Kevin R. Bulgrien wrote: > Lalo Martins wrote: > >> A discussion we had a while ago when the v2 client first appeared: >> >> Many laptops on the market today aren't able to do more than 1024x768, >> and that isn't about to change any time soon. >> >> I *normally* play on my PC, but if I ever became unable to play on the >> laptop, I would be very disappointed. > > The biggest challenge there is that the v2 client appears to use a > system defined font, so unless that font is pretty small, the v2 client > cannot be as tight as the v1 GTK client.
Does the gtk1 client actually specify a font to use? I thought that also used the system font. In any case, the gtk2 client also supports themes, so it is certainly possible to make a custom theme that uses a different/smaller font file. Now it would start to be a little goofy to be playing with both the them and font to try and get something that works. OTOH, these are really two separate things - window layout and text size is really independent. Note that the main reason the gtk1 client can fit more in smaller space is that it defaults to an 11x11 map size. So out of the box, that effectively gives a lot more space to things like the text window, inventory, stats, etc. But IMO, it also de-emphasizes the map a bit - the total space used by the map is very little compared to all the rest of the information. That said, there has been some suggestions about features to make things more usable. One which I haven't done yet is something like quick apply areas. Take a little screen place someplace, and have something like 5-10 spaces for icons. Let players drag and drop stuff from their inventory to these icons - these then become fast apply areas - you click on that icon, and whatever that item is is applied (be it potion, weapon, armor). Perhaps also assign them numbers (0-9), and with control-0 or something, it also applies it. If this was done, then during normal exploration of a dungeon, the player probably wouldn't need the inventory area anymore. I could be wrong in this, but my experience is that I need to access a few items in my inventory (switch weapons, drink a potion, etc) - I probably don't need more than 10. But if inventory was hidden (perhaps by a tab), that frees up a lot of space for other information. Note that even with this, the look (on the ground) would still need to be displayed. It'd be even cooler to be able to drag spells into that area, so you have fast apply of spells also. > I mentioned as much on IRC... yes, libglade would be neat. I'd have to > get a lot more comfortable with Glade and the client code to try it > myself. (I was able to do the re-layout without touching any of the > client code.) I think, though, unless it was easy, it seems there may > be better things to do than convert the client to use libglade. It's > not like you have a lot of options on layout unless you have an obscenely > large display - and that's not a problem I have, and it doesn't seem to > be a problem a lot of players have. If need help, I could also look at the libglade stuff. Now as person with an obscenely large display, I find the default gtk2 client works just fine. But would be curious what improvements could be done - but to be honest, I tend to run it at roughly the 1280x1024 resolution - that just gives me room to have other windows up and about. The real advantage of libglade is that it then makes it very easy for anyone to be a tinkerer - anyone with some proficiency in libglade can go about and try moving things about, and not have to worry about needing to recompile, etc. There is a non trivial number of people that download the precompiled packages - OTOH, I have no idea how many of those would then try to go about playing with glade files. > >> Of course, my preference would be for using a widget similar to the >> Gimp's dockable panes, so an user can change the layout at runtime. But >> I looked around and found no such widget in a library format. At one point, that was the reason for the gnome client - the sub windows were tearaway, so you could pull one off, put it elsewhere, etc. I don't see that functionality in glade - doesn't mean that those widgets don't exist, but there is some amount of stuff that requires extra work to do. I know it has also been suggested that there be a split window mode - I think the only thing to do that would be to remove the root window and make sub windows for all the other stuff. But I'm sure there is some stuff that presumes that window_root actually exists, and that the other windows are children off it. Making window_root exist would be easy - if some code requires that heirarchy, that is a problem. Also, with the gtk2 client (compared to the X11 client), some window still has to be nominated as the main/root window - need someplace to put the menubar. X11 client doesn't have a menubar. _______________________________________________ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire