widelands-dev team mailing list archive

[Holger Rapp <HolgerRapp@xxxxxxx>]

On 18.07.2013, at 15:31, Teppo Maenpaa <teppo.maenpaa@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 07:44:40AM +0200, Holger Rapp wrote:
> 
>> No, I do not think you are correct here. There is so much difference in the way people can or cannot perceive color. Brightness doesn't seem to be easily order-able for a human and the differences are harder to perceive.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> You are right in what you say, except that I still think I am right. If the brightness, or "lightness" in HSL terms, is *sufficiently* different, all will see a difference.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV

I see. Still I feel that overloading the colors with new information is not a very good approach. I am also not convinced that those colors stick around - I find them quite irritating while playing actually. I expect bug reports about them in the future :).

>> I used to think the same till I regularly gave slides for my presentations to a red-green deficient colleague of mine. And it was really hard to predict what he could or could not distinguish.
> 
> I know. Also, not all color impaired are red-green type.
> 
>> We do not do flame wars here - people voice their opinion and then we make a decision and move forward. Flame wars haven't been a big problem for Widelands in a long time :).
> 
> There are new people joining WL team now and them, and most people have never met in person I would guess. Flame wars happen very easily in those conditions.
I have never met most of the people that work on Widelands :). We are very reasonable people here and we always find solutions.

> 
>> I wanted to add some more constructive discussion to the suggestion. For me this idea gives us the chance to consolidate the information we currently have in the game. For example for workers we show "vacant" and "missing" next to them to is the building window - this suggestion can allow us to do the same for wares.
> 
> I would not write these minor notes in full text: as the various on-screen text already overlap with each other now and then, at least in some localizations. More text makes the problem worse. A possible work-around would be to add special characters to the percent-string. Here the challenge would be to find an easy-to-get language independent symbol. Like putting the percentage to parentheses when wares are missing, and appending an exclamation mark when all needed wares are present. This would fix the color-impair issue for sure, and still adding colors could make it more intuitive for the majority.
> 
>> Instead, I suggest adding "status panes" to the building statistics - small pictures (maybe 10x10 pixel) that show the status of the building. Wares missing, Workers missing, Building stopped and so on could all be such panes and they are displayed hovering over the building or in the tooltip.
> [many details clipped]
> 
> Really good long-term goal. I think that this is the way to go, in terms of future year releases.
Actually this is very easy right now: the strings can contain <img> rich texts. See for example test/richtext/tests/sub_fixedwidth_floatleftimg. Bigger versions of the icons could be displayed inside the window - that would make them easier to recognise though 10x10 is tiny.

> Regarding the coming release, I still see the colors worth adding.
I'd much prefer something really nice in b19 than something rushed in b18. We always did it that way. Also, we are nearly 2 month from the feature freeze.

>> Isn't this a cleaner approach that could scale better to other information than using colors?
> 
> Yes, it is a mighty longer term goal worth remembering -> bug report?
Or just implement it :). Well, bug report can never hurt I guess. I think it is insignificant more work than using colors - just the additional images in the building window. BjornKeks in the forums agreed to provide graphics for the "prefer rookies" and "prefer heros" buttons. He might help out here as well - he is very responding and very capable. Just contact him or ask on the forum if he would want to make button images. What do you think?

Cheers,
Holger

> 
> Regards,
> 
> 
> 	Teppo
> 
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