widelands-dev team mailing list archive

[Holger Rapp <HolgerRapp@xxxxxxx>]

On 16.07.2013, at 08:03, Teppo Maenpaa <teppo.maenpaa@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 08:34:35PM +0200, Holger Rapp wrote:
> 
>> I like the suggestion - however I am a bit concerned how this can be explained to the user. So if you implement this, you will also need to implement a mouse over text of some sort or a status image inside the constructionsite window or something. The color alone is not easy to understand.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Are you sure?
> People generally associate red with "something wrong", green with "going strong" and yellow with in-between. The details would, of course, not be obvious at day zero.
Yes - the current implementation is redundant information, as you mentioned. So it is just eye candy essentially. What you are proposing uses color as the only way to convey information. This is bad for a number of reasons, the first that it is abstract (in the sense that a code must be understood) and the most important is that color impaired people do not get this information at all - a significant portion of the population is color blind or impaired, up to 10% of the male population has red-green deficiencies. So this is a no go.

> 
> In my opinion, there are many more severe documentatation issues with the game. For example, it is not easy for the novice guy to figure out, which wares a brewery produces (like that it is not producing beer..).
I agree here, though the ware statistics and the online help on the homepage are a big help here. Also, we started efforts to improve the situation (the next text renderer was in preparation of a rich text help system in the game - unfortunately the text renderer was more work than expected).

> While I agree that tooltip texts would be nice, I am unsure how to do it: More experienced players could be irritated by trivialities like the tooltip popping all the time. If you think that mouse over test *must* be present too, then this would surely be a future release thing.
I am also not sure - UI is not easy to get right. I can only say that only using colors is the easy way out and definitively a wrong approach.

Cheer,
Holger

> 
> Regards,
> 
> 
> 	Teppo
> 
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