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Message header
Area/Game:Wooden Ships & Iron Men
1Topic:Bugs and Improvements
Subject:Re: New interface needed
Posted by: karllagov - 14years 100days ago.
Message text
dcr66 wrote:
BlueDragon wrote:
Many months ago, while still working on the Basic version, Nick told me that one of the goals in WS&IM ToDoList was a better interface to control the many ships scenarios. At that time, the priority was to fix the Basic version, so working on a new interface was postponed.

Now, with the addition of so many additional controls/informations for the Advanced version, the current interface is reaching its limits, so it's time to think about a new one.

One of the key ideas for the new interface is to make many-ships management easier: one of the problems when you have many ships under your control is that you can have a quite long control window and many ships scattered around an equally long (and large) sea map so it's often hard to find the ship associated with each part of the control window, especially when multiple ships have the same (or similar) 3-letters abbreviation.

I have yet to talk with Nick about how the new interface might look like and you are all very welcome to write your suggestions


Whatever you and Nick decide to do, it should have better usability for tablets (IPod, etc.) and handheld device (IPhone, Android, BlackBerry). Few things you can do:

  • Limit the map size. If the ships sail too far, they have disengaged. 0 points for anybody. If everybody chicken out, the last side on board wins. If you choose to do that, you need to mark the map edge with some distinctive boundary so people will see it.

  • Put the Ship control where the Ship Status currently is. I rarely use the ship status. If I need to know the status, I will just do a MouseOver or MouseMove on the ship graphics.

  • If limiting map size is not desirable, what about an IFrame or something like that on the map itself. Hence the UI stays the same size and the user will have to scroll the map separately. You need to check whether such implementation is workable in tablet and smartphone.

  • 2 interface behaviors: one for regular browsers and the other one for tablet/smarphone.






  • Limiting the map size only makes sense if there is no fighting going on at either end of the map.

    I like Hubert's suggestion about scrapping the ship status. I never use it.

    You could also use colors. For example: chain shot has a green window. Full sails has a black outline in the window... one would need to play around with that a little to get pleasing results.

    Maybe stackable windows to group ships which all will reiceive the same set of orders?

    Trying to think of more ...
    Messages thread
    Posting elapsed timePosted bySubject

    14years 102days BlueDragon New interface needed
    14years 102days dcr66 Re: New interface needed
    14years 100days karllagov Re: New interface needed
    14years 100days BlueDragon Re: New interface needed
    14years 100days BlueDragon Re: New interface needed
     14years 100days dcr66 Re: New interface needed
      14years 98days dkalenda Re: New interface needed
       14years 98days karllagov Re: New interface needed
        14years 98days BlueDragon Re: New interface needed
         14years 97days dcr66 Re: New interface needed
    14years 96days Electro Re: New interface needed
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