[Freeciv-Dev] Re: [patch] Message windows (report, science ...)

[Francois Taiani <francois.taiani@xxxxxxxx>]

Vasco Alexandre Da Silva Costa wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 11 Sep 2001, Francois Taiani wrote:
> 
> I guess i can see the point of this. Its a bit like those icons in 
> Civ-CTP with the events.

Exactly, that's the same philosophy.

> About the current way of things: like people have said before you can
> simply minimize or hide the window if you don't like it.

The idea is that you get some visual hint that something new and
interesting happened in the window. By minimizing the message window you
can't know if they were messages at all. I agree that in late stages of
the game, you get messages in each round anyway, but a further
development could be to have the button blink a different color
depending on the criticity of the messages reported. 
 
> Anyway i can see how its a good idea to have an indicator of these kinds
> of events but those buttons could be smaller and/or replaced by icons
> instead.

That's absolutely no problem, from the programming point of view of
course. But I'm not a good icon maker, and while using text, I wanted to
make sure that the words would fit in any local (the French word for
Science is exactly the same as in English, but in German it's about
twice longer for instance). I you have some beautiful icons, I would be
glad to try to introduce them. 

> In alternative why not make things like the "please choose
> the science to research next" request, and any other requests with
> popups a message in the message dialog and integrate the message dialog
> into the main window somehow? That would be a more generic solution IMHO.

I thinks that's definitely a good idea. For instance I thought of
directly displaying the science progress bar on the science button,
along with the technology being searched for (there's already the bulb,
but it's not as "visual" IMO). 

I did not make it for time and complexity reasons. From a more global
perspective though, I think it's not possible to incorporate of the
information provided the different dialogs (think of the diplomacy and
science ones for example) in the main window without cluttering it. 

The message window is different, because it reproduced certains of the
messages displayed in the lower scrolling log. Being able to directly
interact with that log would be great.

Francois