[Rails-devel] Improvements to the UI functions

[Stefan F. (web.de) <ste...@we...>]

Not too exciting world-cup games invite to play around with the user 
interface. 

A) Auto-Scrolling
The map scrolls automatically to center the display on the route network
of the active company. Only done at the start of the tile laying step and only 
if the current zoom step requires scrolling.

Currently default on, but can be switched off in the my.properties-file:
map.autoscroll=no

Any opinion if this should be the default or is this too hectic? Another 
option is to add a similar function that does an auto-zoom (out), if the 
route network of the active company cannot be displayed in the current 
map panel. But this might be too obtrusive? And should it return to some 
standard zoomstep (but which?), when the next company starts operating?

B) Change of fonts for user interface possible
All settings done in my.properties

font.ui.scale allows to scale relative to the default (12pt)
font.ui.name allows to choose available fonts on the system
font.ui.style allows to switch between plain/bold style

This is done globally for all fonts used. It still requires some tweaks on 
some panels to accomodate large font sizes. 
The font sizes used on the map should also be handled separately in the 
future.

C) Game specific settings possible
The settings defined for the options above allow game specific overrides.
For this simply append the game name to the option.

Example:
font.ui.scale.18EU=0.8 
changes the font scale for 18EU only.

Another option defined is
map.zoomstep, which allows to initialize the zoomstep.

Here game specific settings are also helpful.

D) Refactoring of the HexMap classes
In the process of adding the options, I refactored the HexMap classes slightly 
to avoid some redundancies in the coordinate calculations. I also hope that 
this a remedy to some of the problems with the zoom function, which I 
observed regularely. If anyone experience any new problems with the map 
display, please report.

Question to Erik here:
From the Scale class it seems that the scale is 15 and then rescaled depending 
on the screen resolution, as soon as the Scale class is setup
But that  is overwritten by a call from MapPanel:
Scale.set(16);
which overwrites that with 16 and no rescaling is done.
Is that the true intention or is this a code artifact?

Stefan