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erkyrath / tworld

A choice-based shared online text environment sandbox
MIT License
72 stars 13 forks source link

Alternate scrolling UI #179

Open erkyrath opened 9 years ago

erkyrath commented 9 years ago

One of Emily's blog posts (https://emshort.wordpress.com/2015/05/25/writing-for-seltani-in-general/) talks about the general busy-ness of the UI.

Possible alternative: combine the locale, focus, and event information in a single scrolling pane. Only the most recent locale and focus blocks would have active hyperlinks. This would be verbose -- the descriptions could be updated a lot if you were actively exploring, or if another player were pushing a lot of buttons. And then there are "invisible" updates (refreshes which wind up not changing anything); those would probably become perceptible and confusing.

But this would still be more comfortable for some players.

Note that we're talking about a client-only change here. The world design and transport protocol would remain the same.

erkyrath commented 9 years ago

Oh, there's also the instance pane.

And the local-players "pane", which is normally tacked onto the locale but is really a separate item.

erkyrath commented 9 years ago

I suppose we could eventually work up to some gimmick where the most recent (hyperlink-active) block is silently replaced if a new block arrives that looks the same. (Same text, possibly different hyperlink keys.)

erkyrath commented 9 years ago

Include buttons for "repeat locale description" (LOOK) and "repeat focus description" (if there is one) (EXAMINE). These do not require server requests, obviously.