ALFA Universal UI (Plus Other UIs for DMs/Players!)

New models, textures, & integration of 3rd party content.

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FoamBats4All
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Re: ALFA Universal UI (Plus Other UIs for DMs/Players!)

Post by FoamBats4All »

Swift wrote:
Ithildur wrote:UI looks quite good, though taking up a bigger chunk of the screen than I'd imagined.
Size of the UI is only really an issue during combat situations. For UIs that produce effects like this, it is not such an issue to briefly take up a large chunk of screen space as you are unlikely to ever be using them at critical moments.
Yeah. Though the exception to that may be the anchor manager. I made use of a different background for that, which made it bigger than I wanted. Perhaps I can redo that one to be smaller. Though it wouldn't have a nice background, just the boring black of the rest.
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Re: ALFA Universal UI (Plus Other UIs for DMs/Players!)

Post by FoamBats4All »

Going to start back up on this. Comments/suggestions/requests welcome.
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Ithildur
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Re: ALFA Universal UI (Plus Other UIs for DMs/Players!)

Post by Ithildur »

Was just looking at the Anchor Manager and thinking about some recent sessions where I had multiple NPCs anchored... I don't suppose it's possible to tweak things so that when an NPC is anchored, the anchor number (i.e. '#1' or even just '1') floats above the NPCs head visible only to DMs?

Would be much more simple and visual/immediate/direct than actually looking through a GUI... but I'm guessing this is outside the realm of what a new UI system can cover.



Heck, what would be sweet is if we could have visible to DM only floating text above NPCs that give concise info, perhaps when the Tab key is pressed so as to not be overly cluttery, on vital basics like 'CR5 Hostile Stunned FTR4 30/48 HPs' at one glance (rather than having to right click and pull up the character sheet on a dozen NPCs to get that info, or even info that can't be accessed that way such as CR and faction). *dreams*
Formerly: Aglaril Shaelara, Faerun's unlikeliest Bladesinger
Current main: Ky - something

It’s not the critic who counts...The credit belongs to the man who actually is in the arena, who strives violently, who errs and comes up short again and again...who if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement, but who if he fails, fails while daring greatly.-T. Roosevelt
Ronan
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Re: ALFA Universal UI (Plus Other UIs for DMs/Players!)

Post by Ronan »

No idea whats been going on in ALFA-tech land lately, but the two things that would have saved me massive amounts of time are:
  • Google-style (fuzzy string lookup) search for the creator. I started just keeping the mod open in the toolset in another monitor, so I could find where things were quickly.

    Fixing creator hierarchies would of course be nice as well. If you were completely remaking things you'd probably do away with the hierarchies. The data isn't hierarchal after all, its relational (that is an orog should appear both under "orc" and "underdark"). Think of a tag cloud were you might check off things like "hostile", "humanoid" and "sorcerer", and get all possible matches. An easy query to do in LINQ I suspect, if you had the data?

    But thats not such a big gain over text search. Most of the time DMs know what they want and can't find it. Typically its an item, buried somewhere in the creator.
  • A hashtag or other prepended flag for flagging certain lines of speech (or emotes) as needing DM response. The DM would then see these pop up in their own window, and would therefore not need to read every line of player text. Ideally this window would contain "dismiss" and "send tell" buttons. We talked about this in tech about a year ago; I think I got un-motivated (as usual) when I was told there was no generic list-box component to use on the UI side of it.
When DMing larger parties (6-10 players)*, most of my time is taken up by parsing player chat, trying to figure out what my NPCs are going to do/say in response to player actions and looking for shit in the creator. In that order. Of course figuring out NPC responses involves parsing chat, so you might say I'm sorting this brain-profile by 'total time' and not 'own time'. Its still very significant though. Does this mirror the experience of other DMs?

I never had an issue with the rest of the UI. It can be is annoying, especially if you forgot to minimize the blocky widget, but its very usable. I'd bet it increases the learning curve for new DMs, but I don't think its a big issue for experienced ones.

My continued opinion is that UI development should focus on .NET. I realize there are some DMs who DM in full-screen with one monitor, but I think they'd gladly switch to windowed mode if they saw what a proper UI could offer. But whatever, you guys are the ones volunteering your time.

* actual player numbers are of course not always so important. Its the number of chiefs, not the number of indians, which burdens DMs and thus keeps them from being able to handle more players. Party sizes of 10-15 actually aren't so bad barring technical problems, as at that point no one is expecting the DM to respond to anything anyway.
Zelknolf
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Re: ALFA Universal UI (Plus Other UIs for DMs/Players!)

Post by Zelknolf »

Ronan wrote:No idea whats been going on in ALFA-tech land lately, but the two things that would have saved me massive amounts of time are:
  • <--- STUUUUUUUUF --->
The Creator project is actually distinct from the universal UI project right now. We're going to be doing that by knifing the old creator in the kidneys, and thus just have something else open up when you press stop... or comma... I forget which-- the fix for the directory structure is already in, and search strings (which will resemble Windows explorer, not the toolset-- that is, if you're in a folder and then search, it will search that folder and its subfolders, but not its parents) are on the way.

DM Response queue seems like a pretty good idea, provided we could make it adequately discoverable. Not aware of any designs trying to address that need.
FoamBats4All
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Re: ALFA Universal UI (Plus Other UIs for DMs/Players!)

Post by FoamBats4All »

Looking to finish up some of my previous projects, including this. Would still like to hear suggestions/requests from people. Which UIs need replacing? What features are needed?

Some example screenshots of work done so far:

Language Selection -- Already actually in-game. Gives you the @code to speak it in-game, without selecting a language, and more general feedback.
Image

VFX -- Replaces/expands upon the current VFXs available in PC Tools.
Image

DM Tool: Lock Editor -- One example of the various new tools we can offer DMs to let them control the world.
Image

Universal UI -- The core project, to consolidate all tools into one. Ideally people can look at this screenshot and go "oh hey, dice thing is selected (has a thing next to it), then it looks like some attack icon is used, then it's telling me to 'equipped weapon'" and figure rout that the highlighted gives an attack roll with the equipped weapon.
Image

So, still open to requests/suggestions. Plan on working on this one more.
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Ithildur
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Re: ALFA Universal UI (Plus Other UIs for DMs/Players!)

Post by Ithildur »

Is it possible to test these ingame in a test server sometime? That'd be more helpful as far as getting a feel for what tweaks might be needed.
Formerly: Aglaril Shaelara, Faerun's unlikeliest Bladesinger
Current main: Ky - something

It’s not the critic who counts...The credit belongs to the man who actually is in the arena, who strives violently, who errs and comes up short again and again...who if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement, but who if he fails, fails while daring greatly.-T. Roosevelt
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