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

[WillLem]

OK, here's how the feature stands so far:

Traffic light colour system for rescue count (<=0 in red, 1 - [SR -1] in yellow, SR+ in green)
Greyscale exit icon for (rescue count < SR), green exit icon for (rescue count >= SR)

We still need to display the SR somehow, but this is a promising start:



Implemented in Commits 989397575 and 3ddf59e7e

[littbarski]

to answer about my post concerning the total number of lemmings active currently on the screen: as mentioned I don't expect my beginner's (or returnees) view to be seen as best, and if I think a bit about it I think I can get used to seeing only the total number of lemmings in the level (as given also in the level description) and this number stays the same until the first ones get into exit. It was just a bit strange to see a number showing the total active lemmings and it does not change although many lemmings are just appearing. But now I understood, and perhaps it's ok to use some thinking while playing lemmings .

But anyway, the more important numbers are certainly: how many do we need in exit and how many do we have alread there in exit. My feedback to the colors would be, why there are two different ones, grey and yellow, for the same thing = not yet achieved. Perhaps even both could be grey, the symbol and the number before achieving, and then both turn green. If there is not enogh space, then the negative number would be an option (which does not seem to be the most popular) and the easiest to recognize and understand (popular to me) would be the (in your example) 17/20...

[WillLem]

why there are two different ones, grey and yellow, for the same thing = not yet achieved

Well, technically, one is a different symbol; this is because Simon has pointed out that using only colour to differentiate two different things is bad UI. So, an alternative symbol is also used.

I prefer (greyscale exit > green exit) rather than (green exit > green exit with check mark); yes, it's relying on colour again (arguably), but the effect is that of the exit lighting up like a bulb. I'd say that's slightly different from just using 2 different colours (say, yellow exit > green exit).

I'll await feedback on this from Simon before going any further with it.

[Simon]

Hmm, the purple/cyan checkmark clashes with the green exit.

Attached is a variant. To make the checkmark stand out against the exit, I surrounded it with black pixels.

Remember our problem: You show different things (first how many more lemmings needed until we meet save requirement, then later the total saved), but you insist on positive integers for both, in the same position. This is unusual UI. To pay back such a mortgage, you need the clearest icon you can find. And it must be clear without knowing how the other state looks!

In this light, even the grey/green exit icon isn't clear enough to me. You have a lot of green elsewhere in the infobar, e.g., the lemming head and the hatch icon, and none of those mean that it's solved. Assume the player has never seen the grey house. What does a green house tell him? I'd say nothing, it's the blend-in color, all icons are green.

The extra clarity requirement is why I thought of the checkmark in the first place. It re-uses established symbology (to mean a solved level) from elsewhere in the program: You mark solved levels with a checkmark in the level browser. This begs the question: How strong is a checkmark alone, without an exit behind?

Or: What other icons scream "solved"?

Feel free to reject the checkmark on top of the exit (it's a busy icon after all), but consider how the UI will look after the change (from unsolved to solved) when the player hasn't observed the change (e.g., he didn't see the grey house, now the green house tells him nothing), and how it calls for extra clarity.

No final verdict on 17/20 vs. −3 vs. (unsolved exit icon) 3. I believe that it's really hard to beat the clarity of 17/20, and that littbarski is correct to push for 17/20.

-- Simon

[Simon]

Thinking more about alternative icons for the unmet save requirement.

The icon with the unadorned exit is reasonable, don't dismiss it too early. The only problem comes from the positive count next to it, which decreases. It doesn't count what's in the exit, even though the icon shows an exit.

An icon with a question mark, e.g., (exit house ?) sounds possible. It's a busy icon again. Is it even clear? It would look unnerving, as if the panel were warning you about a missing exit.

An icon with an arrow, e.g., (---> exit house), can mean that you should enter the house (desired meaning), but it can also mean that somebody has already entered the house. It's not as precise as I'd like. At least it refers more to the act of entering the exit (rather than to the lemmings inside the exit).

A goal flag. Hmmm ... Its main use is to mark a soon-reachable goal. The guy at the finish line will wave the flag for the race driver as the driver approaches. But the checkered flag has become a symbol for a goal without the nuance that it be reachable in the future. I don't have a strong feeling either way.

