly care that there's only one size ... it may have actually been better that way from the outset, tbh.

The UI stuff is going slowly. The alignments UI turned out fine, but now the party pool is problematic. Got everything sorted there but the height of the long horizontal boxes that PCs are listed in (and their associated highlight boxes). With Priory-12, the text runs out of the boxes. I can re-draw them because they're just part of the background, but the highlight boxes aren't, and there are no .mes files to control positioning of the text (to bump it up, etc.). It's maddening that there are some things you can control as far as this goes and others you can't, and there's no telling which you're going to get with any given UI. :blegh:

Anyway, I will persevere, but it may take a while.

p.s. - is there anywhere in the .dll (should you feel like looking) that controls the number of portrait boxes displayed on the bottom of the party pool UI? We've long been able to have 8 PCs, but never more than five boxes displayed during party creation. Would be kind of cool if we could add three more.

[edit]

Here's an example of a typical trial - the saga of the alignment UI.

First, we see that with Priory-12, text runs out of the boxes in some instances:



So we enlarge the boxes, but we can't enlarge the buttons. Looks a bit goofy:



So using evil transparency , we fade the buttons out on their edges and it looks okay again:

 

Pretty sure that was a .dll hack. IIRC from Agetian it gets done with each instance of altering the configuration, which is why your .dll may oftentimes have a very modern modified date.

I'm talking about start of the game (same thing as above), when you add PCs to your party. Vanilla ToEE allowed five, hence there were 5 'empty' portrait boxes to fill during party creation. Now we can have up to eight, but still only five empty portrait boxes until you get into the game. I can't find any .mes control for that anywhere (not surprisingly).

p.s. - new box works great. :thumbsup:

 

As of right now I'm going to say the far greater likelihood is that there will be no UI updates in v7. I haven't been able to devote much time to it lately, and it's still drastically unfinished and in need of a lot more time consuming work. v7's release date is set in stone, so that's that.

This means that the updated UI will likely be delivered in one of three ways sometime in the future:

1. it may appear in an update to v7 somewhere down the line (the inevitable 7.1.0 or whatever)
2. it may not appear until v8 in what will likely be late 2012
3. it may be delivered as an optional package (unlikely because it would pretty much have to be an add-on module, which would preclude the existence of any other add-on modules since you can only have one installed at a time)

random1 fixed the dialog box size issue so there will still be boxes. Whether the boxes have illustrated/textured backgrounds remains to be seen.

@random, sorry I didn't reply sooner ...

I guess I'm still not really following you; what if there are 8 PCs selected in front end?

What I did specifically is change the background .tga so the frames for the boxes are enlarged and contain the larger text. This is simply cosmetic. What doesn't work is the boxes themselves, which are apparently dynamic. If need be I can post some images to illustrate the issue.

Hm, that's not the case in my set up so either I left something out in that group of files or you've got something modded on your end that is overriding my stuff.

 

Okay, here is the party pool background image. Anything you don't see here gets drawn in separately. When using Priory-12, the text runs over the bottom line of each PC box (the long horizontal boxes toward the left).



Here's the current look (my install is back to Arial-10 getting ready for v7 release). Imagine the alignment line of text going over the bottom bounding line of each box.



Now, if I wanted to, I could eliminate the horizontal boxes entirely, and text being drawn over them would no longer be an issue. Or I could simply enlarge them.



However, the highlight box you see here can't be resized accordingly via .mes files. So things might look okay as long as you don't click anybody, but when you do, the highlight box is drawn to the previous dimensions.



What would be a neat fix for this is if we could simply reduce each instance of character text to three lines.

e.g. change

Code:

Gimble - Not in Party
Male Gnome
Bard
Chaotic Neutral

to

Code:

Gimble - Not in Party
Male Gnome
Chaotic Neutral Bard

or something like that.

Three lines of Priory-12 fits in nicely in those boxes.

 

@r1, what I'm thinking of doing after v7 in 2012 is releasing multiple updates in sequence again (like with the 5.6 - 5.9 series, only not betas) so that we're not all waiting around for a year to get the stuff that remains to be done. The frequent release model with lesser sustainable goals is generally an effective model as opposed to less frequent monolithic releases (like v7). To that end, we could make the new UI the first or second priority.

What I foresee is something like this:

• 7.1 | February 2012 | Primary v7 bug fix (because there will be bugs)
• 7.2 | April 2012 | New UI
• 7.3 | June 2012 | Comprehensive lag fix
• 7.4 | August 2012 | Add in dolio's spells mod (and possibly any other larger efforts that may yet be done, such as if SA were to ever do Reactive Earth Temple)
• 7.5 | October 2012 | Add in a community project I'm pondereing that adds a bunch of minor NPCs and their attendant quests, plots, and other vagaries to flesh out Verbobonc. (This was Marceror's idea.)
• 8.0 | December 2012 | the mythical Co8 v8, where everything is polished, shined, and wrapped together in a bow. (There are still a bunch of other lesser things to be done - custom end slides, etc. If they haven't been tacked on before this, they would appear here.)

Then we all retire.