[DISC] How should the Lemming save count be displayed in the skill panel?

[Simon]

By this argument, we should do both: grey exit so the player knows something is different before, AND checkmark so the player knows something is different afterwards. Otherwise, green exit before is telling them nothing.

Yes, sounds like a good idea. You've also made the checkmark stand out even brighter against the darker-green exit, that's good.

The save requirement (SR) is now visible when mousing-over the exit icon and/or the lems-in-exit value:

Now, whenever you show the save requirement, you hide the save count. Out of everything you have in the panel, the save count is the most important stat to see at the same time with the save requirement. You're forcing people to memorize numbers to compute what they want to know (how many more to save).

Assuming you must show the save requirement only on mouseover: Keep the save count visible. Hide the clock instead (when the mouse is over the save count or an exit), which sits on the right of the save count. Print the /Y in the space that you've freed.

If you're concerned with squishing numbers and slashes together: 1. Consider spaces on both sides of the slash (even though squishing together is the usual typography) and 2. Print the X/Y in two colors: X in yellow or green, and /Y in blue or green.

-- Simon

[WillLem]

Assuming you must show the save requirement only on mouseover: Keep the save count visible. Hide the clock instead (when the mouse is over the save count or an exit), which sits on the right of the save count. Print the /Y in the space that you've freed.

This would be a huge amount of work, mostly due to the way that the skill panel string is implemented. To some extent I agree this might be worth figuring out eventually, but for now I'd like to trial the feature as it is and see if it's sufficient.

Reasons:

1) The "/" character currently isn't part of the panel font, this would need to be added.

2) Overwriting the {clock + time} with {save count / SR + space} results in the {save count / SR + space} at least partially persisting after the re-draw (regardless of printing order). This is because the {string complete with icon} is initialized on first drawing the panel, and then only the digits are replaced after that with each re-draw. It might be easy to hack something together to patch this, but - ideally - extensive refactoring of the panel string would be in order to truly solve this one.

N.B. There is also the recently-implemented Amiga Theme to consider, which draws a totally different string featuring the word "TIME" rather than the clock icon. This further complicates any patching of the string post-overwrite.

3) Recolouring the individual parts of the string also isn't a trivial task, since the string might be offset 1 or 2 characters to the right depending on how many lems have been saved so far; the index then needs to be dynamically adjusted. Do-able, certainly, but doesn't seem worth it in addition to reasons (1) and (2).

4) The current mouse-over feature is actually quite neat as it is; it fits perfectly into the current panel's aesthetic and - more importantly - keeps the information accessible, albeit with the caveats you mentioned. Even if we did print X/Y though, players must still subtract X from Y to get the amount that they need to save; the only benefit is removing the need to memorize Y.

So, at present, I'd rather ask users to memorize Y and see if that's a good enough solution.