Scrollable policy screen?

[Androrc the Orc]

Would a scrollable policy screen theoretically be possible through Lua coding? So that one could incorporate, say, Putmalk's policy work besides the usual policies.

 

[Pazyryk]

Yes. You would have to modify the SocialPolicies.xml (or whatever it is called). Scroll bars are just XML elements (I changed the Tech one from horizontal to vertical). I still find UI about the hardest thing to mod, though. Everything is possible. Nothing is documented.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Yes and no.

The current Policy screen is explicitly sized to be 1024x768, to ensure that it is all viewable as-is on machines running at the lowest allowable resolution. That 768-pixel width is exactly enough to cover five policy box backgrounds, their separators, and the borders. If you wanted to add a scroll bar to the existing layout, it'd either have to cover up part of the existing images or else it'd widen the box to where it wouldn't work on that lowest resolution. Or, you'd have to rearrange the existing policies to have fewer than 5 branches in each row. (So adding 2 policy boxes would allow a 4x3 arrangement, with plenty of room for a scroll bar.)

In my own mod I simply added a toggle instead to hide/show my Social Engineering policy box, so that it's 1024x768 when the box is closed and 1024x913 when it's open. That way, people playing at 1024x768 can open the box, click whatever they need, and then close it again to get their "CLOSE" button back into the visible area. But a scroll bar is better if you're going to be adding a lot of policies or branches and still want all of them to be visible.

 

[Pazyryk]

Civ NiGHTS has a really beautiful policy screen:

Spoiler :

No scroll bar there but it does show that things can be moved around and re-sized. I could easily imagine more policies scrolling off to the right. There is a lot of work in this though.

 

[Spatzimaus]

There is a lot of work in this though.

Right. If you're willing to redesign the whole thing from scratch, like NiGHTS did, then you can do all sorts of nice things involving scroll bars. My point was only that if you're trying to make an incremental change to the existing policy screen, you can't easily add something like a scroll bar or additional policy branches without causing problems for people playing on the lower resolutions. It's just a function of the size of the DDS images used for branch backgrounds.

The fact is, if you're willing to make an entirely new design, there's a LOT you can do in Lua to make a window workable without being constrained to the sizes used by the core game. Take, for example, the Mandala in my own Mythology mod; like the Policies screen it's set to an area of 1024x768, there's a lot of popup information when you mouse over things, and I use a series of buttons to add a large amount of information to the screen without running out of room. Once I decided not to copy a window from the standard UI, I was able to do a lot of interesting things with the interface logics.

 

[Androrc the Orc]

Yes. You would have to modify the SocialPolicies.xml (or whatever it is called). Scroll bars are just XML elements (I changed the Tech one from horizontal to vertical). I still find UI about the hardest thing to mod, though. Everything is possible. Nothing is documented.

Yes and no.

The current Policy screen is explicitly sized to be 1024x768, to ensure that it is all viewable as-is on machines running at the lowest allowable resolution. That 768-pixel width is exactly enough to cover five policy box backgrounds, their separators, and the borders. If you wanted to add a scroll bar to the existing layout, it'd either have to cover up part of the existing images or else it'd widen the box to where it wouldn't work on that lowest resolution. Or, you'd have to rearrange the existing policies to have fewer than 5 branches in each row. (So adding 2 policy boxes would allow a 4x3 arrangement, with plenty of room for a scroll bar.)

In my own mod I simply added a toggle instead to hide/show my Social Engineering policy box, so that it's 1024x768 when the box is closed and 1024x913 when it's open. That way, people playing at 1024x768 can open the box, click whatever they need, and then close it again to get their "CLOSE" button back into the visible area. But a scroll bar is better if you're going to be adding a lot of policies or branches and still want all of them to be visible.

Thanks

Anyhow, I think there would be enough space for a scroll bar if one would remove the (almost) blank space that has the "Advanced View" toggle on it.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Anyhow, I think there would be enough space for a scroll bar if one would remove the (almost) blank space that has the "Advanced View" toggle on it.

That space is used for a few other things. For instance, if you build a Wonder or take a Policy that grants you a free policy, a pink "Free Policies: 1" notification will appear on the left side of that bar. My own mod uses that space for a couple other things as well.

And again, that'd only help with horizontal scrolling. To fit a vertical scrollbar in, you'd either have to rearrange all of the branches or overlap something important. So to go back to the original statement: if you want to expand the size of the Policies screen in any way, it's not a small amount of work.

 

[Pazyryk]

Also, to my knowledge, we can't have horizontal and vertical scroll bars for the same screen in Civ5 sad: very annoying for my tech tree, though I have a workaround).