mouse button behavior

[Cervator]

Just nest the radials if you need more space. Very dynamic design - only include the buttons that are active/needed, if there are more than 8 then group them somehow for overflow, ideally predefined how to overflow maybe with a unique group icon

IMHO anything beyond 8 icons in a radial menu (so not talking about the current corner menu window for miniions with tabs and such) would crowd it too much for easy selection, and alternative selection like mouse wheel, numpad, directional pads, etc. Think cardinal directions on a compass (okay, and technically the ordinal directions). Gets ugly at the north-north-west stage.

Also, go to bed! That's where I'm heading and I'm six hours behind you!

 

[overdhose]

what's a bed? And I think you are YEARS behind me muhahaha...

As you might have read, the best thing about radial menus is the muscle memory training, but for that, your menu needs static menu items, else the muscle memory is useless... or something like that anyway that's why atm it's a static clock with enabled / disabled items in it. I can make it dynamic to, and I can add a second ring I guess for expansion. Anywho, that's details/polish, the first issue is to have it respond decently, and due to the way the input is processed atm after the UIWindow (sigh i actually pressed ctrl+space here, guess i need sleep after all ) is opened, it doesn't catch the mouse up event correctly when I release the mouse to select a menu item (have same prob with activeminion ui).

However for testing, you can release and click again, on the second mouse up it responds correctly. I made a radial where 0° opens main menu, 33° opens minion ui, 66° starts new zone if a block is targeted, 90° end selection if block is targeted again, center button opens the inventory and... I like it , aside from the second click as explained above.

No need for minion command stick anymore, no more zoning tools, no more books, one click fits all. I don't see myself disabling this any time soon, even if I can't push it heh.

 

[ddr2]

What about giving the player two hands ? He could then have one pickaxe in his right hand and a sort of "magic wand" to controls minions in the other which would trigger a radial menu ? Then pressing the left button means using the object / tool / whatever in his left hand and the same would apply for right button and his right hand.

On touch-based device, we just have to divide the screen vertically : tapping left <-> use thing in the player left hand, tapping right <-> use thing in the player right hand. For the leap, from what I understand, it can follow our two hands right ?

Like Cervator, I think it makes sense to put 8 items or less in the radial menu. With that in mind, we could imagine a whole set of radial-menus that could be "attached" to specific items in the toolbar : for the "magic wand controlling minions" (go there, build that, ... ), for the blueprints (start build here, edit blueprint, ... ), ...

We could even use the same radial menu widget for the usual menu brought by the escape-key : main menu, mod options, graphics options, sound options, ...

I am not sure if it is a very good idea but it could definitely bring more depth into the gameplay.

 

[overdhose]

that's pretty much what it does already (even has a bit of a mockup couple posts ago... but yeah I just made this as a sort of poc, how we fill it in and how many entries it has etc can all be decided and even adjusted as we go along... thinking more and more of using 2 circles, with the second circle acting as sub-menus for the main one, not sure how that would work out, but we can experiment. And like i said : we could make a couple different setups.

Still need to figure out how to solve the input problem though.

 

[Cervator]

Funny how timing works out, today Castle Story released a new video showcasing an overhauled radial menu. Usability in the old one was kinda awkward, the new one looks very impressive and much like what I had imagined

 

[overdhose]

ok what amused me most was that the menu was black transparent with icons which is exactly what I have been doing a lot to. Also there's is a lot more fluid then mine ATM I'm jealous but I just started so that might make sense. I love how he explains the muscle memory to, and just leaves the spots empty instead of graying them out, I guess it makes more sense for the radial, but they do place tasks at the same spot every time like I explained. I wish I knew how I can make the round shaped buttons , my buttons may appear round but are actually square.

But yeah I'm happy to see I ain't completely delusional in my thinking.

 

[Skaldarnar]

Speaking of radial menus, here's a video of Castle Story and its radial menu:

 

[overdhose]

Thanks but incidentally Cervator beat you to that already. And yes it gave me some better vision about how to go about it. Working on some ideas, based on an 8 sliced ring with some middle buttons (not sure what the best config there is yet) and an extra ring around it which could serve as a shortcut to inventory item (30 inventory slots in a circle if you choose an action like drop or craft) even though it might be redundant at this point. But somehow the idea appealed to me so I'd like to try it.

Other entries (well mostly my own mod stuff) will also have a second layer, I'm thinking 2 items : minions and zones, with zone having submenus start zone, end zone, cancel zone and zone management, and minions with prev and next minion, inventory etc when 1 is active, minion options etc... To make crafting work from the menu I will need to add a new event to it as i can't figure out how to simulate that item drop (I thought I could fire the event somehow, but I'm to stupid apparently)

I have been puzzling for hours, and have a hard time deciding on a basic layout/functionality as there are many possibilities and i have a restless mind. I also lost some time thinking I could draw the slices in opengl, until I realized how complicated it was to render partial disks, unless I would resort to something like glu.partialdisk to draw them. Just not sure if there would be any merit in doing it, besides providing a more flexible solution.

