Puddle of Muddle (Pizzle on my mizzle bizzle)

Daily 10/18/03 am

Published on October 18, 2003 By Mudflap In Software Development

Sometimes my mind gets in a muddle because of a bunch of things are going on at one time and I can't focus on one task 'til completion. Do you ever feel that way? I'm feeling it with the map editor. Since there's no real UI design or workflow design, I'm having to make a bunch of stuff up. Guess what, I suck at it. Maybe it's because I've been bred to follow specs and design docs. Usually they weren't 100% correct, but close enough to where I could fill in the blanks with no problems. But, give me semi-free reign on a project and I start to fall to pieces. For instance, now I have a UI that isn't exactly what was layed out in Brad's UI mockup, but I think it's more functional. You know how I got there? Hours of trying things and finding out they suck. Ugh. Everytime I tried something, I could here Brad talking about fatigue points.

I am starting to get more traction on the map editor. I've got the majority of the guts in. Now it's jsut workflow and UI. I also have to do file I/O, but that's pretty straight forward and I already know what to do there.

Here's a shot of the latest star editing UI.

That's a list control in the dialogbar. I thought the list control was a nice touch because delete/edit a planet in the control. Thus reducing the fatigue points. I couldn't figure out a good way to add planets in the list control. If anyone can come up with a good method, please let me know. I was thinking about using a double click, but that's not easily discoverable. A right click menu might be nice. It's more discoverable than the double click. I guess I could do that. There's a button for add there for now, but the user may get confused because there isn't a delete button.

Ugh... See what I mean. A simple little task gets me thinking in 5 different directions and I can't decide which way to go. I spend an hour debating with myself and I end up with something that I wasn't even thinking about to start with.

Here's the list of todos for the rest of the weekend and next week:

File I/O
Resources
Ships
Rebars or floating toolbars. (Maybe. I don't like all the wasted space)
Scenarios

Comments

russellmz

on Oct 18, 2003

i'm confused. what's wrong with the current add planet button?

just add a greyed out delete button when no planet is selected and people can add and delete what they want.

Draginol

on Oct 19, 2003

That UI is nice.

Mudflap

on Oct 20, 2003

The only thing wrong with the Add planet button (IMHO) is that it stands out alone. There are three operations you can do with the planets. Add/Delete/Edit. Delete and Edit you can do in the planet window without extra buttons. I wanted to be able to do all three operations in the planet window so that the user would have total control with just the planet window showing. Know what I mean?

After looking at it longer, I decided that it was alright that way. I also put the bar on the side in place of the star palette. It looks much cleaner that way. I'll post an updated screen later today.

Thanks for looking

Bill

on Oct 20, 2003

I would try to get a tree control on the screen, make it floating if you can't afford the real estate.

Perks:
Everyone knows how to use a tree. Right Click Menus could handle Add/Edit/Delete
All of the stars can be added to a single tree. Copy/Paste/Drag&Drop now become options.

Hell, you could make a whole dialog out of it.... The tree on the left and a tab control on the left (one tab for star info, and the other for planet info). The tab control would switch automatically depending on the tree node that was selected.

If you're really bored, you can make the dialog and the map interact. Select a star on the map and the tree goes to that star, and vice versa.

Anyway, back to my job.

Mudflap

on Oct 21, 2003

Yeah, we could do that. We didn't do that at first because I didn't think of a floating palette. It would have been much easier to make a floating palette too.

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