UI modifications (suggestions and discussion)

Will see if I find documentation what exatly to change or not to change so i don´t mess soemthing up over theweekend :)

Latest SVN now has this change (to a bitmask), and so will support display of defenses without Wonders if you want.
 
Could we give ambushers an option- (attack city -OR- move into city to infiltrate) Rather than having to try to move through the city and cancel movement while its in the city so you can infiltrate. Also this could be used for rogues etc, but instead of 'infiltrate' it'd just give you a 'attack?' option.

If this is too hard just remove these units ability to attack cities altogether since they already have a -% to city attacks.
 
We're fairly desperate over here for an option to set a particular citizen specialist type as the default priority (fill these first button). Nothing is more annoying than having to deal with a disagreement with the mayors on these matters. You pretty much have to check every round to get the city to keep your specialists going where they should be and that's very important when you're trying to get a city to birth a particular type, such as merchants when Corporations are coming up.
 
We're fairly desperate over here for an option to set a particular citizen specialist type as the default priority (fill these first button). Nothing is more annoying than having to deal with a disagreement with the mayors on these matters. You pretty much have to check every round to get the city to keep your specialists going where they should be and that's very important when you're trying to get a city to birth a particular type, such as merchants when Corporations are coming up.
While not quite what you are asking for, you can put an emphasis on a particular specialist type by clicking on it on the city screen.
 
Could the event log , that is also displayed under the research bar be made to display a civs name instead of the leader? I tend to remember the nations far faster then the leaders (especially those with "foreign" names I wouldn´t dare to pronounce because I would probably fail), and with some 20 ore more other civs on the map it would realy help me to keep track of war and peace more easily.
 
When I have a stack of units and im attacking a city or something (anything) I can never tell which unit is actually attacking. Like as I go through my units attack, attack, attack etc I have no idea which units are selected each time unless i un-group them and attack that way which isn't practical.
 
While not quite what you are asking for, you can put an emphasis on a particular specialist type by clicking on it on the city screen.

Doesn't seem to work. Maybe I'm doing it wrong... but it does depress the specialist as if hitting a button... just doesn't do anything outside of that.
 
Ok, we have a BIG issue with the help popup lengths. I'd LOVE to adjust some things about this but I really have no idea where to find the controls. We need to:
A) make the list width a bit wider so that it reduces the amount of lines where lines are wrapping.
and
B) establish a maximum number of lines in a column, upon exceeding which, the list wraps to a new column.

We simply have too much critical information on some units and that's about to get a bit worse. Already, you hover over some units in the build help and you can't even see the name of the unit as its pushed off the screen or is up hidden under the sliders. This is just unworkable and requires an immediate solution. Does anyone know how to manipulate the settings for this or at least could guide me to where the controls are located?

Also... I'm having a nasty little time trying to find where the civopedia unit pages are pulling up the unitclass. I've begun to wonder if its in the dll at all or if its somehow controlled in python somewhere. This is just a 'rounding out a mod' issue and isn't so absolutely critical.
 
Ok, we have a BIG issue with the help popup lengths. I'd LOVE to adjust some things about this but I really have no idea where to find the controls. We need to:
A) make the list width a bit wider so that it reduces the amount of lines where lines are wrapping.
and
B) establish a maximum number of lines in a column, upon exceeding which, the list wraps to a new column.

We simply have too much critical information on some units and that's about to get a bit worse. Already, you hover over some units in the build help and you can't even see the name of the unit as its pushed off the screen or is up hidden under the sliders. This is just unworkable and requires an immediate solution. Does anyone know how to manipulate the settings for this or at least could guide me to where the controls are located?

Also... I'm having a nasty little time trying to find where the civopedia unit pages are pulling up the unitclass. I've begun to wonder if its in the dll at all or if its somehow controlled in python somewhere. This is just a 'rounding out a mod' issue and isn't so absolutely critical.

