Topic: Managing Toolsmithy comstruction

I like the idea of kaputtnik and I would suggest to even go one step further: Add a tab to each production site where one can set the economy setting for this building's outputs. The overall settings accessible via flags (and warehouses?) should remain.

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kaputtnik wrote:

Nordfriese wrote:

I can't understand why some are always arguing with the ui. If i look into a window of a trainigscamp or a port there are also much rows and tabs.

Very many, in fact. Which is precisely my point – the Widelands UI is already quite complex, and pretty hard to learn. Even more buttons and options would make it even harder to understand.

In my opinion the UI is the most important thing of a complex game: A good UI can explain many things which might get complicated to explain in words. I remember i had similar questions regarding the economy settings in the past. Just because understanding the results of those settings isn't easy, it's abstract. A good UI should guide a player through complicated things. At least the player can examine the ui and have visual correspondence, whereas some abstract (although logical) things are not very intuitive.

Okay that's a good point. But see below –

For the toolsmith i would like to see all tools he can make and beside each tool a spinbox where one can set the amount of tools the toolsmith should make.

What is the difference to just setting the economy targets to the amount of tools you want him to produce?

The difference is: It's far away. Why should i have to click on a flag, which has nothing to to do with the toolsmith (so: far away), just because i want to let the toolsmith produce a specific tool?

What is the purpose of producing the tool in the first place? You want a worker to be recruited. This is done at warehouses. And you can access the economy options from the warehouse when #4379 is merged.
This is just to point out that there are many ways to interpret "close by"/"far away" in processes that involve multiple steps. Does this mean you want to be able to access the UI for tweaking a goal from every individual step of the whole pathway?

Too much redundancy for some functions is not good either because then people will wonder:

• What is the difference? Or if there isn't one, then why is the same function available in many places?

• What happens when you combine the various functions? Especially if the UI is not exactly the same everywhere (e.g. if the toolsmithy's window only shows the economy targets for tools)

Not to mention that it all becomes much more effort to maintain, and the combination of multiple features for the same logic is more bug-prone.

Edit. Another reason why I'm against adding economy-target related things to the toolsmithy window is that all settings in this window are local. They apply only to this one building. A global setting would need to be clearly marked as such as one might at first assume it to be some kind of local feature; and it would introduce an inconsistency.
(I know the Mute All button is the one exception. If you agree with this argument and conclude that this button therefore does not belong there I'm not opposed to moving it away from the building window into a new global menu. The building window's caps buttons row is very full anyway,)

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I agree that setting economy settings shouldn't be part of a production site window.

An output tab, like GunChleoc propsed will be very helpful, i believe. Such a tab can also have some string saying: "Managing how many wares of which type will be produced for stock is done via the economic settings"...

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