GUI showoff thread #3

Antonius

Single prompt is (probably) fine while you're fighting, if that's the way you want to go. It makes reviewing a fight afterwards about a thousand times more difficult though. Things people generally have on their prompt: current health and mana, some key defences, afflictions, timestamp.

Without those, you can't say "Well, I should have run away or started being extra defensive right here because I was low on health.", or "Wow, that single attack did a lot of damage - what is that and how do I avoid it?" or "Okay, I was almost locked then so I should have done X instead.", etc. If you're going to use a single prompt in your GUI, you should at least make sure it's still being included in your logs with all of that information.

Kogan

If using SVO you can vconfig singlepromptkeep if you insist on keeping a single prompt for quick reference. This will still give you the prompts in between actions, but will also keep a single prompt at the bottom. Though I do not use single prompt.

Torinn

Indeed single prompt is great for logging purposes.  In the middle of fighting though I prefer less clutter with static places to look for affs, health, etc.  I also have noticed often those who have been playing a long time dislike single prompt so I think it may also be a preference for whatever you're used to.  

Vadimuses

Nice UI! Try adding some images to it - they're a very cheap & easy way to level up your UI

Armali

It makes post fight reviewing almost impossible in any meaningful fashion, for yourself or for others.

Alyxeri

Torinn said:

Indeed single prompt is great for logging purposes.

I'm guessing you meant "isn't great"

I have my affs/health in a window that pops up, when I'm in the middle of a fight, to keep track of. As the others have said, you're only doing yourself a disfavour by using single prompt, when going back through a fight afterwards to assess things. Though I also have my affs in prompt coloured a meaningful way, so there's that too.

I'm not exactly sure how removing your prompt from the buffer makes it 'better' mid fight, either. Prompt helps to separate actions and makes it actually cleaner to glimpse mid fight. Not worse.

Torinn

Yeah I meant isn't great, whoops!  I hate non-single prompt for the 80% of my time spent doing non-combat stuff.  I find it really distracting while trying to RP for instance.  But for logging it's useful.  Mid-combat yes and no imho depending on how well you have your prompt set up and what other UI elements you're using instead of prompt.  It's personal preference, honestly.

Salisa

I don't use a prompt at all, helps my immersion experience.

Alyxeri

Salisa said:

I don't use a prompt at all, helps my immersion experience.

It's okay, you're a Depthswalker. You just kill people before they do any real harm to you anyway.

Something something DW OP something something nerf farrah something.

Tysandr

Shub said:

Maybe this is not the right thread, but the opinions are so strong that I feel I need to know. What are these reasons, why is single prompt so bad?

I do just about anything I can to slow down the scrolling to minimize my chances of missing something important. The balance and rage indicators and the chat panel were also part of that effort, to get as much noise out of the scroll window as I could. I suppose I could ditch the prompt completely now that I have the vitals gauges and balance labels, but I got so used to seeing it.

Here's a crazy idea. What if, just saying, you appended your prompt to the end/beginning of the packet (so you lose a newline and reduce scrolling), and then made that prompt invisible until you toggle it to be visible?

Adobe Blank

It's almost as if that's an idea.

Vender

here's my GUI made with geyser.. pretty happy with it given the screen real estate that I have.

also here is my battlestation

Alyxeri

Damn it man, at least set the background of your chat console to black instead of grey. You could also probably make the main buffer a little thinner, to give yourself more space for another 5-6 letters on chat. Can't imagine how painful that'd be to read if you had someone giving a speech or something, and it ended up being 15+ lines in your console

eta: I guess that depends on how long your prompt gets, though.

Kogan

@Vender

You can give yourself a little more room to work if you go Options > Preferences > uncheck show main toolbar. Then you do have to navigate to scripts via clicking toolbox > scripts, but you gain a noticeable amount of room.

Klendathu

Kogan said:

@Vender

You can give yourself a little more room to work if you go Options > Preferences > uncheck show main toolbar. Then you do have to navigate to scripts via clicking toolbox > scripts, but you gain a noticeable amount of room.

Or use ALT-E like a pro...

Caelan

People are worried about the chat tabs and I'm all "Dude, WRONG KEYBOARD"

Alyxeri

Caelan said:

People are worried about the chat tabs and I'm all "Dude, WRONG KEYBOARD"

I mean Iocun killed people with a midi controller. Quite successfully.

Vender

Alyxeri said:

Damn it man, at least set the background of your chat console to black instead of grey. You could also probably make the main buffer a little thinner, to give yourself more space for another 5-6 letters on chat. Can't imagine how painful that'd be to read if you had someone giving a speech or something, and it ended up being 15+ lines in your console

eta: I guess that depends on how long your prompt gets, though.

like i said, i am pretty happy with my set up. i prefer the grey with the text having black box background and if i make the main console thinner now things just look too weird to me.

