Why do other spring games have such bad interfaces

Iirc, many other Springrts games have cloned the ZK interface. GundamRTS and EvolutionRTS both use forks of ZK's ChiliUI.

Others take the approach of staying out of the interface discussion so that players may use base standard SpringRTS widgets freely across multiple games. This comes from the original mentality of SpringRTS games as "mods of Spring" instead of thinking of them as stand-alone games - you'd have a single common SpringRTS baseline experience and "mods" only changed the units, not the UI - your personal UI config would carry across multiple games.

BA and ZK^H^HKP are in the latter camp.

edit: holy crap I spaced there. KP, not ZK. Completely destroyed the message I was trying to convey.

Pxtl does this mean some spring widgets don't work in ZK? It makes a little more sense now I'm still a bit confused. Is it effectively a crap interface because a good interface would not work due to the variety of requirements of the different games? The portable widgets/ui config does seem cool is ZK part of that?

EDIT > Anarchid I guess my real question should be "why doesnt spring use Chilli whatever by default? Its so much better?"

It's a crap interface because TA had a crap interface. The default Spring GUI is the TA GUI, so it is easy enough to tell. If people want, I can go into detail, but the short form is that paginated build menus are cumbersome to use and limit discoverability; the direct use of text for unit states looks terrible, especially given how it resizes, though this is more an aesthetic and localization concern; and streaming economy is tricky enough to get the hang of that not seeing unit and building costs on the construction menu directly (as in, not just In tooltips) only serves to further obfuscate the system and any cost analysis.

Best part of old spring UI are the <-- and --> on the prev, next page buttons.

quote: It's coming along but Java - ugh.

There have been changes during your long cold sleep.

WTF you weblobbying with QT for ...... I'm going to look at the code and If I find a QTWebView the embeds a java/javascript applet to display.. I'm going to abuse you in C++

So you wrote an API for and embedded: http://weblobby.springrts.com/qt/index.html


That being said. One year later CarRepairer gets a hat tip.


http://www.moddb.com/games/pure - I think it was more the devs attitude towards the Spring community that flopped it. If I remember right.

Blarg, I completely brain-farted on the last line of my post. I meant BA and KP. ZK is obviously in the "spring game as game" not "spring game as mod of larger spring baseline".

quote: Why don't they just clone the code from the ZK interface?

Cloning the ZK interface is hard. There are things which handle behaviour particular to ZK.

Some games use Chili:
* Evo has a cut down clone of the ZK interface from a few years ago. Forb is not much of a coder so as far as I know it is undeveloped.

• Smoth pays attention to UI and makes his own (using Chili) because he has the capability and makes games that require their own UI.

In general:

• Games without an established playerbase don't get feedback on UI. Also when a developer does not get to play their game it is hard for them to evaluate the UI.
• Games with a TA:Spring derived playerbase have the old 2010-ish idea that players should install and manage their own UI. These games also seem to lack maintenance and BAR has absorbed the work usually done on the *A games.

In short other games have not put the work in. Also remember that there are people around who like weak UIs. Look at the popularity of Starcraft.

quote: Why isn't the ZK interface the default for Spring games? Why is a piece of software as advanced as spring got such an AWFUL default interface?

Spring is engine. Somehow giving it the ZK UI would make it much less general. Also if it were up to the engine devs to maintain a large default UI it would inevitably break due to disuse.

ZK has good things like space-click, EPIC Menu, Deluxe Player List, and the Gesture Menu, all of which except maybe Gesture Menu are Chili. Even though those things are still presumably possible to implement in LuaUI, I can't think of any equivalents except for the WIP NOTA UI, meaning that players too get an effective improvement with ZK's.

I lost my post, in short:

quote: space-click, EPIC Menu, Deluxe Player List, and the Gesture Menu

Those are imo small things that do not define UI superiority.
For example "Gesture Menu" is another way to do the same things as is already possible via hotkeys. (Other games have hotkeys for buildings, too.)
How many ways to do the same task does an UI really need?
As long as there is one functional way to to do something, that is sufficient.
Playerlists with extra buttons etc exist in other games too. Same for ways to show unit stats.
Other way around some games have features that are missing in zK:
But these things are imo all minor and not relevant enough in everyday-normal playing, so they do not make one UI better than the other.

Btw is there really a "Deluxe Player List" in zK?
I only found "AdvPlayerlist" & "Chili Crude Player List"
If there really is 3 different playerlists then that is funny by definition.

/edit:
"Chili Deluxe Player List - Alpha" - three different playerlists indeed.
At quick look did not find any functionality that does not exist in other games, too.
No normal player cares about picking one out of three playerlists: that is the kind of stuff that is only relevant to fricklers and tinkerers. Why not pick one definitive playerlist to end such fragmention?