Project Clarity: Tooltips

[keith.lamothe]

gets me thinking, what is the size x*y you are aiming for the tooltips anyway?

Aiming for? As small as possible while still being readable, really.

Willing to accept?  512*384 is a quarter of the screen on the minimum officially supported resolution (1024*768, though we try to keep it minimally playable on 1024*600), I wouldn't want it to get bigger than that.  I think some of the descriptions push it higher, but I'm thinking of stuff with maybe 5 or 6 lines of desc tops.  And the description would go entirely below the "crunch" section, so I think mockups could focus on getting that part right and the description just goes under it (and maybe doesn't even show unless you've hovered for 3 seconds or whatever).

[RCIX]

Maybe, having a -1- step tooltip is not a good idea. Optimally, if you hover a ship or click on a ship only the most vital information displays at a set location. This needs to be highly polished, keeping the mouse longer over that ship (3~ seconds) makes the advanced tool-tip display. A 2 stage tool-tip, so to speak. If done this way a lot of "useless" information could and should be condensed for the general tooltip. And proper grouped sections for other information should popup above/next to the primary tooltip.

What I am saying is basically, to split the tooltip into smaller subwindows and not make it 1 window fits all. That way, you can scale it better to fit what information you need too.

That was basically the architecture I was planning on, though I like the idea of having the less important stuff be on a delay.

OK so one of my questions is this: What all are the weapon mechanics I'm looking at? Offhand, I know there's engine damage, life vamp, parasite weapons, translocation, attack boost...

[eRe4s3r]

Also important how information for buildings and unique ships is displayed, it may even need a different tooltip concept for special buildings... oh boy, this is not something I would want to touch to be honest. Seems like only thing to find in this is pain.

This is a topic we should have had back in AI War 1.0 times with a focus on this issue in the Unity switch (where the GUI really became kinda cluttered and odd again, lots of great pre-unity features are still sorely missing)

[RCIX]

Also important how information for buildings and unique ships is displayed, it may even need a different tooltip concept for special buildings... oh boy, this is not something I would want to touch to be honest. Seems like only thing to find in this is pain.

This is a topic we should have had back in AI War 1.0 times with a focus on this issue in the Unity switch (where the GUI really became kinda cluttered and odd again, lots of great pre-unity features are still sorely missing)

You don't get nice plants without dealing with some manure, eh? Besides, I'm all for slogging through it if the end result is human-parsable tooltips.

[Diazo]

Okay.

I just took a look at the tool tip pop-up in question.

I'm not sure I want to ask for any information removed.

I'm assuming we are trying to keep the same tooltip that auto-populates from the data files, not make a bunch of different ones for different situations.

So, I took a look at the tool tip and went "okay, when do I use this?".

I found I use everything.

Even the description is important, for units like the Scout Starship the only place things like their anti-sniper ability is listed, the counter-sniper ability is not in the abilities list.

(Speaking of which, what does a scout starship "Unaffected by Negative Energy" mean?)

Having said that, I'm taking a look at it and I'm not sure. I'm on my laptop at the moment so at 1024x768 so I'm at the minimum resolution.

My first though would be that my biggest complaint would be you can't hide the pop-up. At 1024x768 that's a significant part of the lower left of the screen.

Could a delay be added before the pop-up shows when you mouse-over a unit in the main window? I did not see anything like that in options. Or an option to hide pop-ups when mouse-overed a unit and a key bind to show it.

When you mouse over a unit in the planetary summary or a ship's icon at a space dock the pop-up would still come up immediately.

On the tool tip layout itself I have no suggestions, I have no ideas for improvement and I would prefer that no information be removed with any changes made.

D.

[doctorfrog]

So, I took a look at the tool tip and went "okay, when do I use this?".

I found I use everything.

Even the description is important, for units like the Scout Starship the only place things like their anti-sniper ability is listed, the counter-sniper ability is not in the abilities list.

