GUI theme for Extended

[Ranran]

NOTE: This content is for the r8653 patch. Not yet incorporated. Until then, it will be updated little by little for memorandums and patch testing.

Theme can be changed in Display setting> GUI settings> Select a theme for display also in Extended.

Everything that currently exists in the theme folder should be discarded and updated. The current master has a lot of unnecessary things. For example, the source file is there even though it is of no use.
The old theme is a mixture of things that are originally broken. (aero.tab should not be there when theme pak does not exist.) It can prevent booting.
File names mixed with "." May not be good. Anyway it has changed in standard.
The file name and configuration will change. Therefore, please be careful not to leave old files.
The update will keep the latest standard version of the theme available.

I think standard automatically generates a pak file from themes.src and copies the theme file to the simutrans / themes folder.
Extended may not have such a system. Because the master branch used to have a broken aero theme folder, but its pak wasn't generated. I think the blue extended-specific theme was just put in without being updated.
Extended has a non-standard text color specification. For example, colors that can be upgradable, overcrowded, schedule missing.
Extended must have its own theme parameter, as they are clearly hard to see, such as in high contrast themes.
The pak file differs from standard only in the blue theme dedicated to extended, otherwise it is the same.
However, for the reasons mentioned above, the tab file needs to be updated and provided exclusively for extended. (Currently, the default settings are fine except for high contrast themes.)



Unfortunately, the work of adding new parameters is still in progress. You have to wait for the update.

Extended specific theme parameters:

Code Select Expand


gui_color_up_pointing_triangle = #00F3DE
gui_color_down_pointing_triangle = #FF8200

Triangular color indicating increase and decrease. Available in the city list window. The bar in the depot is the same color. (Not yet supported)
These can be hard to see depending on the background color of the theme.
These have already been implemented in the test branch.


Text color that seems to need to be changeable:
- Schedule slot missing
- Overcrowded
- Upgradeable
- Mixload prohibition
- Weakened gray

You will also be able to change the gray for strength.
I considered adjusting the brightness depending on the theme settings like player color, but this didn't work. The colors did not switch correctly after changing the theme.
And another agenda is that these colors are related to symbols. In other words, it may be a text color that should depend on pakset rather than theme.
I don't think there are any major issues other than high contrast, so normalizing the GUI overhaul patch is currently a priority.
Therefore, these changes are pending.



The modern theme is one of my favorite themes, but I think the white background of the chart is a big drawback of this theme as pointed out in the steam thread.
Chart graphs such as white, light gray, yellow and cream are very difficult to read.
I think this should be changed. However, there is a possibility that the light blue color matches the design of the theme, but the light blue chart may be difficult to see, so be careful.
For example, Profit is light blue.


I intended to raise this issue, but James also pointed out.

* In the "modern" theme, the yellow colour of the "transported" option in the convoy information graph is almost invisible against the white background.

* In the "modern" theme, the light yellow "mail" graph in the chart tab of the city list dialogue is almost invisible.

* In the "modern" theme, the yellow "transported" graph in the finance dialogue is almost invisible against the white background.

* In the line management dialogue with the "modern" theme, the yellow transported graph is almost invisible against the white background.

I respected the theme and tried some light blues that were close to gray. However, there was a problem with the visibility of light blue charts such as profit.
So it changed to the default gray like any other theme. Unfortunately I couldn't come up with any other good (easy) solution. (´・ω・｀)

* In Pak128.Britain-Ex, the query tool cursor shading colour has changed to red instead of the specified yellow. In fact, I think that this red colour seems to override all the pakset specified colours for the cursor shading for the query tool.

This color can be changed depending on the theme. standard new didn't have that parameter set, but the branch's parameters have been updated and it looks like it's displaying the correct colors in my environment. Try updating files in "theme" folder as described above. (Unnecessary things and old files need to be deleted.)

* In the Simutrans New theme, the loading bar colour has reverted to the Simutrans-Standard bright blue rather than the subtler shade preferred for Simutrans-Extended

This also made it possible to change the setting depending on the theme, but it seems that the default color was replaced with the same as standard when merging the change. Therefore, I changed the default color to the same color as before.

I notice that the "modern" theme is now the default. However, since there are a number of problems specific to the "modern" theme, the hardest of which to solve are likely to be the problems with the yellow graphs, I wonder whether we should revert to having the "Simutrans (new)" theme as the default?

I didn't care which theme was selected by default. It seems to load themes.tab first.
I renamed modern and standard new's theme files. As a result, standard new should be the default theme.

EDIT:
The reason why the modern theme may not be able to display all characters compared to other themes is that the modern theme specifies padding on the left and right of the button.
The basic button size is also specified by the theme. The default is 100px. So I think modern themes with padding should specify 110px.
If you use a large font, it's a good idea to use the large version of theme and set the large version to a larger gui_button_width.

EDIT2:
Also, as before, standard new does not currently have a large version. It's a good idea to have it ready.

