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[Patch] Show detailed view in depot

Started by falconne, December 03, 2011, 09:38:59 AM

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falconne

This patch adds an option to the display dialog that allows a more detailed view in the depot. Basically, instead of just the thumbnails of vehicles in the purchase pane, you get boxes with detailed info. The reason I wanted to make this was because I didn't really like having to hover over vehicles to find the ones I wanted, then compare their stats. While I was still getting familiar with the game I wanted to see overviews, especially for comparisons.


I plan to make a few more changes, but thought I'd get some feedback first. There's currently too much info displayed in the boxes... it's using same text that you get when you hover over a vehicle, which was the easiest way to do it. I can remove some of those fields that aren't necessary for an overview, making it easier to read. I will also align the values, such as cost, speed, etc, along a column, so it looks nicer. The mouse over info is still available, as the train depot in the screenshot shows, so no information is lost by using this mode. The active area for each vehicle is the whole box, not just the picture, so you can click any part of the box to buy/sell etc.



To support this change, each depot now also remembers the last window size of its gui through the session. So if you make the window bigger to show more boxes on screen at once, it will remember this size when you next open that depot.

Severous

When I am buying road vehicles I always seem to be doing two different bits of mental maths..and often fail so have to write it down.

1) Running cost of the vehicle per unit of cargo carried
2) Combined running cost of tractor and trailer..to put into above calculation

I think in conjunction with the display 'coal' (or other specific cargo) your display will make it much easier to do those calculations.  Thank you.
Regards
Sev.

falconne

Quote from: Severous on December 03, 2011, 10:43:28 AM
When I am buying road vehicles I always seem to be doing two different bits of mental maths..and often fail so have to write it down.

1) Running cost of the vehicle per unit of cargo carried
2) Combined running cost of tractor and trailer..to put into above calculation

I think in conjunction with the display 'coal' (or other specific cargo) your display will make it much easier to do those calculations.  Thank you.

Yep, I do the same. I plan to add that at some point, which is part of the reason why I wanted to have a filter for individual goods. That way I can display an estimated operational profit (or margin) per km, on a full load, for each cargo carrying vehicle. I also want to do it for entire convoys, which can be a bit tricky for trains as they can have different types of carriages for multiple cargos, requiring a multi select filter. It's still worth doing though as I keep having to work that out myself on a calculator.

It's a more complicated problem however, which I will leave for a future patch.

prissi

Problem is that the depot dialog is already way too large, considering smartphones and pads ...

falconne

Well it's an option that's off by default and doesn't change anything so you don't have to use it.


Most people will be playing on a decent sized screen; the general philosophy should be that a game must be playable on a small screen, but that doesn't mean people on desktops should be prevented from taking advantage of larger UIs for more convenience. That's especially true for economic games where there's a lot of information to process and complicated operations to perform.

prissi

I do not see a button in your screenshots to change the view though ...

falconne

I added it as an option in the Display Options dialog. I did initially want to add it to the depot screen, but the lower panel was already crowded. Also, I figured that if someone wanted to use this view, they'd do it as a global change rather than turning it on for individual depots which doesn't make much sense.

I could still make it an option on the depot dialog if that's better... and just make the option a static variable so it doesn't have to be turned on for every depot.

Isaac Eiland-Hall

Personal, unsolicited opinion: I would imagine popular usage would be to turn it on sometimes, but keep it off most of the time, so easy toggle access might be nice.

Also, either way, this seems like an awesome idea. :)

isidoro

Just an idea:  what about a more conventional list?

One with columns: first, icon, then, name, then cost, then cost/km, then...
And the list may be sorted clicking at the header by name, cost, cost/km, etc.
It would save a lot of space and allow for comparisons.

The list may be activated with a checkbox: "Details..."

Carl

I agree with both Isaac and isidoro. This would be very useful, but should be off by default -- and it would be most useful if it could be given in the form of a sortable list.