RE: [Rails-devel] Fully Working Stock Tokens

[Erik V. <eri...@hc...>]

> I've just committed the rest of the UI code to display stock 
> tokens moving around the stock market.
> 
> You can click on the company name to select the token, and 
> use the buttons to push them all over the board.

Yes! It works for me.

One small gripe: if the stockmarket window gets overlaid by another
window, and then gets focus again, the stockmarket does not repaint,
except the markers (chits) and there immediate surroundings.


I have done the colour change: in CompanyManager.xml all colours 
are now given as hex values. PublicCompanyI.get[F|B]gColour()
now returns a Color object. I have added also getHex[F|B]gColour()
methods that return the colour as a hex value (String) for my servlets.

ui.StockChart has been changed to pick up the Color objects - 
no more need for stringToColor().

I hope the commit has worked - I'm now trying to do that from
Eclipse (I have just upgraded to 3.0), but it is less clear what
is going on there than it was with Tortoise (which BTW does not work
anymore as it now has started using :extssh:, which is what I
specified for Eclipse - Sourceforge does not accept that?)
How do you commit? It's all very confusing.
 
> There is a bug with the message box that displays if no token 
> is selected: the error message doesn't show up in the box. I 
> haven't tracked that bug down, but I suspect that it's likely 
> due to the brute force nature of the current UI code.
> 
> Either way, I think now is the time to start looking at the 
> UI and figuring out how we want to display the various bits 
> of information. I suppose that until we get some volunteers 
> for creating game artwork, or permission to use existing art 
> from the existing games, we can stick with raw numeric 
> output. However, I think it might be worthwhile to eventually 
> display stock certificates graphically and perhaps aim for a 
> drag-n-drop UI.

> Thoughts?

One thought I had is to have Company and Player displays
not unlike those in the bottom half of my servlet output 
(see e.g. http://home.hccnet.nl/erik.vos/18xx/gametest5.html).
In these tables, those fields where some action could be performed
should be highlighted and made clickable (perhaps turn into buttons).

In an SR the player name that has the turn could be highlighted,
and all the share percentages that he could change should become clickable.
For instance, to buy a B&O from IPO Iain should click on the 40%
number on the B&O row, IPO column. To sell a B&O share click on his 
company cell in the Player area, showing P50.
Clicking meaning: "get one away from there".

This avoids the need to have buttons all around.

Just a thought. Designing user interfaces is not one of my strengths....

Oh yes, and we need an Undo button!

Erik.