Differential D920

Observer Dashboard
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Authored by temple on Sep 19 2017, 2:51 AM.

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wraitii

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Summary

Currently observers can get cumulative stats in the summary window, like total resources gathered and total units killed. That's great, but it would be nice if they also had access to current stats, like resources (which is available in a tooltip in the top panel if you have a player selected, but that's kind of annoying) or army composition.

This patch replaces the bottom panel with an "observer dashboard" if the observer doesn't have any units selected.

I think having this kind of information would make spectating a more enjoyable experience.

Test Plan

See how you like it. Hopefully most things are self-explanatory.

I need to look at translations, see if the classes have already been translated, etc.
I should also test performance.

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temple created this revision.Sep 19 2017, 2:51 AM

ffffffff added a subscriber: ffffffff.Sep 19 2017, 3:46 AM

IMO it's duplication with all its problems (having twice the amount of code, both places should have the same features but don't).
If we add a second summary screen page as proposed here, people will ask that this page is going to be extended too, for instance showing killed units, kill/death ratio, trade income, score, total number of champs produced or graphs.
Agree that the current number of units and phase is missing from the summary screen. Therefore it should be added to the summary screen.
Another issue is that non-observers who can see the summary screen still can't see the current number of units as the summary screen only shows the cumulative values.
The right way to fix this IMO would be to show exactly the same information from the summary screen as an overlay and reuse the codebase.
Check the screenhots here http://www.voobly.com/gamemods/mod/476/Spectator-Dashboard

There's a conceptual difference here, so let me go through that in detail just so we're on the same page. I'm not thinking of this as the summary screen, I'm thinking of it as the resource/population tooltip. That's the thing that was bugging me, having to hover over those icons in the top panel to get that information, when it should be just there on the screen. At first I was going to make an overlay right below the resources, but then fpre or causative had the idea to show information in the bottom panel. With the overlay now becoming a panel, there was a lot of extra space horizontally for more information, if I had any. Breaking down the current population into some rough classes (women, infantry, cavalry, etc.) seemed like a good idea, as long as I could fit it into the available space, which I was able to do.

So this is not intended to reproduce the summary screen, it's intended to reproduce the resource/population tooltip. It's meant to display some basic info about the current state of the game, not a detailed summary and history like in the summary page.

The big problem I see with reproducing the summary page is space. Already for example the unit tab spills over at 1024 x 768:

How are you going to fit all of that into the bottom panel? Vertically you have to squeeze 16 lines into where 8 are, and horizontally there's only 80% of the space for something that's already too wide. Do you see any way of doing that?

I agree about storing the current resources and units in the statistics tracker. In particular it will be nice to see graphs of the populations going down after big battles.

(The code's actually really short, isn't it?)

Sure, I understand what the patch does, that it's short and as of now orthogonal to the summary screen.
Also the translation looks correct (some translation context would be useful as some of the strings might be considered ambiguous) and I don't see any potential performance issues.
In fact I like the feature.

But it doesn't change that people will ask and eventually upload patches

to display summary screen information in the overlay
to display overlay information in the summary screen
that the player should have access to this information too (originally thought about a new page similar to the trade dialog stating how many traders there are, just a table instead of sentences)

Perhaps piling up similar code not going to be a problem and perhaps its not going to be feasible to merge the shared code to begin with. But these are my concerns.

I didn't say it would be easy to have the summary screen as an ingame overlay.
First the summary screen page would probably have to be refactored to not be a convulsion and so that the common code can be accessed by multiple pages.
With regards to the GUI design, you have presented a way to display more information in a compact structure by using icons.
There are even more columns than in the session overlay than in the summary sceen page, so the number of columns doesnt seem to be the problem (though the overlay looks like it would run into issues with 3 digit numbers).
Tab buttons would have to be placed to switch to the subpages.
If the current numbers are added to the summary screen, there will be five numbers per cell. Perhaps that is okay for the summary screen and for the session overlay, there could be some toggle between totals/current/captured/lost/killed.
Eventually hotkeys could ease access.