The Tavern

Hello,
I know I posted another further up, but wanted to create two so that its nice and tidy, Liquidate if needed!

I was wondering what the views are on a background or gui (or whatever its called) for the stats / map area. In my mind, the rest of the tiles version is so colorful and graphical, that sticking with the very old school Ascii 'stats on a black background' seems slightly out of place (especially with the graphical inventory). However, some people might like the oldschool-ness of it, and I can understand that. Obviously, it'd need to be very unobtrusive and stretchable(?).

My main thought was how much I used to love the GUI in Heroes of Might and magic 3/old school rpgs, and I think that it would complete stone soup tiles as a completely graphical program.

Again, I'm very willing to help with the graphics, and would be happy to mock up a few backgrounds for testing (although I would have no idea to implement it into the game (my coding suuuucccksss)).

Bim

I doubt that's the reason. The stat area is neat and works wonderfully for console games, but as you noticed it really clashes with Tiles.
The reason no one has changed it is probably because it would be -- gah, work!


What did you have in mind? I used to play HoM III but don't remember anything about any stats GUI except the awesome spellbook. Do you have any screenshots for comparison, or a rough mockup, maybe?

I'm not promising anything - the problem lies in the coding and space restriction for small screens, but I am curious.

Hm, I'm good with interface as it is. Maybe I'm just used to it bit it certainly have it's charm in all it's blackness =)

Haha, I thought it might be more work related!! But yeah, I can imagine the scaling issues would be really hard to work round, although perhaps it could be something that could just be turned off on smaller that a certain resolution screen (like how the different tabs are detached on big screens)?
However, I wasn't thinking of anything too complex or vast, just something a bit more graphical. The HOMM 3 one was quite simple (bottom right corner):



And they got gradually more complex (4's looked nicer, and had dragons on it!!!) But I quite liked its simplicity, with a few nice icons and a background/border. Perhaps the Crawl one could be even more simple, and just be a background texture with a simple border, with holes for the stat text?

Crawl's interface has much more information density than this one! That being said, some textures and icons could be added, sure. We can always disable them if there's not enough room. If you submit a design and the graphics, we'll certainly look into it.

@Galehar (I almost called you Geryon then as I'm just taking a break from fighting him!)

Yeah, I think Icons might be hard to fit in unless they were instead of the description (AC, EV, STR etc.) and I wouldn't want to compromise on the information side of it. Perhaps Icons of text might just about work. I'll do some designs over the weekend/early next week and some rough drafts!