Re: How do you reduce the size of news items SEV
 

Clicking unmarked areas of the screen as if they were buttons is by far the worst interface idea that has come up in a long long time. The same is true for right-clicking the text of the ship report.

The action of clicking something requires something specific to the task for which the clicking is being done.

A button marked "shrink me" is a good idea -- much better than clicking an undocumented area of the screen. Another would be to add an option under "Empire->Display Settings", where most of this kind of stuff is currently found.

Re: How do you reduce the size of news items SEV
 

The issue with a "shrink me" button is that there are far too many things that could be done by adding a button, which would saturate the interface and possibly make it even worse.

Re: How do you reduce the size of news items SEV
 

But in a way the behaviour is consistent with header rows being clickable for functions like sorting etc. - which I have seen in many programs. A pop-up for each header should suffice to alert the user on the functionality as well as what the column means.

Re: How do you reduce the size of news items SEV
 

Clicking a column header to sort a column is a related thing. It has a lot to do with the task at hand. And you've seen it in a lot of programs -- so has everyone else, so they know to do that. Clicking a description box to change the size of icons displayed in a list is not a related thing.

Display text is normally a form of 'read only output'.

It's probably best to employ skills that are already in place. Things like banding boxes around units to select them. Everyone knows this, and so it is a common language.

If I wrote an application that used 3d buttons to display text, people would try to click them, and become annoyed, and say my app sucks.
Sort of like 3DS Max? Or maybe Mathematica? Or Excel? Between these three, I like Excel's customizable button bars, and Mathematica's Control Palettes. I don't really like the grab-and-slide thing from 3DS Max; major hassle. PaintShopPro does fairly good with the buttons too.

Re: How do you reduce the size of news items SEV
 

The first time I saw that functionality (clicking the column header to shrink pics) I thought it was a bug and added it to my bug list. I eventually figured out it was intended behaviour.

For me the small pictures are all broken - They show the top 1/5th of so the picture but 5 times.

Here's a simple question - Why does the player need to be able to change the size of the pictures? If you just left them on small pictures, wouldn't that be sufficient for everyone? The only reason I don't use small pictures is because of the afore-mentioned bug - thus I use the all-text news?
That's the sort of thing you should be asking yourself with every feature implementation - does the player need it?


Personally I think Stars! had the best news collating system I've ever seen in a 4x game. You don't want a message type (i.e. that a building has been built) you click "hide" and you never see it again unless you select "show hidden messages".

That's just one little checkbox. You wouldn't need the "research, construction, combat" sub-categories (which are practically useless to me because they all contain news items that I'm un-interested in so I stick to "All").

You don't HAVE to reinvent the wheel you know.
Keep It Simple

Re: How do you reduce the size of news items SEV
 

I agree.