Crosshair icon. I had that in Lix 7 years ago. Instead of 17/20, I had (crossshair) 3. I eventually changed this to (exit house) −3, which I deem clearer because of the minus sign. The minus sign shows a debt that's hard to show with an icon.

-- Simon

[Simon]

yes, it's relying on colour again (arguably), but the effect is that of the exit lighting up like a bulb.

In 95 % of other places, indeed, you'll be completely fine with this dark/blend-in grey for off/no, and a light/contrastful color for on/yes/exists. Your choices of grey and green have plenty of contrast.

Here, it's about the two different semantics for positive integers in the same place. For this special requirement, I deem it not enough.

-- Simon

[WillLem]

Attached is a variant. To make the checkmark stand out against the exit, I surrounded it with black pixels.

This looks good, I'm happy to trial this in the next update. I might try to make the checkmark stand out further by making it brighter, or by darkening the exit slightly.

you insist on positive integers for both

My preference is a simple counting up from 0 as lemmings exit; in light of the fact that Rivals and Zombies now count as (-1) towards the save requirement, I'm now thinking it wouldn't be a good idea to show it any other way.

So, from this point on, the idea of counting down from the SR can be scrapped. Seeing a Zombie exit and the count go up (which it would, under a count-down-from-SR system) would just be extra confusing.

I'm back to thinking that the best idea is to show the SR when the exit count is hovered-over; I'd like to try that alongside the checkmark exit icon and see if it's a satisfactory enough solution before overhauling the panel display any further.

In this light, even the grey/green exit icon isn't clear enough to me. You have a lot of green elsewhere in the infobar, e.g., the lemming head and the hatch icon, and none of those mean that it's solved. Assume the player has never seen the grey house. What does a green house tell him? I'd say nothing, it's the blend-in color, all icons are green.

Here I disagree, FWIW. The fact that everything else is green but the exit is grey says "something hasn't happened yet, specifically with the exit, because it looks different from everything else". Once the exit conforms to the others (by becoming green), it says "OK, all is done!"

If it were the other way around (so, the exit starts green and either changes colour or gains a checkmark later), the player has no information from the start to suggest that anything needs to be done with the exit, and any changes that occur at the point of reaching the SR could seem like an afterthought.

With that said, I'm happy to give the checkmark a try as stated above, and the exit icon will start green as before. Let's give that a try; we need to reach agreement on some of these points.

The extra clarity requirement is why I thought of the checkmark in the first place. It re-uses established symbology (to mean a solved level) from elsewhere in the program

Agreed, this is exactly why the checkmark is most likely the way to go. Let's try it and see what the feedback is, if any (and if none, we can assume that the problem is solved).

consider how the UI will look after the change (from unsolved to solved) when the player hasn't observed the change (e.g., he didn't see the grey house, now the green house tells him nothing)

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.

I believe that it's really hard to beat the clarity of 17/20, and that littbarski is correct to push for 17/20.

I agree, but the cost is currently too high. Let's try other methods first and see if it's satisfactory enough.

The icon with the unadorned exit is reasonable, don't dismiss it too early. The only problem comes from the positive count next to it, which decreases. It doesn't count what's in the exit, even though the icon shows an exit.

Yes, this is in fact exactly the reason the count-down-from-SR idea is now scrapped, and you've also hit on the reason I intuitively dislike the minus display; I was struggling to put my finger on it earlier: it's far better to show what's actually in the exit. A minus sign makes me think there are (<0) lemmings in the exit...! Even though I know what it means actually, it still seems a wonky way to display the save count. Furthermore, since Zombies and Rivals count as (-1), (<0) lemmings in the exit can now actually happen, so it's better to reserve the minus display for this.


Current proposal

So, this post chased its own tail a bit, as there was quite a lot to reply to.

For clarity then, this is the current proposal for the save count display:

Exit icon will start (green), then go to (green + checkmark) when the SR is met; the exit might be made slightly darker, or the checkmark slightly brighter, to make this icon clearer.

The save count will start at 0, increase with each lemming saved, and decrease with each Zombie/Rival exiter (current SLX status quo). Red is used for (<=0), Yellow for (1 - [SR-1]), Green for (SR+).

