Make Movement/Selection Help menu more readable (+Hotkeys discussion, Zoom Level display)
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@Cernel, I've removed the OK button from this information dialog, the consequence is that the only way to close is the X, Esc or Alt-F4 on Windows.
Dialogs are modal, meaning they steal the focus, and you have to close them before you can go on with the game.
Enter/Return/Space is the default behavior associated with buttons on Windows, so any dialog showing buttons will have these hotkeys by default. Overriding default behavior is not impossible but would require a lot of work as there are many different dialog types used in the game.
You should list precisely the dialogs which cause issue.
When a confirmation button is not really useful, it may be possible to change some to information/notification windows like the following screenshot.
The same dialog @100%dpi (without Font Size correction on my system):
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@butterw Really just the "Yes/No" prompt when someone makes a user or political action requiring your acceptance is an issue (as you are writing in chat and inadvertedly accept).
All occurrences of that I believe are strictly related to the presence of this "option name" in the game (XML) file:
actionAccept
The most frequent, however, is likely accepting casualties as the defender, but that is already avoidable by having "Space bar confirms Casualties" set to "false" in "Engine Preferences".
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@cernel said in Make Movement/Selection Help menu more readable (+Hotkeys discussion, Zoom Level display):
@butterw Really just the "Yes/No" prompt when someone makes a user or political action requiring your acceptance is an issue (as you are writing in chat and inadvertedly accept).
All occurrences of that I believe are strictly related to the presence of this "option name" in the game (XML) file:
actionAcceptNext time you play a game where this is a potential issue, could you please post a screenshot of the window or post the dialog title and/or part of the message, so I can look up where it takes place in the code.
I haven't played a game using politics for a long while, but I do remember thinking the ui could use some improvements.
The immediate solution could be to remove the keyboard focus from the buttons in these dialogs (there would be no hotkeys to validate the default action).The most frequent, however, is likely accepting casualties as the defender, but that is already avoidable by having "Space bar confirms Casualties" set to "false" in "Engine Preferences".
In the case of casualties, the issue is typically that the default selection is in some way sub-optimal, but this isn't easy to get right.
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I'm not sure if this problem can be fully solved. By default 'space' activates the UI component that has focus. The dialogs must be modal and by default they have one of their buttons in focus. Removing that default focus is a major blow to as it is really rare when you are typing away and accidentally confirm, but I acknowledge that can be very impactful when that happens.
There might be a clever solution here like detecting if the focus is in the chat and if a user is typing and try to "re-steal" the focus back to the chat if a modal is to appear. A double confirmation could do it too maybe, kind of like how the purchase screen is set up. Unless we can do something programmatically, it's tricky to set up and retain an efficient UX, forcing players to use the mouse slows games down. Game speed is critical, many players do not play because games take too long to play given how much game you actually play per unit time (game play is inefficient). Efficient game play has been and will continue to be a very high priority to help increase the player base.
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@lafayette
From my testing JOptionPane.showOptionDialog does allow to have a dialog choice with no default button. -
@butterw Cool, hard decision how to proceed. Removal of common hotkeys that allows for greater game play efficiency vs mitigating a rare but impactful mis-click due to chat. Maybe there is another option here..
