Improving ToEE's User Interface

Behold, the new dialog interface in all its glory.

 

Moving right along (and hopefully wrapping up soon), a few more missing interfaces in tech display format ...

DIALOG | The long-awaited dialog interface shown above.



DIALOG HISTORY | What you see when you click that little head to review your conversation with Elmo. This has two modes, interestingly: one is stand alone, if you are not currently in dialog, and the other takes over the normal dialog interface if you are. Weird.



OPTIONS | The options menu where you set technical preferences and what not.



This pretty much leaves just the three most dreaded UIs left to do - character creation (with all its goofy submenus), which will be similar to but not exactly like the character inventory UI, because Troika decided not to do them the same way, the party alignment UI, which will involve some PITA transparency to get the text to fit in the buttons, and the hated party pool UI, which I'm afraid will never look quite right. We'll see.

[edit]

Forgot one -

TEXT DIALOG | "Text dialog ..." I don't know what this is or where it appears, if at all. [ed. - actually it is the UI you use to name your Ironman game, possibly among other things.]

 

Okay, rounding things out here, hopefully ...

ALIGNMENT | The first screen you see when you click new game. This was tricky because the larger font didn't fit in the buttons for CN and LN, so we had to widen the boxes, but the buttons themselves are different from the boxes and we can't alter their sizes, so we had to use transparency to fade the edges out. You can't see it here but the effect will be clear in-game. (That's why the boxes are now blue btw - the match the 'normal' button condition/color.)



PC CREATION | I hate the blue boxes on the bottom left but there's little we can do with them, as (unlike the regular character sheet) we can't control the position of the text. So the boxes have to stay relative to the text as it appears. (Bad Troika. :angry Anyway, I tried to make that area a little less hackneyed looking by aligning the edges of all the boxes and whatnot. Not sure yet about the color either - that is standard ToEE box blue but it's kind of meh. Might be best just to let this one be though. At least you never see it again after you create your character.

[ed.] switched to grey.



PARTY POOL | See below for issues.



MORE META_MAGIC | Perhaps appropriate to bring this thing to an end, here is a UI that I don't think I've ever seen before. It apparently has something to do with metamagic, based on its name. I was going to skip it, but if I did, suddenly it would pop up and people would scream that we suck.



~

This is the end, aside from minor tweaking of other graphics.

Lingering issues to follow below.

 

Lingering Issues, part 1

Okay, here's the postmortem rundown on the UI overhaul, big picture style, interface by interface.

ALERT | Seems fine. The box scrolls, so no space issues.



LOOTING | Works fine. May need to be repositioned relative to the main window.



METAMAGIC | Works fine after expanding the lower box vertically. I could do without the enhancement name boxes but I don't know how to get rid of those.



DIALOG MINI | Works great thanks to random1.



DIALOG | Works just fine.

 

Lingering Issues, part 2

FORMATION | Fine, though the permanently empty box on the bottom is dumb.



GENERIC DIALOG | Little messages seem to work fine in little box.



GENERIC TEXT DIALOG | I still don't know where this is used, if anywhere.



GENERIC DIALOG NO CHECKBOX | Works great thanks to AjiTae. There's another instance where it's called and controlled by a different .mes file, which I need to find and adjust.



HELP MENU | Seems to work fine throughout.

 

Lingering Issues, part 3

CRAFT ARMS | Seems to work fine, surprisingly. The item name can conceivably get too long for the box on the left, but players can customize it anyway.



ITEM CREATION | Problematic. The left column is too narrow, and while it will carriage return the line, the next line is just printed over it. Not enough room to consistently display item descriptions without spillover. Sadly there is no .mes control file to be found for plotting element positions. The whole interface could stand to be half again as wide.



LOAD GAME | Works just fine.



OPTIONS | Works fine in all three tabs.



PARTY POOL | Looks good except the character boxes can only accommodate three lines, not four. Would be ideal if each character could be reduced to three lines, with the middle being 'Sex-Race-Class.' No control files to be found that would affect this.

 

Lingering Issues, part 4

PARTY ALIGNMENT | Works after some tinkering. Had to expand the boxes horizontally so the alignment text could all fit in them, then make the edges of the buttons transparent since we can't seem to resize them. Now they sort of appear to fade out instead of ending abruptly.



META BACKDROP | I still don't know where this is used, if anywhere.



RANDOM ENCOUNTER | Works fine. (Frigging stirges.)



ROLL HISTORY | Could possibly stand to be wider but works well enough.



SKILL MASTERY | I still don't know where this is used, if anywhere.

 

Lingering Issues, part 5

TEXT DIALOG | Pretty simple.



TOWNMAP | Works fine except for one niggly little thing: hovering over a map name produces a black field behind the text. Can't figure out how to undo that. Clashes with the stone texture. We could just make that box black but that would look less cool.



TRACK | Works fine except for the misplacement of the target portrait. This predates the UI overhaul though - I think it came with high def/widescreen modes.



CAMP | Works fine.



WORLDMAP | Works fine.



Up next: the character, levelup, and logbook series of interfaces.

 

Lingering Issues, part 6

And now, the extensive character creation UI.

STATS | Looks okay. I still hate the universal stats box, but there's very little that's customizable in this UI via .mes files. The only thing we can touch is the info box, AFAIK.



RACE | Looks good.



GENDER | Fine.



HEIGHT | Fine.



HAIR | Fine, although Troika seemed a little challenged with centering things at times.

 

Lingering Issues, part 7

Character creation continued.

CLASS | Good.



ALIGNMENT | Not good, because LN and CN are too large for their boxes. Sadly we can't change the width of these boxes, because the boxes are used throughout this UI and there is at least one instance where they are pressed together( Class, above), so widening would cause overlap..



DEITY | Looks okay after some transparency trickery.



FEATURES | Okay.



FEATS | Okay.

 

Lingering Issues, part 8

Character creation continued.

SKILLS | Okay.



SPELLS | Okay. I'd rather the drop-in box lines weren't there at all, but I can't get rid of them.



PORTRAIT | Fine.



VOICE/NAME | Fine.



That's all for character creation. Begin the levelup interface ...

CLASS | Looks fine.