EDIT3:
Features to be available from 14.14-41

Code Select Expand


gui_titlebar_player_color_background_brightness = 2
gui_color_text_weak = #999999
pressed_button_sinks = 1
gui_color_indicator_border_top_left = #CCCCCC
gui_color_indicator_border_bottom_right = #666666

- The brightness of the title bar can be set individually using gui_titlebar_player_color_background_brightness.
- Since you cannot specify the font thickness in simutrans, you can specify the font color that is used for the purpose of making it less noticeable than normal text.
- It is possible to set whether the pressed button sinks.
- You can specify the frame color of the indicator.

[jamespetts]

Thank you very much for this: this is most helpful. I have now incorporated the latest changes into my 8653 branch. I can confirm that the query tool cursor is now the correct yellow. It is somewhat unfortunate that this is now set by theme rather than pakset, however; there is perhaps a tension between theme and pakset selection in this regard. I cannot recall - can the pakset's simuconf.tab file specify a default pakset theme? Some paksets work better with some themes and others with others, given that much UI design is necessarily pakset specific.

As to the modern theme, this is a good looking theme in many ways, and, aside from visibility issues, the original white background to the charts does look better than the grey, which does not go well with the theme (I also notice that the large size version of this theme retains the white chart background). In principle, the ideal solution would be to have every chart's line colour customisable by theme so that themes with light chart backgrounds could specify darker chart line colours and vice versa, but I anticipate that this would be much work, and, given that we have a working theme in Simutrans New, this is not a priority. If modern is to be more widely adopted, the dialogues also will need to be updated to give enough space for the additional padding that this theme specifies without truncating the text. One other disadvantage of the modern theme at present is that, unlike the Simutrans new and Simutrans classic themes, each alternating line on the charts is not a different colour (white and light grey in classic/new). This is also somewhat of an issue with the flat theme, which could easily work with the same white/dark grey colours as classic rather than its current black/dark grey colours. Flat also has the problem that the dark grey window buttons are almost invisible against the window background colours of darker windows in player colours.

In relation to the large size version of the Simutrans new theme, the graphics and .dat/.tab files for this appear already to exist, but it was not set up properly or compiled for some reason. I have made some changes, pushed to my 8653 branch, which should enable this theme; I should be grateful if you could test/confirm that this works.

In any event, thank you again for your work on this: it is much appreciated.

[Ranran]

can the pakset's simuconf.tab file specify a default pakset theme? Some paksets work better with some themes and others with others, given that much UI design is necessarily pakset specific.

I agree, but at this stage it is not possible to set a pakset-specific theme. Search only for userdir and progdir.
It may be possible if it first searches the themes file in the themes folder of pakset.
This is difficult as the theme needs to be loaded before the pakset is selected. (That is, the pakset selection screen.) so need a different approach.

One other disadvantage of the modern theme at present is that, unlike the Simutrans new and Simutrans classic themes, each alternating line on the charts is not a different colour (white and light grey in classic/new).

The line color corresponds to the color of the text on the label. White text can be difficult to read with the light background color of modern theme.



How about this one?

This is also somewhat of an issue with the flat theme

I think phystam made the flat theme, so I think he can do something about it.

[Yona-TYT]

It occurs to me to use a new parameter to adjust the brightness of the colored lines in the graphics, this worked great for me with the colored player texts.

[Ranran]

The default value for the player color is the darkest of the eight gradients in the player palette. It is a system that adds 0 to 7 brightness to it, but the darkest color is not set by default for colors such as charts, button and status colors.
Due to this difference, it seems difficult to select the appropriate brightness using the same system.

[jamespetts]

Ranran's second version of the graph looks good to me. It would be good to be able to customise the graph line colours per theme to allow us to have the good looking white chart background with the modern theme (and this should also help with the high contrast theme), but this is not a priority if this would involve a lot of difficult work

[Yona-TYT]

Another idea could be to use a transparent layer, similar to how the "Networks" look on the minimap. The level of transparency and color can be adjusted with two parameters for the themes.

[Ranran]

In extended, some buttons are represented only by symbols, so in the flat theme, symbol buttons cannot distinguish between disabled and pressed.

[Phystam]

However, I expect that the same design of "disabled" and "pressed" does not confuse players, since "pressed" is interactive (it is shown only when a player presses the button) but "disabled" is not.

[Ranran]

since "pressed" is interactive (it is shown only when a player presses the button)

That is a false perception. There are two types of buttons, one that keeps pressed and one that doesn't. For example, follow me button.
In the case of text, it can be distinguished by the text color, but in the case of symbols, it is indistinguishable because the background button image is almost the same in the flat theme.
There is a difference in whether or not there is a black frame, but it is difficult to intuitively recognize which is invalid or pressed.
This is a flat theme design issue as this issue does not occur except for the flat theme.

EDIT:
I submitted a patch that added a pressed and non-sinkable setting. Generally, for "flat" themes, it is better to set the pressed button not to sink. That patch is aimed at that, but it would add to the confusion if the simutrans flat theme of the current design adopted it.

[Ranran]

Pull request #430 completes the missing parameters in the extended specific theme.
The actual change is in the color of the shadows on the GUI. So far it has been black because it was not specified, but it will look better if the color is 50% black mixed with the background color.

[jamespetts]

Pull request #430 completes the missing parameters in the extended specific theme.
The actual change is in the color of the shadows on the GUI. So far it has been black because it was not specified, but it will look better if the color is 50% black mixed with the background color.

Splendid, thank you, now incorporated.