When the user hovers the cursor over either the Exit icon or the save count, the SR will be shown (most likely in Blue) in place of the save count.

We sacrifice the SR being displayed at all times for the following reasons:

1) It's a static figure, so doesn't warrant use of limited panel real estate vs. other important figures which change throughout gameplay.

2) The SR is shown in the window caption if the player is using windowed mode; fullscreen players might then report not knowing the SR in-game, and can be informed about using the mouse-over-save-count-display method to see the SR. We accept that some users might never know, or might only discover the feature by accident; to mitigate this, we could show a message when switching from Windowed to FullScreen, and/or could add a note about it in the Welcome Screen for new users (I'm considering expanding this screen to provide more info anyway). "Hint of the Day" is also a thing; it's perhaps about time this was added anyway!

3) Ultimately, the cost of displaying the SR at all times is too high: we either have to sacrifice another important figure to be displayed in the gameplay area (messy, and renders these figures not-always-accessible), or have to print another row of UI somewhere (avoidable clutter). And, showing XX/YY doesn't look great when using the standard panel font anyway (I don't have a ready visual example of this, I'll come back and add one later).

[littbarski]

I probably missed this, but perhaps it would be useful to also include the other numbers in your summarizing proposal, so the number of lemmings available in total at the beginning in the hatch. Or was this also a number that is static and so not useful? (I would agree)

If we consider not showing the total number as a static one in its extra place, we could add another 17/20 idea there, too, so there would be the hatch symbol and then 17/20 showing how many of the total number is still in hatch until it gets 0/20. In this case you would always see the total number in the "0/20" and on the right always the SR in the "20/20" at the end.

I understand that this topic is about the SR, but one of the main discussion points here is the missing space, with the space discussion the total number in the hatch is automatically also discussed 

[Proxima]

I probably missed this, but perhaps it would be useful to also include the other numbers in your summarizing proposal, so the number of lemmings available in total at the beginning in the hatch. Or was this also a number that is static and so not useful? (I would agree)

I don't know whether SLX has changed this, but NL displays the number of lemmings currently available, which is not static -- it starts equal to the original number of lemmings available, and goes down when one dies. This is the most useful because you can immediately know without calculation* whether you have too few lemmings remaining to possibly meet the save requirement.

admittedly, some calculation is still necessary if there are cloners

[WillLem]

If we consider not showing the total number as a static one in its extra place, we could add another 17/20 idea there, too, so there would be the hatch symbol and then 17/20 showing how many of the total number is still in hatch until it gets 0/20

Just to be clear, none of the numbers being displayed in the panel are static; they are all numbers that change during gameplay, and have all been established as important values that players need ready access to. And yes, there are other values that players need ready access to, but we all seem to agree that moving numbers take priority over static numbers in the event that there isn't enough space for both.

The number of lemmings available from the beginning does not change, so isn't displayed. It would be a waste of space to put /Y, where Y is {the total number of lemmings available from the start}, particularly since these lemmings could be spread across multiple hatches, or in fact be pre-placed (rather than in-hatch) lemmings.

Ultimately, in order to fit /Y onto the display anywhere, we would have to either shrink the minimap, add another row of digits to the panel, or remove one of the other numbers being displayed. I might as well state clearly now that, after consideration, I don't wish to go ahead with any of those measures in order to display a /Y value on the panel, for any of hatch, active, or saved counts. Even if we agree it's important and necessary, there are some cases where it would take a total of 8 digits (e.g. "100/100 ") so it might not fit on even if we did (for example) remove the hatch number (which currently takes up 5 digits including the space after it). Besides, it just doesn't look particularly great either! Here's a mockup:



IMHO it just looks too big and clunky and clutters up the display. So, we need to find some other way of presenting the information; I think hovering over the digit to reveal the SR is a good enough solution for now, especially since SR has never been displayed on the panel, either in Amiga/DOS or NeoLemmix, and it's never really been much of an issue.

I don't know whether SLX has changed this, but NL displays the number of lemmings currently available, which is not static -- it starts equal to the original number of lemmings available, and goes down when one dies

Just to confirm, this is still the case in SLX:



This shows that there are 100 lemmings available in the level. It will stay at 100 as long as all of those lemmings are either in the hatch waiting to spawn or already active on screen.