 

[Cervator]

Thanks but incidentally Cervator beat you to that already

I may or may not be juggling even more convos than I post in threads

 

[overdhose]

here's the current mockup I was thinking of using :

 

[Cervator]

As in, the circles open outwards in tiers, and the crowded outer ring is not all visible at once or is only an example for something like an inventory needing lots of slots?

 

[overdhose]

yeah like if you mouse over drop or craft or use, the outer ring appears. for minions it would be an entirely new ring as I'll need quite a bit of menu's... I realize that second ring might be problematic key mapping wise again, but I'm doing my best trying to find middle ground between offering a default layout that could be used by core, and functionality that I would really like for the minions mod

Maybe explain a bit why, as i don't draw them in opengl, I need to make the slices in gimp, so i want them to look a bit decent and not redraw them every other week, calculating angles etc

the outer ring would be filtered, use would only show usable items like food and potions

Ow another idea I had been toying with, to keep your 8 slice setup, is dynamically altering the ring on mouse over, like mouse over minions would remove the other items like craft etc and replace them with minion specific items.

 

[Cervator]

Here's one suggestion then - rather than focus entirely on growing outwards to nest elements more deeply, consider whether older parts of the circle can "fade away" and actually move the center to a submenu, then emphasize movement away from the edges of the screen by leaving the general / popular menu choices closer toward the center again.

That could get really deep too, but in a more overlapping fashion that could fit more stuff if we need it, rather than require either more circles or more icons per circle. Say we only have two minion choices right now, that'll fit easily, but then the Oreons develop social diversification and there are suddenly 50 types then there's probably a way to squish them into < 8 sub-groups

As another example if you've moved the focus out to where you're working with minions and zones you might not still need the main menu icon visible deeper in. Could help keep the UI from getting too cluttered

If you release the secondary control function (right click or the alternatives on other platforms) on top of the center of any one circle it could cancel the whole thing but if instead you left click as well maybe that could just step back to the previously active menu (as opposed to sacrificing one of the slots to "go back").

How's that sound?

 

[overdhose]

uch the idea is that the radial opens holding down right mouse atm, and selects by releasing. Releasing without selection will close, so if you "moused over" minions by accident, going back to the center would restore the default menu. This means there is no direct line between minion and the item on the other side of the menu without cancelling though. Like I said, you can puzzle at infinty trying to decide the best way to go about it.

Anyway what you said is what i edited in my post, overwrite the existing items depending on an item you selected. Still kills my inventory idea though and I started to like that one to...

nm I reread what you typed and understood what you meant now, yeah that sounds great

and as for the inventory, I could make half a circle with 6 items, and arrows to scroll though the remaining ones

 

[Cervator]

You're definitely right there, near infinite ways to do this one

 

[overdhose]

some progress :

edit : ow yeah I forgot, I got the mouse responding the way I want, I added a glow that actually makes it seem like the item pops up, I did this as a cheap solution but I came to like the effect, I might keep it like that. It responds pretty well though the rendering lags a bit (can be noticed at night circling around, the selection has a trail)

There's still plenty to add to it, like the middle buttons (left them out for now, still haven't decided grin) and the menu overriding. But Im' most happy about the popup effect working and closing / selecting on release.

 

[overdhose]

added some icons and finished a sub menu for the zoning... radial is becoming alive

 

[overdhose]

came up with another idea, as I added 3 buttons around the center now, up opens menu, south east executes the default interaction with objects (like opening chests) and then I had one left and found a good use for it.

It's used as a sort of wildcard, currently when you open a submenu it proposes a default action for that submenu, and also stores this info during your play session, so for example if you created a zone, and you open the radial again, that 3d button will show the zone management book icon and clicking it will open zone management. If your last action was minion related, it will show a button to the minion list. So it works as a quick access shortcut to 1 submenu action, which might be different or similar to one action from the submenu. I mainly plan to use it as a shortcut to ui's that manage an aspect from the game / mod, and also as a (possible )9th button for a submenu.

The other 2 buttons, menu and frob, are fixed and always accessible (not sure if i should hide frob when you have no target selected, but that's a detail again, selecting it doesn't cause issues, just like normal frob button)

Remaining (minor) issues :
* if you make a very fast mouse swipe, you can bypass coordinate detection so things like the selection glow doesn't appear or appears twice
* similar sometimes even when moving slow, you can trigger a double or triple selection glow, need to debug that somehow, shouldn't happen but couldn't figure it out yet.
* when alt tabbing while the menu is open (by having another window popping up for example) you can run in an a situation where the popup closed when you switch back to Terasology, but as the system didn't receive a mouse up event I think the radial still process the mouse input so you can't use mouse anymore (keyb still works though to exit) prob just need to make sure the modal state gets set to false when the radial closes.
* I also tried binding the radial to the middle mouse button, which works to open the radial but wouldn't close at mouse up, might be because I didn't check the delay since last mouse press

 

[Cervator]

That dynamic shortcut bit sounds clever!

 

[overdhose]

say what you want, I'll make this optional in the minion settings, but I have a feeling many will enable this: