Re: [GD-Design] (GUI) Playfield aspect ratio

[Mickael P. <mpo...@ed...>]

Erin Daly wrote:
> I don't know the real reasons behind Blizzard's choice, but I suspect
> it's because scanning horizontally is easier for the brain than
> scanning vertically (reading left-right and all that).

Please note that WarCraft 1 & 2 had a left sidebar, and thus had a nearly
square playfield. The horizontal menus appeared with StarCraft.

Considering the efficiency of "clicks", I don't think it's the reason,
simply because hardcore RTS player never click on something else than units,
they all use keyboard shortcuts. There is no reason to lose time clicking on
the gui.




> Interestingly, Command and Conquer had a sidebar HUD for many years,
> but recently switched to a horizontal bar with their latest game (C&C
> Generals).


I always considered that C&C was wasting a loot of room on screen with their
design. And forcing the player to scroll down in a list to find what they
wanted to build was simply a non-sense...


Concerning user configurable GUI, I don't really like them.

Games like Diablo (1) that have fixed size panels and dynamically update
game display depending of which panels are displayed work fine. You can
gather things on the ground while still playing and fighting,
activate/deactivate panels with keypressed... it all work fine.
Recently NeverWinterNights have been doing the same, and it works quite
nicely. There are some glitches, but well mostly it worked fine.

An example of reconfigurable/resizable/movable windows scheme can be found
in Morrowind. How it sucks !!! You can almost never find a non overlapping
scheme that work correctly. It uses tabbed selections in the inventory, but
even with this due to clumsy design you still manage to get lot's of items
in each inventory page so you still need slider bars... that takes room in
the windows thus even more reducing the usability of the whole thing.

Generaly speaking, when the GUI system try to be cool, and even to think for
you in general it sucks: just look Word. Some people seems to like the
"intuitive help", the smart assistants, and automatic folding of less used
items, and automatic replacement of :) by real bitmap smileys. A lot of
people seems to first deactivate all these features because they break their
work flow: If the program keep moving things around because you don't use
them, you keep not finding them where they were the last time you use them
:(

So better _design_ a really good interaction system for your particular
game, allow the use of shortcuts to access any particular thing, if you need
a GUI make it nice and usable, but don't try to be very smart. In general it
bites you back.


    Mickael Pointier