Re: [Rails-devel] Allowed user actions (was: M&H)

[brett l. <wak...@gm...>]

On 8/14/06, Erik Vos <eri...@hc...> wrote:
> Thanks for your comments.
> Just one additional remark for now:
>
> > > A corollary of the above approach would be, that the player
> > turn will
> > > never be over if the allowed-actions List is not yet empty.
> > > So we will need an always-available Done button
> > > (in fact the current No Tile and No Token buttons have that role,
> > > but for clarity I would prefer to get rid of those).
> > >
> >
> > I'd really like to see the No Tile/No Token button merged with the
> > Done button, and just continue to change the text of the button to
> > represent it's current action.
> >
> > However, I don't really like forcing the user to step through each
> > phase. I'd really like the UI to do something along the lines of
> > SimTex's 1830 game, where you can skip unneeded phases by choosing the
> > option you want to do.
> >
> > I'm not certain we could do this without reworking our phase handling
> > a bit, though.
>
> Hmm, that's a different approach, and one worth thinking about.
>
> Not sure how to accomplish this, perhaps a menu bar with options,
> that grey out as they have been used or skipped.

Right, this is basically what the 1830 pc game had.

If you skipped past something, you usually couldn't go back to it.

>
> It does not save many user actions. Currently, users have to click
> a button if they want to get *out of* a turn step, whereas in this way
> they have to select an option to get *into* a step.
>

I agree, it's not a huge savings.  The one added benefit is simply
being able to see all phases of the OR in a neat list, so that you get
a reminder of what's coming up.

I wouldn't really consider a change like this a very high priority, if
we decide to do it at all.


> The allowed-action selection, needed to build the menu, will be more
> complex,
> because we do not only have to worry about what actions are currently
> possible,
> but also about what later turn steps a player might legitimately jump to.
> But that does not look to be insurmountable.
>
> Handling the jumps should not be a big deal, as the game engine already has
> turn step awareness.
>
> Nice ideas to think about if my coming vacation (the next two weeks)
> would turn out to be rainy - it's in mid-Germany, could well be so... :-(
>

Have a good vacation.

One of these days, I'd really like to get to Essen.

---Brett.