Informing Players and the Editor Helper

[hhyyrylainen]

@Buckly

Do these error types seem good enough? Or would we need more specific variants?

I think having too many variants is not the best design. Perhaps at most urgent, warning, and informative would be the categories (informative could be stuff like, can’t engulf, can’t really move {if the player is a plant, otherwise this would be a more serious warning}). That’s because I kind of foresee someone wanting to dump quite many purely informative stats in there.

@Buckly

By providing a pop-up window containing an explanation on what exactly is wrong when interacted with, we could provide optional further assistance to those who need it.

I think a tooltip would be a more appropriate GUI element to use here.

@Kasterisk

Not only it is more intuitive but it also works like our other UI so it’s not that difficult to program. And thus, here’s a mockup of my idea:

I really like this idea of using tabs. Though, I don’t exactly like that the auto-evo explanation is hidden (though maybe we could put the long-wanted up/down arrow regarding total energy gain straight into the organism statistics so that players would pay more attention to that than the raw numbers).

@Kasterisk

JSON to define the notifications, a notification class to define when a notification should be displayed from a context

I guess the JSON layer would be fine to have here to be able to configure which “preflight checks” are enabled for each editor type.

@Kasterisk

I think with this configuration, the UI clutter will be much more minimized

I see just one slight problem for controller navigation: how to select the tabs as it would have to either share buttons with the report, patch map etc. tabs or some other way to switch those tabs.

@Buckly

So the player could click on a particular panel to “bring it into focus” and expand it’s contents to see full detailed information, and the others would be collapsed but still show the most vital info, albeit to a minmialized degree. An example would be the statistics panel collapsing to a point where you only see the balance bar, health value, size, and speed. This would ensure that the player doesn’t have to constantly flip between pages and tabs to find all the info they need which would be frustrating.

I think this would be even harder for controller navigation…

My idea regarding how to solve this is to just put the most important stats directly in the organism statistics panel so it would have the at a glance situation report in it, including the most important line of information from the other tabs.