Improving ToEE's User Interface

What exactly is the problem you're perceiving, AJT?

 

Lingering Issues, part 9

Levelup continued.

STATS | Looks good.



FEATURES | Looks okay.



SKILLS | Fine.



FEATS | Fine.



SPELLS | Fine but for the noted box issue.

 

Lingering Issues, part 10

And now the main character UI window. Everything should look familiar here by now.

INVENTORY | Okay.



SKILLS | Okay. I could do without the little blue boxes but meh.



FEATS | Fine.



SPELLS | Good enough. I can actually stretch the text out vertically, which looks better and less scrunchy, but ironically I can't control the vertical limits of where its printed so it goes outside the box. Oh well.



IRONMAN | Fine.

 

Lingering Issues, part 11

And lastly, the logbook. This has been altered almost not at all except for the font.

QUESTS | Fine.



REPUTATIONS | Fine.



EGO | Fine enough. Note that the ego tab retains the Arial 10 point font because Priory 12 fits no way no how.



KEYS | Fine.



RUMORS | Fine.



That's it, folks. Next I will discuss possible solutions to the remaining problem UIs.

 

Lingering Issues - the conclusion

Okay, there are four UIs that have significant lingering issues.

Item Creation: the only thing to be done for this is to truncate the item names severely (luckily the list is independent) and keep the item descriptions away. This is unfortunate, as I could have made a sweet-looking UI if we had the control files, but alas it is not so. At least it will be 'fixed' and not appear jarring at a glance.

Party Pool: Nothing to be done for it, unless a guru can turn 4 lines into 3.

Track: No fix that I know of. Can't touch the image placement.

Alignment: The only thing I can think of to fix this is to abbreviate all alignment references for PC creation (LG, CE, etc.). This would also affect the initial party alignment selection screen too though, and the game doesn't bother to define the alignments there.

 

Okay, that's actually not the scrollbar but the background image. I can fix it though.

 

Woo-hoo, the screen below features the fixed scollbar-appearance thingie, fixed position of descriptive text so it isn't over the bounding box's top line, and most significantly, cool-looking ToEE style buttons for the stat names. I was able to make these because I discovered how to get the game to print no text there dynamically, so we can now just make our own background like in the regular character UI (though we still can't put the actual stats exactly where we want them, so we have to build the UI around the existing positions, as it were). Looks much improved, IMO. We'll do the same (with the buttons and drop shadow text for depth) for the main.

Lastly, this is also an example of what the alignment choice UI would look like with abbreviations, obviously.

 

And the main UI with cool buttons. I have to admit that the main reason I never made them for this UI before was simply that I never thought of it, but it finally occurred to me. The advantages are huge in that they transform an image into a quasi 3D object with the appearance of depth (along with drop shadows for the letters), which is far more pleasing to the eye than a flat rectangular block of color. The drop shadows also make the text easier to read. Some abbreviating was necessary.

 

As a final tweak to this, I switched the vertical placement of HP and LEV, since HP requires more space to display the output, and since the little tiny blue box for HP didn't look good. I also equalized the horizontal space allotment for EXP (now called XP) and HP on the top line, with the buttons and output boxes for both being of equal size respectively. The only time this gets wacky is for HP if a character gets three digits worth of HP and all three digits are greater than 1, at which time the output placement goes a little off and ends up outside the box on the right. That would be an unlikely scenario however I think, as you'd need more than 200 HP in the first place. XP fits any 6 digits comfortably.

 

Thanks. I was a little daft not to think of it before, to be honest.