[Kde-games-devel] Game status view

[Eugene Trounev]

begin Rant {
I have been fighting the hideous atrocity that is 'status bar' for as long as 
I'm a part of KDEGames. To date, sadly enough, my lamentations have been 
largely ignored. 
} end Rant
The problem with the status bar runs much deeper then might appear at the 
first glance. For example: start Kbattleship, choose single player game, and 
then try to *guess* what to do next. Well? Bingo! All the instructions are on 
the status bar. Chances that an average user will ever find those are slim to 
none. And Kbattleship is not alone.
So the real problem is not simply showing the *irrelevant* information in the 
status bar, the problem is that the newcomers and seasonal KDEGames coders see 
this behavior, dim it acceptable, and use it to display ALL the ingame 
information, regardless the importance.
Now, I do not propose to remove the status bar per say, I just want the games 
to be playable by average users.

If you wish to fix this problem for the games you maintain, go ahead, you have 
my full support.

Best regards,

Eugene
[it-s]

On Saturday 07 June 2008 16:47:45 Stefan Majewsky wrote:
> Many of our games (KGoldRunner, KNetwalk, KBlocks, KDiamond, ...) have a
> statusbar showing information about the game status (remaining time, earned
> points, level) and the difficulty selector. At first, the status bar is an
> obvious place for such information which does not constrain the size of the
> actual game view very much. That is also the problem: the status bar is
> difficult to discover if you do not know it, and it is hard to read on big
> windows.
>
> Other games (esp. those running in fullscreen mode) have information panels
> at one of the screen edges where such information is organised. The
> situation is the exact opposite here: An information panel takes much place
> away for the sake of visibility and readability.
>
> I would like to know how we actually came to the extensive usage of
> statusbars for game informations, and whether there are better solutions to
> accomplish this task (esp. with regard to small window sizes).
>
> Good night.
> Stefan



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