The routines you want are in CvGameTextMgr.cpp - setUnitHelp() etc. I am unaware of any mechanism to control the width of popups (I **think** the game engine decides that on its own and just scales the height for the text we return to be displayed, so it may well be out of our control). Bext approach is almost certainly to precis the text (collapsing promotion sequences to just the last one and generating cumulative text etc.)
 
I had begun to suspect its established in the exe as in the text manager file, I couldn't find anything to suggest we had power there (though I thought there might be somewhere else that all such kinds of popups were being defined.)

(collapsing promotion sequences to just the last one and generating cumulative text etc.)
I may need you to go into more detail on these thoughts so I can follow your drift.
Is there a way to set up a new message panel of our own and override the original help pops? hmm... There IS a way to get it to show a second help popup page when you hit shift... Perhaps I can raid that kind of thinking for more use.
 
Instead of showing combat I through VI on a unit just show combat VI. Similarly for any of the numbered promotions. Hover over of the button/icon would need to show the sum of the changes I-VI not just the combat VI change.

I have noticed that some people have put pedia style text in some of the strategy text areas and this is also causing over flow of the hover text when building stuff.
 
Instead of showing combat I through VI on a unit just show combat VI. Similarly for any of the numbered promotions. Hover over of the button/icon would need to show the sum of the changes I-VI not just the combat VI change.

I have noticed that some people have put pedia style text in some of the strategy text areas and this is also causing over flow of the hover text when building stuff.

IRT the first issue, if someone else hasn't gotten to it first, I was planning on taking a moment to look over the manner in which FFH2 handles this in their code and seeing if it would be easily adopted here as well. Otherwise I've theorized on a few ways of doing this too. I may be able to get this fit into my next update... I agree it's getting to be pretty important to address.

The latter issue/suggestion could be a good audit project but its certainly not going to be a full solution. I'm still considering ways to condense this somehow if we're truly limited here.
 
IRT the first issue, if someone else hasn't gotten to it first, I was planning on taking a moment to look over the manner in which FFH2 handles this in their code and seeing if it would be easily adopted here as well.

Yeah i agree, the last and most current promotion would probably work better in the interface miniscreen because if you put alot of units in a stack, PLUS the GG if fills out the screen and cant handle them all, so good intentions, what do you'll think?
 
Would love for a way to remove certain units/buildings from the available list in a city. Never need to build spies, missionaries, or advanced defenses in my city.
 
Lots of useful suggestions here!

Suggestion: split the pseudo-buildings that are actually 'effects' into their own list. Thus all the 'crime(XXX)' 'buildings' would appear in a separate 'effects' list (maybe the cultures too??).

The new list could appear in one of several ways:
  • As a separate tab on the panel that currently contaisn the building list
  • As a third tab on the right hand panel that currently already has tabs for 'properties' and 'resources' [this is my preference because it's a minimal chnage to the layout)
  • By splitting the current panel that contains the buildings into two vertically

The benefit would be lack of 'huh' reactions to seeing obvious not-really-buildings in the buildings list, as well as having the effcts in on place, making it easier to se at a glance what effects are currently present.
I like the part of removing the pseudo-buildings from the buildings list. Similarly, I'd like to have the "lesser" resources in a separate resources list. "Lesser" in this case could be resources that don't grant anything like extra :), :health: or :yuck: but instead enable other buildings (e.g. charcoal, etc.)

If I select the "choose tech" option on a great person, I don´t get the techs tooltips in the list where i can choose. It is not the biggest problem ever, since i mostly choose important key techs, but it would be nice to have, in order not to choose something that suddenly oboletes soemthing important.
Yes, although I don't use that screen very much, I've noticed it doesn't display the techs' tooltip nor the number of :science: each tech costs. I find this last matter important because I tend to use the strategy of bulb the most expensive tech almost always (unless there is a cheaper tech I really need at that moment).

