Tooltips

[jacksawild]

Does anyone else think these could add some nice usability to the UI?

Examples:

1. Hover over a savegame and a tooltip gives extra info (tactical, geoscape, crashed UFOs, Flying UFOs etc etc)
2. Hover over a soldier during equip screen and get a tooltip with stats, equipment could give you ammo loaded etc
3. Hover over a UFO or crashed/landed craft/alien base and get the info you'd normally get from clicking it in a tooltip (saving you from closing window)
4. Hover over a base gives tooltips on research/production/soldiers/stores
5. Hover over an alien in tactical draw lines to xcom units with LOS (not too sure about this one)
6.
7. Profit

I may start playing around with this idea, if I get anything I'll make a fork for people to test. The rest of this thread is for feedback/suggestions for tooltips or other UI ideas.

[Amunak]

Someone said that any "hover" effect is actually a bad idea - the game can run on smartphones or tablets at some point and there are no "hovers".

[michal]

But should we restrict functionality because of such devices? Probably over 90% OpenXcom users will play on PC (windows/mac/linux).

[Amunak]

I'm not sure; if it will be one class which could be easily changed for touchscreen devices maybe it can be implemented. Or we can use another approach - don't make it on hover, but on click - the game already has tons of popup windows, so there's no reason to change that

Maybe we could just do it for right click on PC (it is rarely used, afaik in battlescape for unit facing only and in geoscape for globe rotation), on touchscreen that would be probably touch and hold.

[Volutar]

If we want to make "universal" game with user interface, which is friendly to touch devices, to multitouch devices, to mouse pointed device with keyboard AT THE SAME TIME, I bet it will look pathetic on either.

Touchscreen xcom version should be absolutely another game in terms of UI, and logically it has to be kind of branch of main game, tuned and optimized for such controller. It should be having large buttons and touch-friendly interface, having quite little in common with xcom we used to.

Concerning tooltips - I think it's a good idea, but only when resolution be at least 640x480. Low res will make these tooltips huge and irrelevant.
Have you seen Windows' tooltips on 320x200?

[michal]

Exactly as Volutars said. For example PocketUFO had interface designed for touch screen and playing windows version wasn't very pleasant.

[Daiky]

I understand the need of tooltips, and they'll make the game more user-friendly.

But I have the same concern as Volutar:  tooltips mostly are small aids and not distracting when you don't need them. In the resolution we got now, a tooltip with some info quickly becomes a popup which covers up half of the screen...

I think if you make some screen mockup's of screens with tooltips in gimp/photoshop could give idea's about how it will look.
Before you know how big the boxes will become you need to know the content and font size. And the positioning. You can easy prototype it, without writing one line of code.

[jacksawild]

I don't really understand the logic of only working on that which is good for the most restricted devices (this is why PC gaming is dying, for all the console shooty-bang-bang ports). We already use the right mousebutton and scroll wheel, it would be up to the device developers to implement what they feel is good for them.

I think it is doable. I've attached three mockups. The geoscape pic is based on the FPS counter, I don't think a background is necessary. The two equip-screen pics I think do need some kind of background (perhaps these should be click-activated and cleared). I don't think it blocks out gameplay. I also thought that on the geoscape you could "attach" a tooltip to a UFO/SITE/BASE with the middle mouse button so it doesn't disappear when you move the mouse and it would look a bit more air-traffic-controlly by foloowing the blip around.

I've started to look at the code and I think a new class in the Interface folder based on the FpsCounter class and initialised from the necessary state classes ought to do it.

[Volutar]

I see only use for something like depicted in 3rd screenshot. Two first are useless. Unit stats with 2letter abbreviation is a crap, which already covered by UFO1/2 mod (which obviously will be for openxcom). Hover info over globe objects like "race" is a cheat. I see only possibility of showing object name, though sometimes it will prompt multiple objects, so this feature can be useless too.

[jacksawild]

Of course they look crap, they're quick and dirty mockups demonstrating that the entire screen doesn't need to be sacrificed. I don't know why you think that race info on the globe popup would be a cheat, have you played this game before? I also don't know why you think the feature would be useless because more than one object could be targetted it'd probably be possible to scroll through multiple pages of info with the mousewheel or display more than one tooltip on differing vectors (it's a simple bounding box collision detection). The 2 abbreviations are dirty but it is still more info than you get on the loadout screen atm and again: we have mousewheels.

Anyway, it's just an idea and an excuse for me to play with the code.

[Volutar]

Arrows and multiple paged messages needed of MWHEEL are unwanted. Hint watching shouldn't get any additional action and must not be a visual obstacle or any disturbance (as will be with multiple info).

[Daiky]

Yeah, the mockups are not for the actual info BUT it gives use the idea how big a tooltip is of 4 lines high and about 17 characters wide.
Unless you have the hyperwave decoder in your base, you shouldn't see the race/mission of a UFO.
Unit stats in the inventory layout are covered with UFO extender in another way already: https://www.ufopaedia.org/images/5/56/Equip.png

[moriarty]

first of all, @jacksawild: please don't be too angry about all of this, I've read the thread again and some of the comments sound quite harsh to me. I think your general idea is quite good.

tooltips for soldiers in inventory: I think the way it's been done before with UFOextender is better as long as we have 320x200 pixels. have the relevant stats displayed to the top right of the soldier - the rest is accessible via clicking the rank icon anyway.

tooltips for weapons: I don't know... I don't think you need that information always at hand. perhaps this could be done by integrating the ufopaedia into the game better? if you right-click on an item that has a UFOpaedia entry, you get a one-button popup window "show UFOpaedia entry for %1", which takes you there - clicking outside the window erases the pop-up? that way you could access the information you want.

tooltips for UFO's: you are aiming for some air-traffic-controller type of info, right? I like the idea, but I'm not sure what I would want to have displayed, considering that in the original 320x200 you could only have one or two lines of (short) info there, else everything would look all cluttered. plus most of the really relevant info is only available after you have a hyperwave decoder. of the basic radar info, what do you really need?