[Freeciv-Dev] gui improvements ?

[Philippe Fremy <pfremy@xxxxxxxx>]

        Hello,

I hadn't played freeciv for two years, so I checked it recently, just
before the 1.9.0 and discovered happily that many things have changed. I'll
just give you some feedback and some ideas that touched me while playing.

Well, the graphism is now really good. Although I prefer engels tiles,
trident is a bit too dark for me, especially when playing after midnight
(but it's only a matter of taste).

Porting the client to gtk is really a GREAT thing, I hope it will help gui
improvements. Now the look is rather professional and modern. And the
possiblity to put aside the message log, the player info and the minimap
is really cool. A lot of nations, a hard ai (for beginners), a lot of thing
are very pleasant.

And now the 'could still improve'

- colors: I don't know if with gnome you have a lot of theme which makes
the game look fine, but here, I find it a bit too grey. The Xaw widgets had
more colors, had they ?

- the help window: this thing has really improved on some aspects. I
remember a tiny window displaying 2 lines of help. And now there is a full
window, displaying clearly the strength, weaknesses, requirements, what it
allows, ... for everything. Just, concerning techs, the really good thing is
that you can jump to what the tech allows. The bad thing is that
you can't jump to the things the tech requires. What about a jump with
middle button or a thing like that (popup ?) ? 

The colors for unkown or learning techs don't ease readability. The red is
quite strong, making it difficult for the eyes to accomodate, especially
when red lines are mixed with lighter colors (eg yellow). The previous look
in the Xaw widget was better for this part.

A few ideas about it: putting one light bulb by step needed could decorate
a bit. Dark bulbs when the tech is far away, lighted bulb when it is
already known, lighting bulbs when searching. IMHO, stronger indentation
could help too. I have difficulties to distinguish which tech is in
which tree (but I'm shortsighted).

Another thing, when browsing the help, imagin you're not sure if you're
going to build a wonder or an improvement. To go from the improvement
section to the wonder sestion, you have either to scroll the entire help,
or to find the map window (which often lies under tons windows) to go to
the given section. Putting the 'help' menu in the main window AND in the
help window could greatly help.
And putting the help titles (improvements, units, ...) in boldface while
leaving the others like that would also help to distinguish betwen titles
and items. I'd also like more indentation for items, and why not different
colors for different sections, so that while scrolling, you easily know
you're entering another section. For the moment, I have to concentrate to
notice in which section I am (ie, notice a title or the section limit).
And what about a 'listview', I mean a thing which shows its content when
you click on it (like you now have in the tech tree) ?

- selecting the item to build: I encounter the same problem as with the
help window. When you can build a lot of thing, the list is quite long and
you waste time looking in the list for the item you want to build.
An improvement could be 'section titles in the list' (Improvement, Wonders,
Units), colors per section and the best IMHO: having three buttons that
shows three different lists, one for the units, one for the Improvements,
one for the wonders.

- and the classical: stacking what you want to build would be really really
great.


        I hope I haven't upset anyone especially the developpers who
spent time on this. I really find the current thing cool. The gui is just
now too civ-1 related and has the same weaknesses. I don't know gtk and have
other project right now, so I can't do this by myself, but I might do
something for freeciv.

        regards,        


        Philippe