What is with lobby redisign

Hi,

i think that most people agree with me that current lobby is not pretty or representative.
Many also does not find it very intuitive.

This WIP lobby:
http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/6311 is amazing but even if he finished it, its made in WPF which works only on Windows.

So, is anything going with lobby? As i see it, its the roughest edge there is for newcommers.

Since lobby is in Winforms, i dont think it can be made pretty and "modern".

Myself, i tried to make webpage which could be binded to weblobby funcions, but i realized that i dont have so much time and weblobby client still have some drawbacks. If someone wants to see how i ment to do it. Its ONLY WEB PAGE with battle shown, any other window would be overlay, its ONLY for Google Chrome for its specific functions, its just very quick mash-up so many things like function elements or responsiveness missing.




PS: Did you noticed that awesome random sentence generator i made for the page :-D

You may not see it as veteran, but its not very welcoming. (ugly too IMO)
Also, taking battlechat as regular channel is weird.

[DDAM]aiphee

Agree that Battle Chat as a regular chat channel... especially one that *doesn't close when you leave the battle* is bad behavior.

There are lots of large and small opportunities for improvement - the home screens are terribly over-cluttered, the skin on both the lobby-UI and the website is generally ugly, and could use a good designer's touch. Licho deserves a lot of great credit for implementing a lot of fantastic functionality, but iirc he's freely admitted he's waiting for somebody with design talent to fix up buttons and the like.

Many of the panels in the various listings are cluttered, and the Web vs. Winforms pages could use some unifying theming (why is Chat and Battle listing white while the website is black)?

I'd also love to see messages come through as some kind of GChat-style pop-up instead of appearing as new chat-channels.

My fantasy approach is a right-sidebar panel for direct chat messages, votes, and other message-like content.

Saktoth Well, i know about webllobby, that is why i started to work on that website, i could manage to bind all those weblobby funcions to it.
But i tripped over some weblobby engine and map download errors so im not sure if is it quite ready yet.

There was talk about using some reasonably portable .net wrapper for webkit or chrome. That would allow the lobby to be made nice on all supported OSes, while retaining most of ZKL's functionality that would otherwise require recoding.

quote: it did not detected 91 engine (on Linux) which works with ZKLobby

Presumably that's because SWL keeps its engines separate.

ZKL stores engines in: ~/.spring/engine
SWL stores engines in: ~/.spring/weblobby/engines

If it "did not detect" and did not try to download (did it?) then that's download broken.

Then post ~/.spring/weblobby.log (there's a button in the settings tab for that)

[2up]knorke definetely ZKLobby, its more tested. Just maybe not with winforms.

quote: In few months is supposed to be release on steam,

This looks hilarious now though. Can't really say the state of any Spring lobby became noobie friendly in that time...