Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 6454
Joined: Tuesday, 30th October 2012, 19:06
Re: Ease of use improvements needed in .21
advil wrote:VeryAngryFelid wrote:Shtopit wrote:This one is huge, but it would be nice to have an actual "options" menu with a GUI, instead of an rc file to edit.
It is not even hard to do (I did something like that in 2 programming languages but I don't know C++ good enough). It can take literally 2-3 days I believe. Seriously, dynamically creating a row with label, combobox and 1-2 textboxes is trivial. Storing data into options_guide.txt file is trivial too and we already have parsing in place.
I think this is something that there would be general interest in, so patches (even partial implementations as a way of getting things started) would be welcome. (That goes for a lot of things in this thread, fwiw!)
2-3 days is a drastic underestimate though. Factoring in getting this to work across all three build targets (not just webtiles), all the necessary testing / design iteration, and crawlcode, I would personally probably budget months of spare-time work, maybe about an entire version cycle, which I suspect is why no one's done this yet. At less spare-time speeds (and also a probably more accurate estimate than mine), Neil's estimate for a prototype is about 1 week of sitting down and working on nothing else.
It is probably a solid 30-40 hours of work for a reasonably solid user interface for all three targets with a robust usable ui. One could do that amount of work in 2-3 days of one was properly motivated and didn't take good care of oneself. That doesn't include all the cleaning up, that is just to get it to the stage at which a reasonable person could test it and tell you what else needed doing. (Going from prototype to finished product usually takes 1-2X on top of the initial development investment)
For a much poorer interface, you could probably make a basic "promp for the option you want to set then prompt for the value" interface in about 8-10 hours (but that might be macroable, which would let you set up keystrokes to quickly swap given options on/off, which is what i, personally, would want from it)
For another crappy, but still all in game solution, a super simple text editor to edit the options file and the ability to reload that on the fly would also probably be around 10-15 hours.
Shoving a simple "reload the options file" with no in game editor at all would probably take about 2-3 hours, but wouldn't accomplish most of the desired goals.