Re: Weird fuel behavior

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald@phy.cmich.edu>]

On Tue, 20 Jul 2004, Hans Ronne wrote:

> at first. However, Stan long ago pointed out that professional games almost
> never use multiple windows since "users don't like Office-type
> applications". 

I think this is true for 3D shooters (such as Unreal) or 
some simple (many things are highly automated) realtime strategy 
games (such as Warcraft), but not necessarily true for 
strategy games where there are multitudes of forces of different 
kinds to track and manage, and there is not heavy automation of 
their actions.

>And I think he has a point here. You can go a long way with
> just one screen and panes instead, 

Well, I think even panes should be kept to a minimum. Believe me, 
I like the "clean rectangle" concept that SDL offers, but there 
can (and should, IMO) be windows that can be popped up demand to 
display various useful summaries and sets of details. The Tcl/Tk 
interface is way too cluttered and some things, such as the unit 
list, have minimal usefulness (construction and change-type 
selections should be done through a popup dialog window, and not  
through the unit list).

The driving concept should be: which info is so useful that it 
should always be displayed, and which info is only occasionally 
useful (but useful nonetheless) so that it should be kept in an 
on-demand display?

> What you can do with SDL, I believe, is transparent overlays and such. Not
> the same thing as a floating window but a decent alternative.

This might be acceptable for a pure SDL implementation, if someone 
felt like taking the effort to make such "windows". My guess is 
that true popup windows could be much more rapidly implemented 
(with expected UI components) using something like GTK.

Eric