[PLAYER][DISCUSSION] Extra buttons on skill panel area

[namida]

I'm adding an option on the next update to hide the minimap and replace it with some extra buttons on the skill panel.

I'm wondering what people think should be included among these buttons. Four that I think are pretty much critical to include here: Fast forward, back one frame, forward one frame, restart level.

Pretty much anything else that can be assigned a hotkey can be added here, unless the hotkey is of the "hold the key and do something else" variety (such as "select walkers", directional select, etc).

I'm wondering what features people would like to see here. There's room for four more.


Some thoughts on potential candidates. The ones I'm leaning towards the most are bolded.


Load Replay - A frequent question from new users is "How do I load a replay?", so having a button for this might be helpful.
Save Replay - This one is a bit less important since successful replays - which is usually what people will want to save - are, by default, auto-saved. This might also be more suitable for the postview screen.
Clear Physics Mode - This is a very useful feature that's currently quite undiscoverable except by being told it's there. Having a button might be useful.
Cancel Replay - The replay insert / modify would be a bit space-consuming to put all three options here, and I don't know how important this one is without the other two also being present. Besides, by default, a click in midair in the level already cancels the replay.
More skips - Perhaps 1 second skips, or as Nepster suggested in another post, "the shortest skips the user has bound to a hotkey, that aren't just one frame".
Save state / Load state - If there's one of these, we'd need to have both. But I don't know if these are considered very useful these days. I personally used to use them all the time, but now that we have a good variety of frameskip options (and backwards frameskips don't suffer from horrible performance), I virtually never use them. Nepster mentioned he doesn't use them either. Does anyone still use these?

[namida]

Based on discussion with Nepster in chat, we've come up with the following list. If you think this should be changed (or even more added - this will be a bit of work but is far from impossible, as we can simply make some of the buttons half-height so that two can fit in one horizontal slot), feel free to suggest it.

Fast Forward
Restart Level
Back One Frame
Forward One Frame
Clear Physics Mode
Directional Select Left
Directional Select Right
Load Replay

[Colorful Arty]

How about adding buttons to allow players to use more than 8 skills on a level?

[Nepster]

The new buttons are an alternative to the minimap. So for players who want to use the minimap, we won't have more space than right now, i.e. for 8 skills. So we probably should not use this space for essential buttons like further available skills.

At the moment I see two ways out of this problem:
- Hide the nuke and pause buttons when displaying the minimap and having more than 8 skills.
- Shrink the minimap if more than 8 skills are used. But this would be quite some work to code.

For people who don't want to use the minimap, but have the new buttons instead, I still would prefer to have all 8 non-skill buttons for levels with at most 8 available skills. Only if a level has more skills, I would move some buttons away (probably the directional select ones).

[mobius]

while your at this; why don't you move the pause button away from the nuke. I know this isn't really much of an issue anymore but it still stinks of bad design; pause button adjacent to button that ends level; a single miss-press leads to much irritation.

[IchoTolot]

Sent this in a PM about the new exp version today, but should be posted also in here:

I really want the minimap as standard back! Yes the buttons are useful ------- but a new player comes in, doesn't see the minimap and thinks this is not my Lemmings as it used to be and leaves --- lost player. I recently saw a new player play -- the most used button was the nuke of all cases [Hint: Keep Pause and Nuke right where they are now ]. Pressing "R" wasn't right for him. Trust me in here. Beeing old on the surface and fresh on the inside is the right way for new people! We experienced people know how to toggle, "avarage Joe" doesn't care and moves on!

At least: Put a toggle button between minimap and extra buttons directly in the panel! Merge directional select or sth. Split one button place into 2 (maybe even 3 for walker select) for it. Or leave out the physics mode.

while your at this; why don't you move the pause button away from the nuke. I know this isn't really much of an issue anymore but it still stinks of bad design; pause button adjacent to button that ends level; a single miss-press leads to much irritation.

You always have to double press the nuke anyways + a simple rewind is all it takes to make it undone

[namida]

The default can be changed fairly easily.

However, this does raise the question - what's going to be more helpful here; keeping that extra bit of familiarity (keeping in mind some other things will still be different either way - for example, skills that aren't used in the level won't show up (eg: go play Fun 1, notice how the only skill that shows up at all is the Digger), and the difference in how the lemmings alive / rescued stats are displayed including the lack of percentages; or exposing these useful features to a new player? If we default to minimap, there isn't much added in discoverability; the only advantage is for medium-level players who may want these features, but might not want to learn the various hotkeys.

[zanzindorf]

I like IchoTolot's idea of a toggle button. Attached is an idea I had on how it could look.

Image 1 shows the minimap (which I feel should show by default) and a new button to the right with a green plus (just a placeholder icon).
Image 2 shows the extra buttons which show after clicking the button.

In my example, the way the new buttons are split and arranged should be revised; I just wanted to throw something together quickly.

[namida]

If there is enough demand for it, I can implement in-game switching. It will be a bit of work to implement, so I only want to do so if there's a lot of interest in it.

[IchoTolot]

Another point for the minimap standard: The purpose it serves has no hotkey! Jumping across larger levels and ~ visual representation of the situation in a larger scale. Scrolling is much slower and I often use the minimap for that purpose.   

Zanzindorf's example is perfect! With that toggle button the standard doesn't matter that much anymore. I would still vote for the minimap, but then players will see that plus and want to find out what it does.

The extra buttons are very useful, but we 100% need ingame switching for that, because both options are essential in my eyes!

[Wafflem]

I completely agree with Icho and zanzindorf and would like at least the ability to toggle between extra buttons and the minimap. I also use the minimap a lot more as it's a lot faster to use it to scroll around large levels, so I would prefer for it to be enabled by default.

[Simon]

I would still vote for the minimap, but then players will see that plus and want to find out what it does.

I feel the same. NL's main selling point is that it looks like Lemmings. The release rate was considered holy already; players defended the RR against any change in representation, even though RR 98 and RR 99 denote the same. The minimap has an even stronger impact on the look-and-feel than the RR.

Modes suck, yes, but I don't see good alternatives here.

Scrolling is much slower and I often use the minimap for that purpose.

Yes, edge-scrolling sucks. Hold-RMB-move-mouse is the fastest and most precise method. :>

-- Simon

[Flopsy]

I'm in agreement with what IchoTolot says

I feel that the minimap is far too important to remove due to it being a staple from the original game.
The extra toggle button would help solve a lot of the problems already raised in this topic.

Unfortunately my laptop is broken at the moment so I can't really type a long reply to this topic. If I think of anything else to contribute then I'll be sure to add it in when it is fixed.

[namida]

It looks like there's a lot of support for switching in-game, so I'll look into implementing this.

[mobius]

yes please, I need the mini-map. It's much more convenient to be able to scroll around with that then without.