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henricj / dunelegacy

GNU General Public License v2.0
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Refresh harvester status message on each click #11

Open tbertels opened 2 years ago

tbertels commented 2 years ago

Dune II used to show the exact harvesting percentage on each click. Dune Legacy currently only refreshes the message if we click the harvester after the message has fully disappeared.

tbertels commented 2 years ago

I'm guessing it's because of https://github.com/henricj/dunelegacy/blob/eeb009c16e4e2fd1cfb31f1fd506d6d3a13c010d/src/Game.cpp#L814

henricj commented 2 years ago

I think the idea is to avoid building up an excessive backlog of messages.

There is a red progress bar above any selected harvester, but sometimes it can be difficult to see when not at maximum zoom (and red on top of orange spice doesn't help). At least for debug, I've been thinking about adding some more information to the UI when a single unit is selected. Perhaps duplicating the health status bar (and harvested bar, where applicable) above the unit image, to the right of the repair button in the side panel..? My main motivation in mucking with that part of the UI would be to add state information to help track down the bug that causes units to get stuck (they sit in one place and ignore move/attack commands) and maybe drawing the unit's planned path, if any, on the main map.

juj commented 2 years ago

Observed the same issue on my playthrough as well. I do recall that in the original game one could keep clicking on the harvesters to have their % status update in realtime.

On my playthrough I realized that I wanted to "optimize" the harvesters to return back to base immediately when they would carry enough spice to complete a building that I was doing (for the fastest base build startup).

E.g. if I had 0 spice in bank, and a refinery costs 400, and a full harvester load is 700 spice, I'd like to issue the harvester to return to base immediately when it is >= 400/700 = 57% full so that my next refinery would come online the quickest.

I noticed the visual red/orange bar, which is a great addition - though trying to visually gauge from the bar whether it is at >= 57% is a bit risky to fall short.

In the old game one could keep clicking on the harvester to find when the needed % was reached and then immediately issue a return when the desired % was reached.

Though agree that the original game's UX of "keep clicking on the harvester to poll how full it is at any given time" is not good either, so not sure if there is much value in even reproing the old behavior except if one wanted to be accurate to original game - maybe a permanent continuously updating UI text on the right side bar (below the harvester icon) when a harvester is selected would work better.

tbertels commented 2 years ago

Indeed, I didn't notice that orange bar before.

Duplicating those two bars (and perhaps adding the actual percentage text for the spice?) would be a great idea. The status message could then be removed.

And if that's an occasion to add optional debugging info help track down bugs, it's always a good thing.

PS: I started an older version by error and then the current one, the difference in legibility of the text is still incredible since you fixed #6!