When a lemming dies, exits, or becomes a zombie, the number decreases. If it reaches the point where there are no longer enough lemmings to complete the level, the number turns red (in this example, the SR is 95):

[littbarski]

thank you for clarifying this, I was indeed not sure about some things. But this shows also that this topic is important and not always easily understood by beginners or players who don't play the game often (just from time to time). When I watched some Youtube videos I always wondered why this one number does not go down. Of course now I understand better. It seems that I thought somehow that for the experienced players the number of lemmings currently active on the screen may be also important.

But from the simple user side a last comment: it would be certainly good to have help or hints windows, tooltip text or other information, but I always like it when you can then turn all of them off in the settings (so no popups, tooltips and so on).

I will not write too much here in this topic though, not because I don't think it is interesing or important, but as I don't have the knowledge to understand each single step of the discussion. Still it would be nice perhaps to see now and then an animated image of the total panel line with numbers to understand it better.

[WillLem]

tBut this shows also that this topic is important and not always easily understood by beginners or players who don't play the game often

Your feedback is very important and valuable; I imagine that many beginners/casual players who use our engines either don't take the time to post feedback, or (worse) give up altogether if they don't understand something about the program, or find something problematic.

Be sure, I take all feedback seriously and will action as much of it as I can if it's been agreed that it will benefit the majority of users. Of course, sometimes it's difficult to please everybody and compromises need to be made, but that's true of most programs.

it would be certainly good to have help or hints windows, tooltip text or other information, but I always like it when you can then turn all of them off in the settings (so no popups, tooltips and so on).

I've already implemented hover-over hints in all menus. In-game is more difficult, but I can find a way to achieve the same thing.

From this discussion, and others we've had in the past (e.g. how to cancel out of Replay mode!), it's definitely worth adding at least a "Hint of the Day" panel to the main menu, maybe even adding a user guide/manual to the main menu that can be accessed at any time (even in-game via a hotkey/button) and which explains all of the various features.

it would be nice perhaps to see now and then an animated image of the total panel line with numbers to understand it better.

Good idea. I could add some animated images to the manual, or perhaps link to video tutorials where necessary.

I'm going to go ahead and add this (in-game hints/manual) to the to-do list for 2.9, I think it's definitely worth implementing something like this once and for all.

[littbarski]

thank you - of course I will give my feedback, only I don't have too many new ideas at the moment and about the different displayed numbers of lemmings, I don't have enough experience to know what is important. By the way I even did not know that you can also play in windowed mode, I just start it and play in fullscreen - and like it, I would not have thought there is a need to switch in windowed mode at all. Hopefully the fullscreen will stay . But then of course those numbers given in the window above are not there.

So I only think, less is more and so too much color system and too much popups or tooltips (even as well too many icon changes) may be not clear enough. The numbers and their meaning itself have some kind of aesthetics. But as said this is not based on many hours of playing lemmings so perhaps I will just be more viewing here in this topic.

[WillLem]

OK, so... here's what we have so far:

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



The size of the mouse-over rectangle is also dynamically adjusted depending on how many digits the lems-in-exit value is. So, it won't randomly show the SR if the mouse is hovered over the blank space to the right of the digit.

And, I've replaced the greyscale -> green icons with green -> checkmark:



For 0 or less, the lems-in-exit count is red; for 1 to (SR -1), it's yellow; and for SR+, it's green.

Let's give this version of the save count display a try in the next SLX update and see if we like it. All things considered, I think this is the best overall solution.

Implemented in Commits 50ac9fda5 and f3528c060.


Also fixed a bug where the numbers were being nudged left whenever the count exceeds 3 digits (e.g. '1000', or '-999' for negative numbers). Now, all counts cap out at '999' ('-99' for negative numbers) - (Commit 179d8b12f)

The Editor has also been updated so that 999 is the maximum number of lemmings supported; levels can still be text-edited to have any number of lemmings, but the skill panel doesn't support more than 999 for display purposes - (Editor Commit 23ae5ee)

[littbarski]

Thank you for the work and explanation! I like it and I also think, if we look at the space issue, this is a really good solution. For me personally the checkmark is not necessary as it doubles the information, but of course it more obvious that way . As long as the user can change the icon as a file in the folder this is not a real issue after all.