RE: [GD-Design] Configurable GUIs

[brian h. <bri...@py...>]

> Go for #4, but have a "quick hide" and "quick show" buttons that 
hide all
> the non-essential windows such as chat, etc.

That's the direction I'm leaning towards.

> StarTopia came quite close to what I consider to be an ideal UI for 
an RTS -
> small moveable panels, sections that you don't need can be 
collapsed, and we
> managed to have purely modal windows - only one at a time. 

Ah, but that's an easy way out!  If you make everything modal, then 
moving/resizing/selection is trivial because the primary concern I 
have is dealing with other things at the same time in other 
windows/the desktop.

If everything is modal, you don't have that concern, you're 
either "doing this" or "doing that" -- you're never in the ambiguous 
territory of "doing both".

At that point, the interface becomes much simpler to deal with.

-Hook