Same. This is the cul-de-sac I found myself in this morning: wait, I am not just used to seeing all of this stuff, I actually use it as well. Even the no-unit-of-measurement-known Range stat I refer to.

If you start culling stuff, I'd still expect an "experts" mode.

[RCIX]

(oh and the font info would be great, but you don't have to)

I don't actually know the font style and point size used.  I could post  the OpenType Font files we use but I think at least some of them are non-free so "distributing" them might be putting my foot in it

Looking at Unity and the .otf file properties... the "MediumTooltip" font is Systopie (by Sergio Ramirez) at 15pt, but the name of the actual font is not known to me.  That's the font used for the ship's name, etc.  the "MediumSmallerInfo" font is also Systopie, but at 14pt and used for the metal and crystal per-second-cost and some other stuff.  If there's another font in there that doesn't match one of those, let me know where it's showing up and I can look it up.

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/sardiez/systopie/

Look familiar? Unfortunately it's 20 bucks for one flavor and it seems a little impractical to shell out just for a couple of tooltip mockups ;p I have the strange feeling I'll be grabbing a lot of random screenshots and doing a LOT of recoloring :x It might be possible to "loan" it to me under the Graphic Designer clause in the license, but that might be too messy to figure out.

Or I could, you know, not be an idiot and borrow the font previewer. Shouldn't be a problem

[Draco18s]

Even the no-unit-of-measurement-known Range stat I refer to.

I believe it's pixels at maximum zoom.

[Bognor]

+1 for retaining range.  All you need to do is remember that Missile Frigates have a range of 10,000 units; all other ranges are meaningful with respect to that.  Also, just holding Z doesn't clearly tell you that, for example, a Missile Frigate out-ranges a Zenith Beam Frigate, which is highly relevant information.

Also +1 on retaining commas.  134,000,000 is much easier to parse than 134000000.

[eRe4s3r]

I don't want to remove commas, I want to make them pointless. Numbers with more than 2 zeroes get culled into something humanly readable.

[RCIX]

OK so the community singing the opening riff from this has been informative. Now, what I need is either:
 * A complete list of abilities, immunities, hull types, and the longest description (isn't there a tool to export data?)
 * A tooltip showing "conceivable worst" possibility (theoretical worst would have so many bells and whistles you'd practically have to revert to a wall of text in any case )

I don't want to remove commas, I want to make them pointless. Numbers with more than 2 zeroes get culled into something humanly readable.

Will definitely be working this in.

[TechSY730]

List of hull types will be easy.
Ability list will be trickier.

Both can be gotten from the Excel stat dump (which thankfully did survive the Unity port)

Also, thanks to the hard work of Dazio and many others I can't think of the name of at the moment, you might be able to get some nice lists from there.

[RCIX]

Both can be gotten from the Excel stat dump (which thankfully did survive the Unity port)

And since everything is hotkeyed, what button do I press?

Also, thanks to the hard work of Dazio and many others I can't think of the name of at the moment, you might be able to get some nice lists from there.

?

[TechSY730]

Both can be gotten from the Excel stat dump (which thankfully did survive the Unity port)

And since everything is hotkeyed, what button do I press?

Well, I was going to do it, but I had to start a big file recovery

However, you should be able to see the hotkey in the controls page of the settings. You have to be in debug mode (by default, toggles with F3) to do it though.

Also, thanks to the hard work of Dazio and many others I can't think of the name of at the moment, you might be able to get some nice lists from there.

?

*facepalm*
I meant to mention the wiki somewhere in that sentence, but apparently forgot to mention the whole freaking point.

[RCIX]

AI War is cranking through ship relative stats, which I'm starting to regret telling it to do I'll also have it export whatever else it does and see if any of that helps.

The wiki also has the information I need.... Just not collated into one document. -.- Edit: NVM, found the specific pages. Looks like I get a complete list of everything except a long selection of attack multipliers. Hmm. Works for me.