Rant: We're too used to crappy UI

[Simon]

Climbers and floaters should be painted differently from non-permanents on the game board. They must immediately jump to eye in a crowd. Even with good cursor priority that prefers climbable walkers over non-permanented walkers, it's a pain to locate climbers. L2 did it well, L2 inverted hair and body color on permanent-skillers. Everybody should roar and demand this in any IRS.

No, that should not be an option. Nobody in their right mind will ever switch off good, nonintrusive marking.

There should be a word for (rodent that has at least one permanent ability). Athlete is already taken for (climber and floater), but NL has overriden the meaning already. There should be a word, like plain, for (rodent that has no permanent abilities).

L2 had horrible assignment priority. L2 prefers young stunners over old workers. WTF. If Dullstar were correct asserting the L2 assignment have an RNG, the resulting algo would blow L2's assignment out of the water.

Screens should never fade in and out. Precious time wasted at critical moments. Fading is for music: Anything that runs along without gobbling 100 % of your attention. Screens should pop in, ready to go.

Leading zeroes contain no information and should be culled from most UI. When the quantity is zero, printing 0 is a leading zero. When you have 0 of something, and that something is not 0 over 90 % of the time, fine, print the single-digit zero. Otherwise, leave the gap, but don't print in-your-face-attention-whoring digits. L2 did it horribly wrong, L2 presented 00 on empty skills. Two leading zeroes! In the glaring orange font!

People will not read manuals. Present on screen what they can do. When that would clutter the screen too much, you can hide rare options in a menu. Cut blah-blah text and put options on the screen instead.

Some level designers clamor for level titles spanning two rows. Go write a novel instead. Names must be short. Naming is hard.

The simple text file is the best way to store information. Surprisingly, all text-based formats suck. We're in a dark age where XML is crap, and it's simultaneously replaced by Json, Sdlang, Yaml, Toml, Wurstml, Longacronyml. CSV is for rectangular tables, not for writing the contents of a class to file. Ini lacks standardization, lacks nesting, and "thing001 = this, thing002 = that, thing003 = ..." is idiotic to represent collection of thing.

Lix, both C++ and D, has the I-don't-care-just-die hotkey [Shift] + [Esc] that cannot be remapped. This is nowhere documented. Everybody should learn it and pester me to document it, and make it remappable.

Hotkey-binding dialogs are hard:

• You can map keys to functions, that's bad, you must now list all keys where 70 % of them do nothing. And cohesion is horrible: When mapping a key, I don't get a feeling where related game functions are mapped. I see nearby keys only.
  
• You can map functions to keys, that's bad, you want to map pause to two keys. Pause goes to [Space] for normal two-handed play, and pause goes to MMB, or at least [Numpad-Enter] near the mouse, so you can hit it comfortably while you're scratching your butt.
  
• You can map functions to a set of keys. That's ugly, now you must have a UI to maintain the set. This UI will take awful wide loads of space. Otherwise: I want this function mapped to [A], and now I want it mapped to [E] instead. Should the UI add that, or replace [A]? Ah no, before pressing [E], I changed my mind altogether, so I hit [Esc] or RMB to cancel the assignment. The oh-so-helpful UI will now either clear [A] too, which we wanted to keep, or bind the function to [A] and [Esc].

-- Simon

[Simon]

Everything on this list, at least one of NL or Lix gets it right. The spread is roughly 50:50 even. Very good. Only a matter of time until the users of one rage for the other.

Lix panel = Korean washing machine, I've split it off.

Lix, both C++ and D, has the I-don't-care-just-die hotkey [Shift] + [Esc] that cannot be remapped. This is nowhere documented. Everybody should learn it and pester me to document it, and make it remappable.

Interesting.  Though I imagine many Windows users already knew about Alt+F4 (which is typically more of a normal [Esc]), and currently that appears to have the exact same effect in Lix.

Perfect, that's even more memorable. I believe I won't go extra lengths to intercept this.

-- Simon