Re: Changing the Standard Game

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu>]

Lincoln Peters wrote:

> On Thu, 2004-09-02 at 23:10, Elijah Meeks wrote:
>
> > For most of the people who pop on here
> > and post once or twice, this game IS XConq
>
>
> A better interface (specifically a better "Welcome" screen) might make
> it clearer to most players that Xconq is not just one game (important
> for those who enjoy strategy games that are based on something other
> than World War II).  

Well, I think that part of the problem might be simply that when you 
call one game the "standard" game, it implies that the others are either 
substandard or offshoots of it.

When I first tried out Xconq back in 1999 or 2000, this was one of the 
things that kept me away from the other games. And I barely did more 
than open a few of the others before I abandoned Xconq then because the 
UI was not very good. Even when I came back to it in the middle of 2003, 
I started playing the Standard game on the Tcl/Tk interface, because I 
assumed (possibly correctly) that the Standard game would give me the 
best playing experience. There is this perception that the Standard game 
is brought to you by "the developers", whereas the other games are just 
made by "other people", if you know what I mean....

> I can envision a "Welcome" screen that looks like
> the following (which, as usual, I designed with Glade without having to
> write any code):

Of course, code would still have to be added for event handlers for the 
various UI elements, so that a click on, say, a radio button will 
translate into the proper Xconq internals being updated.

> http://homepage.mac.com/lmpeters/welcome1.png
> http://homepage.mac.com/lmpeters/welcome2.png
> http://homepage.mac.com/lmpeters/welcome3.png
> http://homepage.mac.com/lmpeters/welcome4.png
> http://homepage.mac.com/lmpeters/welcome5.png
> http://homepage.mac.com/lmpeters/welcome6.png

Looks interesting.

> Furthermore, as soon as you click "Apply", you could theoretically jump
> to the existing SDL interface and thus leave behind anything that even
> remotely resembles an Office app.

I would suggest the "Apply" button be relabelled to "Accept" or "Start 
Game".

What you propose is interesting. This would certainly save time in the 
development of the startup screens, a task I have only half been looking 
forward to. The tradeoff is that the Windows installer would get quite a 
bit larger, because we cannot reasonably assume that a Windows user 
would have the GDK, GTK+, Pango, etc. libraries on his/her system.

Eric