Knights and Merchants.net Forum

@Ravior: Not sure what you talking about, I did WR/AFC modding tools mostly and a dozen of mods (cars, sceneries). See detail at krom.reveur.de

About game design - I suggest you start a fresh topic and ask there more specific questions about it )

Uh ok.

I've had another idea about trading via a certain building and how you could make sure that it wont be abused too much, having a little tradeoff so that its not too unrealistic and unmatching in the game.

What about if you had your standard - warehouse be able to send and receive items from other players?
You could select a certain amount of Items (f.e. 10 Gold-Chests) and klick on a send button (before sending you need to select a player which will receive them).
But instead of sending the 10 items at once, it would take some time to transfer them. F.e. one item could use up to 10 seconds to be transfered to the other player (indicated via a progress bar, like in the shool).
This will keep trading from being abused and also adds a new feature which needs to be used with care and precaution. There are some design elements which would be interesting to think about how they would be set.
Could players abort transfers once they started?
Can they have more than one outgoing and incoming transfer at once?

It could look something like the attached faked gui picture i created. The button with the ? on should be the one that initiates sending. The cyan-colored-bordered item would be the one thats being send, the green one would be the one that is accepted.

Just have a look at the picture and read my idea. What do you think about it?

Off topic: it's "e.g.," which is the latin phrase exempli gratia (for example).

Now, back to business:

It's a nice idea, that is actually worthy of discussion imo; however, I don't believe that it should be in the storehouse. I think it is better suited in the marketplace, because this would be a huge new mod to KaM; just like the marketplace. Also, the marketplace would just make more sense.

Either building (storehouse or marketplace) will need a GUI redesign because this won't fit in the smaller resolutions. Though I must admit, the amount of people using 800x600 are very few these days, and they ought to upgrade anyway

Hmmm, yes. Well, all the gui in the game should be on the left panel, so fitting all the items which could be selected can become tight. Mabye it could be made like a dropdown menu where you select the items instead of having them displayed all the time.

A dropdown menu would be odd for this sort of thing, and it would look bad in KaM anyway imo.

Hmmm... but what system would be better for displaying the 28 item-types in an efficient way which does not overload such a screen? Drop down menus are just for that, you know, theres a bunch of options to choose from but only one could be selected at once. The only other way which is pretty similar for the game is the way you choose which units to train in school or in the barracks. But there its just like a little more than 10 units, not 28.... I don't see it. Its either way... these items need to be hidden the most time and only visible if you need to select one. And that's like drop-down. OR you break with the borders the ingame-gui is designed in by now and create a window for that, where would be much more space.

OR the minimum resolution is raised to like 720p at least, the logo being removed from the screen also.

Do you have an idea? Just saying "it would look bad" is not really much helpful Spray with your own ideas

Dropdown menus are a weird thing to put in a game's GUI. At the moment, I can't think of any games that have them in the in-game GUI, but I'm sure it would be terribly clunky and annoying to use. This is just my personal opinion, but I'm sure that most would agree.

Logo is already removed from the game panel if it does not fit. You can see that by manually resizing KAM Remake in a window.

@Ben: I agree on dropdown menus, they are one of the last resorts when nothing else fits. E.g. multiplayer lobby map selection.

Well when it comes to fitting, you would really have to create some new selection type of thing in the game, like this control Ive seen on other games (have a look on the picture).
It would be a scrollable horizontal list of the items which would be navigated through rapidly. Implementation could be a little tricky, but once done its flipping powerful.

/edit: I added a screenshot with the control used as trade controls in the building which would be used for trade then. Its very small now, though very nicely controllable Of course the current gui is design-style, nothing to do with the finished look - if you want to play around with the design a bit, here is the *.psd-file: http://venion.net/filez/trade_idea.psd

What do you think?

I'm surprised how we haven't thought about that solution for School/Barracks. It will work good for ~10 items. Will take some time to get used to though, because with current scheme e.g. I know I can right-click, then left-click 3 times to get on a stonemason. Need to think about it..

Using this for ware selection is unlikely to work, because there are too many items (28).

Happy to see that you like it

But I don't think that its not usable for ware selection, since you can scroll through as fast as you want.
But you could also make it 2D Scrollable, having the wares laid out as they used to until now.

Such scrolling is better suitable for touch interface, where selection could be done with single finger sweep+tap (short sweep to locate the item and tap to select it).

Having many disordered items is very confusing, how would one for example find a flour among long list of 28 items with only 5 being visible at once and no apparent logic in placement ..

<Talking about a 1D listbox>

Thats extremely easy. You just scroll quickly along the list, see it, and then select it. Its easy as shit, to say the least.

Or to say it on a different way: I don't understand where there should be any problem finding the item you want; also people aren't dumb. They recognized most of the stuff when they used the control 10 to 20 times and then they scroll directly to whichever thing they want.

The control should be capable of holding up to 100 items and it would still be very usable.

@Ravior: I disagree. Selecting item from scrollable list with only few items visible at once is hard. Player would not have enough anchor points to identify his current location and relative position to the item he needs, not to mention that he will need to identify the icon among moving list, he will have to stop often to check. Don't know if you have example at hand, but treeview or a listbox with 10 visible items and total of 120 alphabetically unsorted items is a pain to navigate in. Thats very similar to 1D scrollable list

I totally agree with everything Krom is saying. I hate scrolling with a mouse (as if it were my finger), and having to scroll through 28 items...ugh. No, things like this kill RTS games.

And please don't change the school/barracks selection mechanic unless you are totally set on killing everything about the old game.