"Show map scale" button text misleading?

[Spike]

I'm not quite sure about this one, but "Map scale" is something like 1:10000 for me, telling that 10000m in real will be shown as 1m distance in the map.

What the button does is to show a legend for the colors indication height levels. Not quite what I had expected from the text.

So maybe "Show height legend" or something? A native English speaker can surely clear this up.

Found in Simutrans 111.1

[TurfIt]

.

[VS]

This has nothing to do with height. The "scale" is universal, for levels of things such as sped of ways, tourism level, amount of transported goods... You get the buttons to show these with "legend".

[Spike]

Uh, and how are new players expecetd to know this? Or people like me who were away for a long time? I misinterpreted the colors quite a lot as you see.

-> Bad UI design, like mentioned in other threads. From what I gather among the interwebs, the difficult UI of Simutrans is one of the major problems for new players.

[AP]

I'd suggest the phrase "terrain height" is clearer than just "height". The height colours themselves could be improved - it all ends up grey above a certain altitude. Compare our colouring with an OS map which is more like this.

Bad UI design, like mentioned in other threads. From what I gather among the interwebs, the difficult UI of Simutrans is one of the major problems for new players.

Indeed, simutrans seems to go for substance over style, which is good, but doesn't always make for intuitive gameplay.

[jamespetts]

For reference, in Experimental, as well as its normal function, "show map scale" does show the scale of the map.

[Spike]

What exactly does "scale of the map" mean in English? Maybe it's a translation problem (not of Simutrans but of me, when reading the text). In my translation "scale of map" ended up as the math factor of size relation between map and reality, like the number 1:100000 found on the maps. Reading this thread I slowly suspect "scale" does mean something else in English.

[jamespetts]

No, Hajo, your original understanding of "scale" is entirely correct here. Its use in Simutrans - aside from the more recent additional use in Experimental that I describe - is the odd use.

[Fabio]

First, the button could be hidden when the legend is hidden too. Second, "values scale" could go?

[prissi]

Well, so suggest a better translation. Actually, I am very tired of being accused of bad UI design for bad translations. (Hiding button is also bad UI design; the button stays pressed, so you can unselect it.)

Especially considering how often I tried to avoid stuff which is bad UI design, like submenus under some graphics (which you have to find out) or modal dialogues (really want to yes no maybe ... ) and the like. Deliberately hiding stuff is part of this decision.

About player having difficulties to use simutrans: Most of who had spoken up so far had come from OpenTTD. And here the UI is really bad, for instance the go to location button is a icon, sometimes text, button changes their description alle the time, some buttons are actually drop down menus ... Please try it out before mentioning bad UI design.

When these people come to simutrans, they want to open a convoi dialogue from the depot and add the schedule there. This does not work well with the simutrans line system. People complay about reverse scrolling, so that could be made default the other way.

The only other bad thing are choose signals. I did not like adding them, albeit they are useful in few situations. But they are the most often cause of help request.

[jamespetts]

This is where tooltips would help, I think: it is difficult to get an accurate description in English into such a small box. A button with the text, "Show min/max colours" and a tooltip explaining, "Show the colours representing various values, depending on the legend option selected" would perhaps be the clearest.

[sdog]

"colour legend"
show is superfluous, people notice that part when pressing it.

[prissi]

In german it is just color code, which is probably the best. Anyway, added tooltips.

[Dwachs]

Already changed to 'Colour Codes' in translator.