Missing tooltips

Mylon · Apr 30, 2008

There's a few areas where the tooltips are incomplete or lacking some information. Tooltips are great not only as little reminders, but also as a means of learning as you play. You can shout RTFM at me all you like, but I still hate having to crack open a book (digital or otherwise) just to play a game.

Some notable areas where tooltips are required:

Buildings for units. Training grounds for axemen/champions, machine shop for phalanx.
Requirements for buildings. Even if the requirement of a river for a brewery is met, it is still nice to know that it requires a river (and that this is why it doesn't show up in other areas).
Wonders. Particularly when discovering a technology, I have to click on the pedia entry to find out what it does, as the mouseover tooltip only tells me the cost.

Also, it would be nice if the "Sid's tips" bits were expanded to assist in some long term planning. Like mention what comes down 2 techs further along the line with a particular tech to give people a better idea of not just what tech does what, but what tech will do what later on.

Promotions. At least for negative ones, it would be nice to know how to cure them easily, and could be included in the description.

Guilds. When mousing over a guild in the city view, it doesn't display any information except the name of guild. (as a side note, it seems every guild is a "headquarters"). It'd be nice to know about the mercenaries' guild, ratcatchers' guild, etc. I noticed that some units got the "hire mercenaries" spell but did not know why (I must've missed the message).

Ringtailed · Apr 30, 2008

Machine Shops are actually for crossbowmen. Weaponsmiths are for phalanxes and mithril weapons.

TheCowSaysMoooo · Apr 30, 2008

Tooltips listing the spells granted by each mana type when trying to decide what to improve a raw node would be useful.

Nikis-Knight · Apr 30, 2008

You can shout RTFM at me all you like

No one will; Kael likes feedback like this to make the mod more userfriendly. Gaps are often overlooked when people who post have been playing since a feature was released.

Roghar · Apr 30, 2008

Other useful tooltips improvements I can think of off the top of my head

- Trait details when having to choose trait as an adaptive leader

- Would be great to lose the constant mana display on the top left and have
it come up on mouseover only - when fighting a large stack I can't see
the top units

Mylon · Apr 30, 2008

Ringtailed said:
Machine Shops are actually for crossbowmen. Weaponsmiths are for phalanxes and mithril weapons.

All the more reason to add in this kind of info in tooltips.

Nikis-Knight said:
No one will; Kael likes feedback like this to make the mod more userfriendly. Gaps are often overlooked when people who post have been playing since a feature was released.

People keep directing me to Xienwolf's manual anyway. Curiously enough, he was the one that wanted me to start this thread, though.

xienwolf · May 1, 2008

That's because I never think that my work is done

But I mainly want this thread for my MODCOMP, not for the manual. Especially if people can give specifics as to precisely what is missing a needed tooltip (ie - All Buildings that provide XXX Bonus fail to show it).

Couple good ones in here already which I hadn't thought of myself though. Of course, no guarantee that I can actually get them all to work automatically, but worst case scenario I can create a simple workaround by allowing the GameText.XML to insert a field (which can be extended to as many lines as desired quite easily)

Kael · May 5, 2008

Mylon said:
There's a few areas where the tooltips are incomplete or lacking some information. Tooltips are great not only as little reminders, but also as a means of learning as you play. You can shout RTFM at me all you like, but I still hate having to crack open a book (digital or otherwise) just to play a game.

Some notable areas where tooltips are required:

Buildings for units. Training grounds for axemen/champions, machine shop for phalanx.
Requirements for buildings. Even if the requirement of a river for a brewery is met, it is still nice to know that it requires a river (and that this is why it doesn't show up in other areas).
Wonders. Particularly when discovering a technology, I have to click on the pedia entry to find out what it does, as the mouseover tooltip only tells me the cost.

Also, it would be nice if the "Sid's tips" bits were expanded to assist in some long term planning. Like mention what comes down 2 techs further along the line with a particular tech to give people a better idea of not just what tech does what, but what tech will do what later on.

Promotions. At least for negative ones, it would be nice to know how to cure them easily, and could be included in the description.

Guilds. When mousing over a guild in the city view, it doesn't display any information except the name of guild. (as a side note, it seems every guild is a "headquarters"). It'd be nice to know about the mercenaries' guild, ratcatchers' guild, etc. I noticed that some units got the "hire mercenaries" spell but did not know why (I must've missed the message).

This is great stuff Mylon. I added the tooltips for buildings, that was a gap I never noticed (as Nikis-Knight said if you play to much you tend to take that stuff for granted).

Removal method and strategy stuff is good, but we are still changing to much to lock it down. The only thing worse than no info is outdated info so we tend not to document interworking stuff at this point. Auto-text is awesome though (like the tooltips for unit reqs).

I'll get some help text in for the guilds, that would be great too.

WCH · May 5, 2008

Adaptive Trait needs, needs, needs tooltips. Because when it comes up, there's no way to check what they do -- you can't go to the Civilopedia until after you choose, which is too late to help.

As it stands currently, unless you've been playing long enough to memorize the entire list of traits, you're basically being asked to pick blindly.

A list of what spells each type of mana offers would also be incredibly helpful.

smjjames · May 5, 2008

xienwolf's manual actually helps alot here with the adaptive trait. Although in MP, correct me if I'm wrong here since I've never actually done MP and don't know if it works the same as in SP, you don't always have the leisure of time to look at the manual or something to figure it out.

You still have a really good point here though, the trait changeing box for adaptive needs tooltips badly.

xienwolf · May 5, 2008

Ask and ye shall recieve.

Unzip the attached file and overwrite everything with the Assets Folder. I don't know of any mods that change the EventInfos.xml or RandomEventInterface.py, so it should be compatible with everything out there. If it is not, then it is pretty straightforward what you have to change.

The field <PythonHelp> for each of the Trait Events needs to be set, and the Python Arguements need added (all of them are at the bottom of the file). The main important thing is just the Text, which will work fine with anything else.

This is by no means elegant or perfect. It has to be updated manually if the traits are ever changed. But it DOES get you the tooltips for the exact information you can currently get by doing a mouse-over of each leader in the Civlopedia. Please inform me if I am missing some information which could be nice to add to that.

Missing tooltips

Mylon

Amateur Game Designer

Ringtailed

Anthropomorphic Lemur

TheCowSaysMoooo

Warlord

Nikis-Knight

Deity

Roghar

Warlord

Mylon

Amateur Game Designer

xienwolf

Deity

Kael

Deity

WCH

Prince

smjjames

Emperor

xienwolf

Deity

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