DEVS: Are you interested in a brand-new client?

[Jackard]

When they made the client open sourced, it's also when they screwed over the community by allowing the tools to used by the wrong people to create bots and other little cheating clients.

dude, you dont know what youre talking about

our group had a custom client and alt-tab macros in world one

[themendios]

UPDATE:
Since I like reinventing the wheel I built a whole goddamn control and input library and complete game engine(all code in the project is brand new and you're not even seeing all the classes). XNA may simplify drawing but pretty much makes everything else harder since you lose all the builtin forms goodness that windows is known for. I could have hacked in Forms(and indeed that's what google told me to do, but I built it all OOP without forms hackery anyway). What's funny is at this point I've actually abstracted enough layers to switch to opengl/directx (and might at some point).

After that I did some premature optimization since I realized XNA eats all available CPU power when in focus due to hardcoded busy wait game cycle, bypassed that and added idle time cycles calc'd on the fly with a threshold, now it's running smooth at 1% CPU

Now that I've got working controls I'm sorta trying to decide what I want to do with the UI, I don't think anything but the background image it's using is salvageable, anything with transparency is artifacted to shit, I think I'm probably gonna have to redesign the UI from scratch.

Any thoughts welcome, been looking at a couple different UIs but I'm not horribly attached to anything yet.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/96/dev1q.png/

[SeanPan]

That's awesome work! I'm looking forward to hearing more.

I'm not sure how much the client is capable of, though I suspect that this is well within your power - can you see if you can simplify and optimize the radial menu to more intuitively reflect the situation? For example, right-clicking on yourself should provide the options of Travel, followed by Hearthfire.

Right-clicking on a body of water while having a bucket in your inventory should give you an option to 'fill bucket', looking for the first bucket with empty space to fill water. Right-clicking on an appropriate unit of construction while in the inventory and when the construction dialog is open, should display "Move to construction pile" as an option.

[sabinati]

That's awesome work! I'm looking forward to hearing more.

I'm not sure how much the client is capable of, though I suspect that this is well within your power - can you see if you can simplify and optimize the radial menu to more intuitively reflect the situation? For example, right-clicking on yourself should provide the options of Travel, followed by Hearthfire.

Right-clicking on a body of water while having a bucket in your inventory should give you an option to 'fill bucket', looking for the first bucket with empty space to fill water. Right-clicking on an appropriate unit of construction while in the inventory and when the construction dialog is open, should display "Move to construction pile" as an option.

seems like left click bucket, right click water is simple enough. and for construction, shift-click is much better.

great work, though, OP

[SeanPan]

Oh, I agree 100%. That said, a newbie is unlikely to access shift-click so an effective radial menu offers a lot in the way of assistance. I know that I didn't even figure out shift-click despite reading quite extensively from both the forum and the wiki; my girlfriend discovered it almost by accident.

Other UI suggestions that may be helpful in my experience, though I admit that I'm far from an UI engineer. I have worked with commercial games before in a coder functionality, for what it is worth:

• "Active" marked actions from the hotkey bar that will be automatically executed on the terrain with a Shift-Left Click. For example, you could highlight Harvest from your hotkey bar, and then shift-left click on any crop - it will automatically harvest that square. Likewise is true for paving ploughed terrain, etc.
  
  While I can see that its not technically any different from binding Harvest to command key 1 and then clicking on the square, its a heck of a lot more ergonomic to me.
  
• A "get all" command over a square - useful when trying to grab straw or other hard-to see small items.
  
• A "sort" command in the inventory, allowing you to sort items within by quality or alphabetically.
  
• More tooltips on hover over. I'm working on the wiki right now, but I've written for games and UIs before, so if you would like any help, I'll be glad to provide it.
  
  

[sabinati]

• "Active" marked actions from the hotkey bar that will be automatically executed on the terrain with a Shift-Left Click. For example, you could highlight Harvest from your hotkey bar, and then shift-left click on any crop - it will automatically harvest that square. Likewise is true for paving ploughed terrain, etc.
  
  While I can see that its not technically any different from binding Harvest to command key 1 and then clicking on the square, its a heck of a lot more ergonomic to me.
  
• A "get all" command over a square - useful when trying to grab straw or other hard-to see small items.
  
• A "sort" command in the inventory, allowing you to sort items within by quality or alphabetically.
  
• More tooltips on hover over. I'm working on the wiki right now, but I've written for games and UIs before, so if you would like any help, I'll be glad to provide it.

not sure i understand here, how would the first one be different from the options under adventure>landscaping?

get all and sort would be great

[SeanPan]

Well, Clicking Adventure>Landscaping>Harvest is three clicks. "Activating" Harvest in the hotkey menu in my method, essentially allows you to do things with just one click: hold down the shift key, left-click on crop.

[sabinati]

hmm, i always have harvest hotbarred... there are definitely some UI improvements that could be made though.

[SeanPan]

To be fair, some form of queuing would be very nice for harvest, though this thread might not be the best place for discussion in regards to this. I can't quite see it as cheating to be able to click and drag a square over harvetable crops, and proceed with the harvesting joy.

[sabinati]

well loftar said that at some point he would like to revamp farming to be less of a clickfest. personally i don't see much gameplay value in the current implementation of farming, it's something that i do because i need to.