Topic: Content and looks of the new "cheap in-game help"

Heyho!!

back from my travels I am able to add more here :). Nasenbaer is quite right with his assessments, but I have more to add to the rendering of text.

Rendering of text is complicated - a nice example for good text rendering is the tex/latex system which has been developed since the dawn of time and it is still not perfect. Other systems are reflowing text in browsers and so on. But we do not really need that much functionality - we strive for the most simple set of features that does what we need. Our own system is not very versatile but it was good enough (TM) for now. With the help we would like to have some more layout freedom - but hopefully we do not need everything word does.

I have contemplated to replace our own text renderer with pango [1] - a move that battle for wesnoth has done a while ago. Pango would do all we want and more. The problem is: Pango is quite a beast, a huge library that seems to be hard to integrate/ship on various OSes. I am afraid of the maintenance hussle it would introduce.

For the moment I feel incrementally improving details on our own renderer is wiser and a better solution than making a big move and throw a lot over.

Btw, the example help looks pretty nice already! I feel that this a big improvement over the current situation. If you can identify what layout features you would like to have we could see what can be improved in the code.

[1] http://www.pango.org/

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Venatrix wrote: There are three fonts in the game. Well, alright, the Widelands-Font is only used in the main menus (btw: Why isn’t it standard?) but it seems to me that the other two, FreeSans and FreeSerif, are used randomly.

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/662800. The Widelands font is a bit limited so it has problems with non-latin characters, which obviously isn't ideal when we have a global audience.

For example the campaign texts use a serif headline and a sans text body. As I understand it, it is more common the other way round (as said here), but on the other hand I heard that in texts only used on a monitor sans fonts are better readable. There must be a reason, why this forum doesn’t use a serif font, right?

I'm fairly sure recommended font-types for text and headlines are opposite on screen compared to printed paper. Though, I've always had problems remember which is used where. :p

[Campaigns not using the same format.] Shall we do something about it?

I'd also prefer if all campaigns used the same format, but it doesn't seem to be that straight-forward (https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/835559).

Ships!

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I agree, Venatrix, that usage of the fonts should adhere to a set of rules and be uniform throughout WL.
Mass text in Serifs and headlines in SansSerif is definitely more common than vice versa.
This is because Serife fonts give a better readablilty usually.
However, fontsize and display resolution factor in here as well.
It might be good to have a decision first on the resolution that will be supported in the future.
It will make the font decision easier (and some other graphic related stuff, too).

Being no programmer, I apologize for all my suggestions that imply undue workload and for other misjudgements due to lack of expertise or relevant skills.
I am on Win32, have no means to compile, and rely on prefabricated distributions (Thanks to Tino).

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Nice, Venatrix!
Can you post a link for the .lua file as such, not just a screenshot, please?

We should have some "guide lines" for left aligned texts with right aligned icons.
For this, simple dotted lines of "." characters may be good enough.

I think another element that we should have, is a way to
group subsequent lines to paragraphs.

Having bold, color and font sizes for subheadings is fine, but readers have a tendency to
see logical structures represented by a varied spacing between the lines.
Having those icons to deal with, we are a bit limited with what we can do
to comply with this habit, and logical units easily fall apart layoutwise.

I don't think inserting additional blank lines would be the best answer to that.
Our help text already have an unfortunate vertical size.
Instead some horizontal and maybe also vertical lines could help?
A sort of "framing" for certain text and graphics areas.
To have those frames as graphics (fake shadow effects, like we use for the buttons)
to let certain areas appear elevated or sunk in, would be great graphically.
But a simpler graphic may also do.

I'd hate to resort to ASCII line drawing characters.
It would mean, that we're limited to monospaced fonts only.

Is there any chance anything along these lines can be achieved?

Being no programmer, I apologize for all my suggestions that imply undue workload and for other misjudgements due to lack of expertise or relevant skills.
I am on Win32, have no means to compile, and rely on prefabricated distributions (Thanks to Tino).

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I know, what Sirver will answer: "Not at this time"
Anyhow, thank you for the files, and of course the your work behind those.
I will try to figure out, if and how I can use your formatting elements by analogy.
I am not sure how far that will carry with someone as "programming illeterate" as myself, but I can try."
In case I utterly fail, would you be willing to do some formatting for source text I provide?
And if so, you might want to tell me, what format you'd want the text and/or graphics in.
But maybe I can answers that myself, once I have looked at your .lua files?
Let's see...
again thanks Venatrix!

Being no programmer, I apologize for all my suggestions that imply undue workload and for other misjudgements due to lack of expertise or relevant skills.
I am on Win32, have no means to compile, and rely on prefabricated distributions (Thanks to Tino).

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