Vadimuses

Alyxeri said:

Caelan said:

People are worried about the chat tabs and I'm all "Dude, WRONG KEYBOARD"

I mean Iocun killed people with a midi controller. Quite successfully.

We've been working on getting gamepad support into Mudlet...

Puxi

I've been using my Logitech G13 since I came back and it seems to be working fine. Most gamepads come with software that you can map to certain key combinations then you hotkey those in Mudlet.

Or are you talking about something else?

Vadimuses

Like a Playstation controller

Chubbs

Watch out, world. Vadi's gonna turn our text game into Soul Caliber MkII

Caelan

Alyxeri said:

Caelan said:

People are worried about the chat tabs and I'm all "Dude, WRONG KEYBOARD"

I mean Iocun killed people with a midi controller. Quite successfully.

I know.  Someone else (Zero? Antidas? ) use a PS2/3 controller (or XBox?) and so on.  It's actually a great way to get more macros.  Or you buy a G-series Logitech.  I have 54 extras.

Solnir

Wait, I'm not the only one that buys a new gamepad every couple months because I forget I already have one?!

Ahmet

Solnir said:

Wait, I'm not the only one that buys a new gamepad every couple months because I forget I already have one?!

I buy new ones because there's always that one goddamn button that starts to stick, or comes loose.

Devran

Conversation about controllers reminds me of something. I played (still kind of do sometimes but not really) Dark Age of Camelot. Best player versus player combat I've ever had in an MMO that wasn't a MUD. 

Anyway, there was a guy named Macatho who made a Bainshee class when they first got released and were a bit strong. He had three accounts. One was a warrior type bodyguarding him (it intercepted melee hits and had to be killed first) and the other was a healer type that had a preloaded health buffer up that had to be exhausted before any real damage could be done.

The bainshee was all about it's AOE abilities in the forms of screaming. He rigged up a race car controller. You know, steering wheel, brake and acceleration pedals, etc. Turned left or tight with the wheel, moved forward with the pedals and used to smash the Horn to trigger the characters Screams. He used to wipe out entire zergs of people by himself. We're talking 80 people or more. With a damn car horn.

Ah, memories.

Puxi

I loved DAoC, bard was my jam.

Devran

Puxi said:

I loved DAoC, bard was my jam.

Oh god I hated you people. Instant Amnesia was and is so broken.

But Bard/Valehooker duo was so awesome. Almost as good as Skald/Valk.

You sir, are a gentleman of quality.

Shub

Lots of gui progress lately thanks to some wisdom from this thread:



The labels and gauges have nicer looking gradients that change color when their corresponding abilities become available. In the rage tracker's case, they show countdown animations when used. I still need to refine the triggering and cover all the corner cases to get it to behave perfectly, sometimes the timers fire and the buttons disable when the rage ability is still on cool down. You really need to see those cooldowns to use battlerage efficiently and the main console is often too chaotic to pick up the availability messages.

The balance indicators on the bottom left are very handy for seeing what svo/my aliases are doing. I need to play with the colors to find something with enough contrast to quickly tell available balances apart from cooldowns without distracting too much from the main console text, bright green in that area was giving me a hard time. The violet shade is too hard to tell from gray when in a hurry. I'll probably put a couple separators between the labels too, I don't need my offense and curative cooldowns all smooshed together. I'm in the middle of making a giant table with all my ability cooldowns that will eventually turn into animated timers on my balance trackers, much like my rage tracker. Naturally it will be a lot trickier because there are many things beyond ability usage that affect balance times, so it will never be perfectly accurate.

I turned off the single prompt, soon I'll put text on my vitals gauges and get rid of the prompt copy that I'm keeping at the bottom of the window.

The miniconsole in the bottom right is my latest experiemnt, it is a queue manager that displays the status of my serverside queue. It has already come in very handy to help identify abilities that need queue prepend instead of queue add, I'm not smacking shields as often now. It is pretty basic and ugly at the moment. I'll put some color in it and experiment with some links or hotkeys for re-ordering things mid-fight.

The colors of the whole thing are obviously temporary. The blue/gray is handy for showing free space areas that will eventually all be black like the rest of the background.

There is still a lot of space to fill, I need to find a solution for defense and affliction tracking, probably some opponent tracking as well.  There is a lot to be done in the queueing department to properly batch clusters of commands together as well. I'm curious how others accomplish all of that.

Torinn

You have a gigantic monitor.  

Armali

If possible, I'd recommend turning on serverside timestamps.