search

widelands / widelands

Widelands is a free, open source real-time strategy game with singleplayer campaigns and a multiplayer mode. The game was inspired by Settlers II™ (© Bluebyte) but has significantly more variety and depth to it.
https://www.widelands.org/
GNU General Public License v2.0
2.02k stars 158 forks source link

Have some way to signal parts of the minimap to other players #1900

Open bunnybot opened 5 years ago

bunnybot commented 5 years ago

In multiplayer it would be useful to have some way of highlighting parts of the map for other players. Useful applications could be planning which areas should be scouted or attacked by different players, or as a "Help! I'm under attack" without having to deal with descriptions like west of your kingdom, south of the green player, just above the mountain. Instead the player would be able to send some signal which will light up on other players (preferably allies) minimap displaying where the signal came from. While it would be neat, I am not sure if we currently have a good way of adding it to the minimap. Here are some of my initial suggestions and considerations.

How to do it - why it won't work. Left-click the minimap - Already used for going to another part of the map, which is (more) useful. Would not want other players to see every time I click somewhere on the map. Right-click the minimap - As all other windows, it closes. I would prefer to maintain consistency with other windows, and I don't see the minimap as unique or different enough to justify treating it differently. Hold some button and click at the same time - No. Cumbersome, complex and hard to discover. Add a button to the minimap - Could work, click a button which activate "notify-mode" and would then notify other players instead of going to an area if you click on the map. Only drawback is, currently we have an even number of buttons in the minimap so adding only one would make the rows unsymmetrical plus it wouldn't look as good and orderly as currently.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions which might work?

Imported from Launchpad using lp2gh.

bunnybot commented 5 years ago

(by gamag) Maybe it would be an idea to add a link to each chat-message, which brings you to the place on the map which the writer was viewing when he wrote the message. This Link could also be manually added to the message by the writer, using a keyword like \mypos

this wouldn't be as comfortable as using the minimap, but maybe it would be easier to use and to find a way to implement it.

bunnybot commented 5 years ago

(by sirver) I find this an excellent idea!

bunnybot commented 5 years ago

(by hjd) I have some concerns/thoughts based on the idea of including it as a part of the chat.

1) "add a link to each chat-message, which brings you to the place on the map which the writer was viewing when he wrote the message" I think this has some privacy implication. Imagine casual chat between two enemy players which would reveal where their territories are located since it is in the background when they send a message. Additionally, I think this feature is more useful if locations are only sent when they are considered important. When a location is marked, the instinct should tell a player "this is something important, I should look at this right away". If each message contains a location, they are more likely to ignore them or filter them out, and may then miss important information in cases where it actually is useful.

2) A keyword like \mypos would be easy to implement, but it would likely be harder to discover and/or use. I would prefer a button.

3) Related to privacy, and something we should probably decide is who we are going to show the messages for. Only allies, or all players on the map. I think communication between allies would be the main purpose, but there would also be cases where you want to show something to a non-ally. Having two different options would of course solve this, but increase complexity.

4) We should probably take a look at other games to see how similar features work there.

bunnybot commented 5 years ago

(by gamag) I did some painting on the chat window ...

To fill space I had to invent some more functions which may be useful or not.

I'm not totally happy with the result, maybe buttons are better than check-boxes. And everything is a little to big.

By the way, why don't we support Unicode in chat window I tried გამარჯობა, its in chat window something like [][][][][] but in the console its "[Host]: chat: nobody1: გამარჯობა"

bunnybot commented 5 years ago

(by sirver) I find the buttons a suboptimal solution, mainly because pictograms are much better than text -> fixed width in all languages and prettier.

And we suppport unicode in the chat, but the font we use doesn't contain glyphs for them. It is really hard to come by a good open source font that contains most unicode glyphs and looks good in widelands. If you have suggestions, shoot.

bunnybot commented 5 years ago

(by qcumber-some) The "Droid" fonts (Apache License) look very good to me, they support quite a lot character sets and made for clear visibility on small, medium-resolution devices (read: Smartphones/Tablets).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droid_fonts

Don't know how they look in Widelands, but I can imagine that Droid Sans might look great ;-)

bunnybot commented 5 years ago

(by nasenbaer) Unfortunally Apache License is not compatible with GPL. However we could update our version of FreeSerif and FreeSans. I am pretty sure they added quite many new glyphs in the last years.

bunnybot commented 5 years ago

(by shevonar) Actually Apache License 2 and GPL 3 are compatible: http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html. Does Widelands use GPL3? If yes we should have no problem.

bunnybot commented 5 years ago

(by hjd) Shevonar: Widelands use GPL2.

Anyways, the discussion about fonts is drifting off-topic, and probably fits better in bug 662800.

bunnybot commented 5 years ago

(by sirver) Setting to incomplete for bug sweeping.

bunnybot commented 5 years ago

(by janitor) [Expired for widelands because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

bunnybot commented 5 years ago

(by sirver) I feel like I saw a different bug with the same message, but I could not find it right now.

bunnybot commented 5 years ago

(by hjd) SirVer: bug 566434 which was marked as a duplicate of this a couple of days ago?

bunnybot commented 5 years ago

(by gunchleoc) I tried to at least display the coordinates while reordering the elements for the debug_ui, but I failed at triggering when the chat window opens.