[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#7127) [FS] Screen design

["Per I. Mathisen" <per@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=7127 >

On Tue, 6 Jan 2004, Raimar Falke wrote:
> > >>>>   * chat output area ALTERNATIVE: fading output at top-left
> > >>>> corner like in Diablo2
> > >>
> > >> Diablo 2 IIRC relied on the top left corner of the screen being
> > >> pretty dark or black. I don't think we can guarantee suitable
> > >> conditions over the mapview.

I don't think this is correct. IIRC dark corners was only guaranteed in
Diablo 1. If you use solid black shadows, bright coloured text should be
readable on any background.

> > Looking at that GalCiv shot you used, the city name/production text is
> > contained in a transparent greyish black box.This looks very nice
> > and would solve the problem of messages being hard to read over the
> > map view.
>
> You mean like http://freeciv.org/~rfalke/fs3_pics/mapview2.png (photo
> manipulation). This is ok for chat message but not for others since
> you can't click. Or at least people don't expect that you can click
> it.

I don't it looks good with this transparent box, but the can-click issue
can be resolved by having the text highlight on mouse-over. This is a very
good and intuitive hint that the text is clickable, and easily discovered
by "accident". (Our chat lines are clickable in different ways, which
we could solve by using different kinds of mouse clicks - left, right,
middle - but that is not intuitive again.)

> It is planned to use freetype (http://www.freetype.org/) to render
> text. The true-type font to use will be included as part of the theme.
>
> It may happend that for very slow computers (like an original A500)
> freetype is too slow. In this case the platform code could use native
> fonts.

Freeciv is played/playable on original A500?

> Some of you may remember Settlers I. If there was an important issue
> an icon fall down on the right side and sat there till you clicked
> it. I want this feature for at least diplomacy meetings. I think it
> can be used for other popuping up messages as well. This may look like
> http://freeciv.org/~rfalke/fs3_pics/mapview3.png.

You are going in a very exciting direction here. I love these screenshots
:-)

Only thing I don't like is the gui-fs scrollbar. Perhaps clone Windows
XP's?

  - Per