Well, I don't really understand what the problem is here.<br>The welcome screen the way it is now is very good, except for a few little problems.<br>First - when player selects "You" button and system asks for a nickname, it's hard to imagine how to submit it. I spent a few minutes trying to figure that one out :) before realised I had to press enter there.
<br><div align="left">It's not very intuitive since up to this point the entire control is mouse driven. The second problem is the absence of any indication that the game has started and player has to place the ships on the field (some kind of indicator telling what to do and how to do that would be nice at this point).
<br>As for the network settings - I don't think creating a custom GUI would be wise. Actually a regular QT4/KDE4 driven and color managed pop up settings window would be quite sufficient here. That's what I would expect as a player. And no it does not create any inconsistency. It comes there logically and naturally.
<br>Hope I'm being helpful.<br><br>it-s<br><br></div><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 6/12/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Paolo Capriotti</b> <<a href="mailto:p.capriotti@gmail.com">p.capriotti@gmail.com</a>> wrote:
</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0; margin-right: 0; margin-bottom: 0; margin-left: 0; margin-left: 0.80ex; border-left-color: #cccccc; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex">
After a number of failed attempts and experiment, I'm starting to be a bit<br>dubious about the whole 'welcome screen' thing [1] [2].<br>The idea is good, in principle: after the game has started, the user should be
<br>given all the information on the existing types of play. A nice welcome<br>screen, integrated with the game graphics, just seems like the right thing to<br>display.<br>However, many games (including kbattleship) require to user to enter
<br>additional information before the game can actually be started. For example,<br>in kbattleship, when playing over the network, one has to pick a nickname,<br>and enter the tcp connection parameters.<br>All these additional things tend to complicate the welcome screen interface,
<br>pushing it to the point where normal gui controls are needed, thus breaking<br>the integration with the game graphics, making flicker-free animations<br>practically impossible and requiring a lot of programming effort, which is
<br>essentially wheel reinvention in many aspects (resizing, layouting, handling<br>mouse events...).<br>Plus, the controls are inconsistent with the kde style, and do not use system<br>colors. I agree that this may not be a problem for a game, but in this
<br>particular case, we're not strictly dealing with a game, but with<br>the 'initial configuration' needed for a game to be started, which is imho<br>quite a different context, and I think that in this case fancy graphics,
<br>albeit nice, probably get in the way.<br>On a side note, I've tried a particular approach (double menu, see the<br>screenshot in [2]) while integrating KWelcomeScreen in kbattleship, and it<br>resulted in a gross failure: even one of our game developers had troubles
<br>figuring out how to start a network game!<br>That's not the main point of my rambling, though. The interface can be<br>simplified, and we already started working on this, but imho even a<br>simplified interface will have the flaws I've tried to describe here.
<br>My proposal is to forget about integrated welcome screens, at least for<br>kbattleship, and to add a normal dialog acting as a welcome screen (like<br>ksudoku, iirc).<br>I hope to hear some comments about this, so that I can finally decide an
<br>approach and follow it. I've been experimenting with this menu for quite some<br>time, and I must say I'm a bit tired. I'd like to have all this stuff settled<br>down, so I can move on to more interesting things.
<br><br>Paolo<br><br>[1] <a href="http://johann.pwsp.net/2007/04/09/a-new-game-starter/">http://johann.pwsp.net/2007/04/09/a-new-game-starter/</a><br>[2] <a href="http://commit-digest.org/issues/2007-04-15/">http://commit-digest.org/issues/2007-04-15/
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