I have a suggestion for making the F1 (City Status) screen more useful, at least in my opinion: Stop the list from re-sorting every time you make a change. For example, if you sort your cities by most productive, then change one city's production, the list gets re-sorted by how long you've had the city.

Likewise, if you have a city status screen that is long enough to scroll, and you change a production, the list re-sorts so that the city you changed is at the bottom of the visible list. This leads to a really annoying pause between changing multiple cities. I play with "Minimize Pop-Ups" on, so with F1, I can easily cities that need new production assigned, but it's slower with the pause between cities while the list re-sorts each time.
Yes! I need this too :D

When I have a stack of units and im attacking a city or something (anything) I can never tell which unit is actually attacking. Like as I go through my units attack, attack, attack etc I have no idea which units are selected each time unless i un-group them and attack that way which isn't practical.
Exactly ;)

Ok, we have a BIG issue with the help popup lengths. I'd LOVE to adjust some things about this but I really have no idea where to find the controls. We need to:
A) make the list width a bit wider so that it reduces the amount of lines where lines are wrapping.
and
B) establish a maximum number of lines in a column, upon exceeding which, the list wraps to a new column.
Is this about the popup that shows up when hovering over a unit stack? If so, yes, I find it a problem too, one we've been suffering since vanilla Civ4. When there are a lot of units in a stack, especially when the top one is a GG or has a lot of promotions, the tooltip fills the entire screen vertically and you can see it continues up but cannot scroll to see the rest. There is the grouping of "lesser" units of the same type displayed as the name of the unit class followed by the number of instances of that unit in the stack, but somehow this is not enough (you still need to scroll to see the rest but there is no way to scroll).

Instead of showing combat I through VI on a unit just show combat VI. Similarly for any of the numbered promotions. Hover over of the button/icon would need to show the sum of the changes I-VI not just the combat VI change.
This would be great too.

Also:

- There are several lists in the UI which contents are too long to display and you can't see all content. One that comes to mind right now is the trade routes list: if you have trade routes providing you with two types of bonuses (e.g. :food: and :commerce:) each line is too long and you don't get to see the full data.

- It would be great if the options I chose for the units/buildings filter in each city screen were saved with the game.

I'm not sure if these are bugs, suggestions or little improvements, if these don't belong in this thread forgive me :blush:
 
Regarding the filters for the city build list:
Could the filters for available units/buildings be split? Since right now I can filter out unavailable buildings on the map, and units in the city screen.. so i need to always hop inbetween map and city screen to set up my cities. And like lunfa_reo pointed out: I need to do it evry time I load a savegame.
 
Regarding the filters for the city build list:
Could the filters for available units/buildings be split? Since right now I can filter out unavailable buildings on the map, and units in the city screen.. so i need to always hop inbetween map and city screen to set up my cities. And like lunfa_reo pointed out: I need to do it evry time I load a savegame.
I am not sure I get what you mean. The units/building filters are split in the first place and you switch between them with the buttons to the right of the building list.
And yes, they are not saved in the savegame currently though that is definitely something I can add.
 
Could we give ambushers an option- (attack city -OR- move into city to infiltrate) Rather than having to try to move through the city and cancel movement while its in the city so you can infiltrate. Also this could be used for rogues etc, but instead of 'infiltrate' it'd just give you a 'attack?' option.

If this is too hard just remove these units ability to attack cities altogether since they already have a -% to city attacks.

I second this
 
Was thinking in the BUG menu, maybe a few 'default' settings should be considered.

Such as on automated workers - burn forest/burn jungle/burn bamboo/ burn sword grass all off by default.
Maybe all the hide unconstructable building and unavailable worker actions etc.
The off to declare war when u move on same tile should be off i think.
Automate-hunt should have a higher minimum, 65-70 I think, hate when they suicide into Neanderthals.
Do you guys like PLE Draw Method and PLE filter behaviour options?
Bunch of others that the team might like to look at.
 
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