Three thoughts

[mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

I've been busy with other things and not really playing or thinking about
Xconq much recently, but here are three interface thoughts, two of them
TCL/TK specific:

* If firing at specific units were to be a big part of some game, then it
would be nice if it were easier to designate specific units when there are
many of them, or nested occupant/transports, in a cell.  As it is, even at
the deepest level of zoom it's quite difficult to click precisely on one
unit if there are a lot of them in the cell.  One way to deal with this
might be for an interface to be able to give me a dialog box with a list
of units in the cell.

* In the current TCL/TK interface (well, current as of my last CVS
update), connection terrain is sometimes not drawn when at the highest
zoom level unless "grid" is turned on.  The "Lord of the Rings" game is a
good one for observing this - zoom in on a section of the map where there
are roads, and the roads suddenly disappear when you hit maximum
zoom.  They can be made to appear and disappear by turning "grid" on
and off.  And yet it seems to work correctly in the standard game
regardless of the state of "grid".

* I would really, really like to disable the automatic scrolling based on
mouse position in the TCL/TK interface, and I sure hope that "feature"
hasn't been incorporated into other interfaces.  It makes games that
require close-in zooming almost unplayable.  This will probably be my
project next time I have time to spend hacking on Xconq.  As a general
principle, I *never* want mouse position (without click) to change my
interface state, especially not in a way that's hard to reverse.  It's
especially annoying because common actions require me to move the pointer
between the map area and the menus or action buttons, and every time I do
that I have to move the pointer through the magic scroll zone and risk
getting a scroll that I didn't want.  Making the auto-scroll user-settable
would be okay, I suppose, but I'd keep the setting turned off all the time
myself.  Why can't we have scroll bars like everybody else?
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                    Embrace and defend.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/