GUI Details

[FreeWilly]

Some enhancements of the GUI (I use GTK2/3) continue to dropp into my mind. I present some of them here.

Drop 1) Can you make it so that the "Messages" tab is refilled with the content of the entire current day when a turn is saved and a new session of the game is started again?

Drop 2) Is there a way to set the speed by which movements occur in the world display? I think user experience will gain when they can observe what is going on in the battle field or country. Second to this, a switch could be introduced that allows to follow ALL movement events which are visible to the player. (Currently we can see only an unpredictable subset of what there are movements in the game, or so it seems.)

Drop 3) The "Research" panel shows one superfluous dependency link, namely from "Republic" to "Code of Law" (over "Education"). As Code of Law is already implied with Education, there is no need to show a dependency link to it from Republic. Just to be a little meticulous here. Otherwise the panel looks excellent!

EDIT: I found a few more (among the later researches; I give the German names and hope you can understand): "Kernfusion" already implies "Atomkraft" over "Supraleiter". "Supraleiter" already implies "Atomkraft" over "Laser". "Laser" already implies "Massenproduktion" over "Atomkraft".

Perhaps I'm not fully aware what these dependency lines mean, but in my current understanding the mentioned relations are not required.

Cheers!

[cazfi]

Drop 2) Is there a way to set the speed by which movements occur in the world display? I think user experience will gain when they can observe what is going on in the battle field or country. Second to this, a switch could be introduced that allows to follow ALL movement events which are visible to the player. (Currently we can see only an unpredictable subset of what there are movements in the game, or so it seems.)

Game -> Options -> Local Client -> Graphics -> Unit Movement Animation Time
It should show all the moves visible to you.

in my current understanding the mentioned relations are not required.

If the ruleset allows (as standard ones do) holes in tech tree, e.g., one can steal tech from between without knowing the lower tech, the dependency to lower tech means that the upper tech still cannot be researched.

[Ozor Mox]

Drop 1) Can you make it so that the "Messages" tab is refilled with the content of the entire current day when a turn is saved and a new session of the game is started again?

I think this can be done with the option ec_turns. "ec" stands for event cache, and turns specifies the number of turns back from the current one that messages will continue to appear. I use this setting on a longturn server I am currently playing on so when you reconnect you can remember what is going on. You can also use ec_info if you want the messages to be annotated with the turn they correspond to (if ec_turns is set to go further back than one turn for example).

Drop 2) Is there a way to set the speed by which movements occur in the world display? I think user experience will gain when they can observe what is going on in the battle field or country. Second to this, a switch could be introduced that allows to follow ALL movement events which are visible to the player. (Currently we can see only an unpredictable subset of what there are movements in the game, or so it seems.)

I always change the option that cazfi mentioned, as I think the default movement and combat animation times are too fast. Everything whizzes around too fast to see what's going on and you have to catch up after using the messages window.

I also always tick the option to centre on combat, so the map moves to any battles that happen. It's not always ideal in multiplayer with simultaneous turns, but very useful when playing the AI since all the AI turns happen at once between your turns.

[Arbogast]

I have been fooling with these parameters for a while now, but...
I don't understand the whole thing very well. I can't get the re-centering right as I get a lot of noises (cheers, guns, etc.) without seen what's going on.
By the way, I play with 'players moving alternately' for other reasons.

[Ozor Mox]

Enabling centre on combat should move the map to any combat that happens on the map that you can see, whether or not it involves your units. Normal movement of units won't move the map though. The cheers are probably from things like cities celebrating and research being completed (either by you or a civilization that you have an embassy with) so the map won't move for that.

[Arbogast]

Thanks for your clearing tips. But I still don't have the centering thing.
The values in milliseconds are all set to 100.

[cazfi]

1/10 seconds (for the entire animation) is still quite short time for a human to recognize what's going on.

[Arbogast]

Indeed. But any slower settings makes the game crawl and the 'Turn done' is time for a coffee break.
Remember my opinions on the slowness of the game?
(I play on windows XP and at the moment Freeciv2.4.4)

[cazfi]

100ms sounds like a very bad compromise taking bad of both worlds - too fast for you to actually see anything, but still slowing client down.

[Arbogast]

Quite right. I pushed things to 200 Milli and it didn't seem to affect things a lot. I'm just asking: What are the settings most people use?