Re: Weird fuel behavior

[Hans Ronne <hronne@comhem.se>]

>It's not an easy problem.  Having a huge number of messages somewhere
>of the sort ("unit xxx starved" etc) won't work (unless perhaps for
>rare events, which starving might be).  Maybe being able to click on a
>unit and issue a command saying "what's going on with this unit?"
>(e.g. "tried to attack last turn, but didn't have ammo").  Or I guess
>it would be a cell in the case of a now-vanished unit...

Interestingly, that feature is already available in the Mac interface :-).
If you ctrl-click on a unit, it brings up a small closeup (floating window)
where you can examine its plans etc. Basically the same information as in
the unit info pane. There are two advantages over the latter, however.
First, these closeups take much less screen space, and only when you need
them. Second you can open several of them and study how units interact with
each other.

Unlike the History window, this is an extremely useful feature. I use it
all the time while debugging new kernel code. It's the only way to grasp
what is really going on in a complex situation with several interacting
units. I have therefore given serious thought to porting the closeups to
the tcltk interface. The only thing that has held me off so far is the poor
support for floating windows in tcltk. It took a lot of work to get the
research popup window to behave the way it does, and it is still inferior
to a real floating window.

Hans