Home sweet home?

skyjake

<div id="bridgedd"> <div class="excerpt-title">This is a blog excerpt.  <a href="http://dengine.net/blog/2016/04/home-sweet-home/&quot; target="_blank">Read Full Article</a> </div> <br /> <p>In <a href="http://files.dengine.net/builds/build1918">build 1918</a> I have merged in my work branches. This means the new Home UI — in its current state of implementation — is now available. Most of the basic features are working, however there are still many things that either need improvement or are completely missing. </div>

veirdo

It would be cool to have a nice preview icons for a packages too, like for a games itself. Addon's authors can render a preview icon with appropriate size and keep it in a package, so the engine can read and show it in the list of packages.

skyjake

veirdo wrote:

It would be cool to have a nice preview icons for a packages too, like for a games itself. Addon's authors can render a preview icon with appropriate size and keep it in a package, so the engine can read and show it in the list of packages.

I agree, and it won't be very difficult to implement. In practice you'll just need to include the icon image in the package and add "icon: filename.png" in the info.dei file.

The current generic white package icons will be used if the package doesn't provide an icon.

KuriKai

loading on linux i get this error

"App init failed:
[NotFoundError] (PathTree::find) No paths found matching "home.icon.shadow""

skyjake

KuriKai wrote:

loading on linux i get this error

"App init failed:
[NotFoundError] (PathTree::find) No paths found matching "home.icon.shadow""

Are you using the prebuilt .deb or .rpm? Or are you compiling it from source? If you have compiled from source in the past, check that you don't have an older version manually installed whose packages might be getting confused with the newer ones.

I just checked the .deb, at least that one has the correct resources included.

KuriKai

I had the file "net.dengine.client.pack" in my runtime directory, that was causing the problem


may i suggest when choosing addons for the game you have chosen, to always show the "add" button, so the user only needs to click once instead of twice?

skyjake

KuriKai wrote:

may i suggest when choosing addons for the game you have chosen, to always show the "add" button, so the user only needs to click once instead of twice?

Yeah, that should work nicely. I'll put it on the todo list.

Vermil

I would like to suggest that the game name be given precedence over the developer name in the header of each game?

In the past I've commented that I don't believe the ui should have Doom, Heretic, Hexen and other headers due to appearing to promote certain games above others. should give the impression of promoting such games; but I wasn't expecting Chex Quest, HacX, Doom64 and FreeDM to also be lumped onto a single page. I'm also not sold on the game descriptions as a result; I think it would be better to have purely factual information such as release date?

from a usability perspective, I think said descriptions should be collapsible. Ditto for the save games under each profile.

There seems to be a lot of unused horizontal space; for instance, the information on each MP game could perhaps be condensed into the grey boxes?

In short, I think the new UI requires a lot of vertical scrolling that I think could be reduced?

I also kind of wonder if generic groups are a good idea and whether there should instead be separate profiles for the likes of Doom1(which would include shareware, registered and ultimate), Doom2, Final Doom (containing TNT and PLUTONIA, or maybe they should be separate?) etc. Also, one could argue that Heretic and HeXen could arguably go under the same generic group due to being the same series, like Doom2 is to Doom1.

skyjake

When it comes to the logic behind the grouping of the game families and which games fall into each family, these can be fairly trivially adjusted in the future. As you say, it may ultimately make more sense to have only two families ("Doom" and "Heretic/Hexen"), instead of the current four.

May I ask what display resolution are you using? The layout adapts to different resolutions, but of course there may still be some sizes which lead to less-than-optimal usage.

Vermil

It's that conumdrum of designing for the future (i.e designing around Dday's potential of supporting dozens of games) versus the present (i.e an interim of sorts, based off the number of games Dday currently supports).

My resolution is 1366x768 at the moment. I can see that low resolutions only display one column instead of two, which is a good idea.

May I suggest that games the user lacks the files for, under each 'family' be displayed under all the supported ones, instead of both groups being mixed together?

Also, a little thing; maybe the 'HeXen' game mode should be renamed 'HeXen 1.1'?

Gordon

the one thing that erks me is that even tho i have the ultimate doom i can still play the none ultimate version with the missing episode. what i think needs to happen is that if you have the ultimate doom you should not be able to select doom as technically you do not have it.

skyjake

Gordon wrote:

the one thing that erks me is that even tho i have the ultimate doom i can still play the none ultimate version with the missing episode. what i think needs to happen is that if you have the ultimate doom you should not be able to select doom as technically you do not have it.

Yeah, I think on the whole it would be best to apply a strict requirement about which IWAD is used for the Registered and Ultimate Dooms. The new package system supports quite fine-grained IWAD detection so this should be trivial to implement.