Re: Three thoughts

[Lincoln Peters <sampln@sbcglobal.net>]

On Sun, 2004-08-22 at 07:01, Hans Ronne wrote:
> >I noticed the problem most in my game with the item units, because there I
> >had some units with as many as 25 occupants that sometimes were occupants
> >themselves.  It becomes an issue even in the standard game with smaller
> >numbers of occupants, though.
> 
> I see. One thing that might solve this problem, if I may bring up the Mac
> interface again, is to implement unit closeups. This is how you navigate
> within the stack on the Mac: right-click on a unit to bring up a small
> floating window with unit info plus one image of each occupant. Right-click
> on any of these images to bring up a closeup of the occupant. And so on.
> There is also a clickable image of the transport in each occupant closeup,
> so you can navigate quickly up and down in the stack. The frontmost closeup
> automatically becomes the current unit for commands etc.

Here's a rather crazy possible solution: Would it be possible to use
TclTk *and* another toolkit, such as GTK+, simultaneously?  That might
allow us to not only use GTK+ to implement new features, but also to
"phase out" the TclTk code (since nobody seems to like TclTk anymore)
and replace it with GTK+ code.

If I remember correctly, a few people have complained that it is often
difficult to debug TclTk code, various quirks make it difficult to
create certain keybindings, and it's just plain ugly.  While GTK+ would
still result in a game that looks like an Office app, it should be
easier to debug (no useless "Error reading tcl" errors) and more
versatile.  Not to mention that GTK+ contains everything you need to
make an application accessible to people with disabilities (might be fun
just to make Xconq able to respond appropriately if you were to bark
orders at it via a speech recognition engine).  And I don't think it
would be a step backward from the existing TclTk interface if the
interface was re-implemented in GTK+ and ended up looking like an Office
app.

I've put together an example of what a "close-up" dialog might look like
if implemented in GTK+, and I've posted it here:

http://homepage.mac.com/lmpeters/cell-closeup.png

(The icons are generic icons from the GTK+/GNOME library.  Just pretend
that they look like unit images from the Standard game.)

The situation illustrated here is the city Sausalito and a fighter
flying overhead.  Within the city are infantry, armor, a bomber, a
battleship, and a carrier.  Furthermore, within the carrier are three
fighters and another bomber.  This would be almost completely
unmanageable without a close-up dialog like this one.

I envision the closeup dialog as something you could summon with a
special mouse click (perhaps Alt-click or click with the middle button),
and then use any time you need to click on a unit (choosing a unit to
give orders to, board, attack, fire at, etc.).

> Porting this to the tcltk interface is something that I have wanted to do
> for a long time, but it is easier said than done. The main problem is the
> lack of support for floating windows in tcltk.

I'll add this to the list of reason not to like TclTk.  I guess you
could implement a close-up dialog like I illustrated above in TclTk, but
it sounds like it would be more work.

---
Lincoln Peters
<sampln@sbcglobal.net>

It is contrary to reasoning to say that there is a vacuum or space in
which there is absolutely nothing.
		-- Descartes