Knights and Merchants.net Forum

Been implementing 1024x576 and up support into Remake recently. Going through menus and allowing elements to resize where appropriate. Some screens are easy (e.g. main menu, which fit in 800x600 in original game), some need work:
and some are quite hard to manage - e.g. Lobby. How to squeeze everything into yellow outline? (see pic)

I think the player list could have two column and smaller location, team and color selector. They could be only one square.
The game mode selector could be only four pictures, and if the user move the mouse over it, it would display its name.
The mode, under the map description, could be also eliminated as it's displayed twice, the size could be in the map description, but the minimap also shows it.

@kocsis1david: These are good ideas. How would you picture these icons to be simple and understandable?

Start Location ?
Team ?
Flag Color: this one is simple, we can just take flag that units or houses use

Actually we've made the minimap scale so it's always the same size no matter what size the map is, so you really can't tell the map size from the minimap. Maybe it would be better not to scale it?

I've done the new player list layout:

The pictures can be downloaded here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/28475953/KaM/lobby.7z
Maybe the pings are not the best to display so many times. The green dot in front of player means that he's ready
I would draw the location, team number over the picture with some clearly visible font. I don't know how the selection would work, maybe left and right clicks could increase and decrease the number.

I think it's better if the map is scaled, maybe it should be in the map description. Or if you want I can make a small picture for each map type, and it could be selected by clicking to it. We would save more space with it.

@kocsis1david: That looks very nice in fact! I like the flags idea and the dots to display "ready" status. Army look very nice too.

I would try to replace pings with some other kind of dot or a bar (maybe made from 3 section alike so [][][]).
The meaning of soldiers and green clouds are not very obvious, what do they mean?
Section titles would be good too, if we can make them shorter or displayed as a hints on mouse hovering over.

It's not green clouds, it's three islands, it would be location selector. The soldiers have different color and they are together that means they are allies. But it's possible to make hints when the the mouse is over it for them too.

I like some of your ideas, such as the green dot for ready/not ready. The colour selection also works quite well as a flag. I'd prefer a numeric ping than just a "bars" display like Krom suggested.
We discussed players clicking on the minimap to select locations, I wonder whether we could somehow highlight the selected location to show which player it is...
The chat can be made smaller (auto sized based on resolution) and the "size/mode" section can be deleted. The map selection area can be made more compact.

I would rather not make the UI ugly/less friendly for everybody just to support lower resolutions if possible... but it's hard to see how we'll trim away so much space.

I have another idea, I think it's clear and fast to use, but it needs a lot of work:

The player should be dragged to teams and locations. The "?" means that no location had been selected. The AI player could be added by dragging "AI player" at left side. It would be hidden if the max. player number is reached.
The next team would appear if the previous is already used. There could be maximum 6 rows, if there are 3 players in 2 teams, and 2 in other teams.

Hum, I'm not sure.... Why not just something like this:

NOTE: It is very very roughly made, lol. Just to give the main idea.




Ready Status:
Green - READY
Red - NOT READY
BLUE - HOST [doesn't need to be ready]
Grey - AI PLAYER [doesn't need to be ready]
Black - NO PLAYER [doesn't need to be ready]

Dragging players to locations on the map is very unintuitive. I think we stick to original approach (dropboxes) in one way or another.

Most of the problems are arise from long texts in localized versions, e.g. "Номер команды" (Location) in Russian take quite a width .. so the first way to fix that is to get rid of titles by using intuitive selectors (flags to select color is a perfect solution). Dots for status (red, green, grey) are okay (although they may be replaced with thumbsup or thumbsdown?) Location .. that hard to picture with something .. Team - even harder ..

My idea was to make the players list less wide and grow map settings top (it needs more space..)
Then when removed status bar from top, and reducing chat height it will fit into 576px.

I admit that dragging players was a bit crazy idea. I think thumbsdown is not good, because it means downgrading while red dot means that you can't go. If you have a good idea to picture location and team, I can make them.
Not a bad idea.

Sorry if this is ancient history now, but I don't like the idea of making the players list have 2 columns. It looks a lot less clear to me. I really like what you've done with the scroll pop-up in the first post... I think maybe the solution for smaller resolutions is to split things into different screens / pop-ups, i.e. a "View Players" button to bring up the players list or something.

We have kept the single column layout