r23447 - Navigation tabs and X button tweaks

[drdev]

It took all night, but I was able to finish implementing navigation tabs for the titlebar that allow switching between the Home, Deck Editor, and Match screens intuitively and easily. Here's the summary from CHANGES.txt:

- Navigation tabs -
Forge now display navigation tabs in the titlebar and supports switching screens without closing them
By default, Home and Deck Editor are available as tabs, with another closable tab added for any game you start
X button in upper right now exits Forge rather than going back to Home screen
To concede the current game, use the X button in the Game tab itself
Deck Editor and Exit Forge buttons have been removed from the Home screen since they're both accessible on the titlebar

Here's a peak at what Forge now looks like on all 3 screens:

Please note that I picked from the icons for the Deck Editor (FSkin.EditorImages.IMG_PACK) and Match screens (FSkin.DockIcons.ICO_ALPHASTRIKE) from those already available. Though the pack one I think works fine, I'm definitely open to input on both.

Let me know if you have any questions or encounter any problems.

Thanks.
-Dan

[friarsol]

No prompt if you click the X? Since we've trained everyone to do that to return screens, people are going to be closing all the time (like I just did twice).

Aside from that it seems a bit... awkward to me.

1. Launch Forge
2. Switch to Deck Editor (see Constructed deck editor no matter what phase of the game you are in as far as i can tell)
3. Go back to Home->Quest
4. Open Spell Shop
5. Go back to Home/Quest

Now if I click on Deck Editor it reopens the spell shop, which implies to me it's impossible to reopen the constructed deck editor without a restart.

Additionally, is this going to hog resources by not actually closing out of the deck editor when switching out of the deck editor?

Edit: Not to say you won't get the kinks worked out, it's just awkward for me right now.

Here's another. I finish playing a quest game, and click great on the screen that tells me I've won. I'm returned to the home screen, with the game screen tab still open. I'm able to switch back to this tab and interact with the game, which doesn't actually do anything and since the game is no longer on the "Game Over" screen, things appear broken. I'd prefer the "Great" button to close the tab as part of it's normal cleanup process.

Edit2: Weird, now I did get the alert box, even though I'm in a similar scenario that first got me closed out of Forge without a prompt. In Deck Editor, clicked the X. I have played a game, but have since X'd out of the tab. Even though that's the case the alert box says "A game is currently active..." And... now it tells me I can't start another game because there's another one in progress, when I try to play the next one in my quest.

[drdev]

I realize it's going to take some getting used to, and I promise we'll get the kinks worked out. I thought able showing an alert always, but given that I added an alert if a game is active and we show an alert if you have unsaved deck changes, I opted against it. Given you shouldn't be able to lose anything by making the mistake, I thought it better to not prompt in general so that people quickly get trained out of it.

For the Deck Editor, I could add a combo box or something that allows switch the deck type being edited right from that screen, making Constructed re-accessible and allowing switching to the others without returning to the Home Screen. Alternatively (or in addition), we could just add a link to the Constructed tab on the Home Screen that opens the Constructed Deck Editor back up.

As for this taking more resources, we were not previously clearing any resources when closing a screen, so this shouldn't result in any more resources being used than before.

For the issues where the game tab isn't closing, that should be easy to fix. Same with the issue where you're being improperly informed a game is active.

[friarsol]

I realize it's going to take some getting used to, and I promise we'll get the kinks worked out. I thought able showing an alert always, but given that I added an alert if a game is active and we show an alert if you have unsaved deck changes, I opted against it. Given you shouldn't be able to lose anything by making the mistake, I thought it better to not prompt in general so that people quickly get trained out of it.

I'd strongly recommend always having an alert, unless perhaps if you are on the home screen only. It closed on me twice in 5 minutes when I was just trying to buy a few things in the shop, and then make a change to my deck, both times inside the deck editor. I play mostly on a laptop and it takes a non-insignificant amount of time to load. If this were any other game, I would have either uninstalled it, or removed it from my desktop as soon as that happened the second time. Losing time, and becoming frustrated are not things to be overlooked. People will be trained just as well if they are prompted to quit when clicking "Oh right, that quits now"

I think it's very important not to ostracize are long term users, many of whom never had issues with this X goes back issue.

[drdev]

I realize it's going to take some getting used to, and I promise we'll get the kinks worked out. I thought able showing an alert always, but given that I added an alert if a game is active and we show an alert if you have unsaved deck changes, I opted against it. Given you shouldn't be able to lose anything by making the mistake, I thought it better to not prompt in general so that people quickly get trained out of it.

I'd strongly recommend always having an alert, unless perhaps if you are on the home screen only. It closed on me twice in 5 minutes when I was just trying to buy a few things in the shop, and then make a change to my deck, both times inside the deck editor. I play mostly on a laptop and it takes a non-insignificant amount of time to load. If this were any other game, I would have either uninstalled it, or removed it from my desktop as soon as that happened the second time. Losing time, and becoming frustrated are not things to be overlooked. People will be trained just as well if they are prompted to quit when clicking "Oh right, that quits now"

I think it's very important not to ostracize are long term users, many of whom never had issues with this X goes back issue.

You make a good argument. Alright, I committed a change (r23452) so you'll always be prompted to confirm exiting or restarting Forge, regardless of whether a game is active or what screen you're currently on. I decided not to exempt the Home screen anymore because you could be on the Home Screen but have other tabs open.

I also fixed the issue with Quest game tabs that you reported (r23451).

[spr]

On a technical level I am very impressed with your tabs but from a usability point of view I have a number of problems with the new look -

• It is a complete change to the way it worked previously so at the very least there should be an option to revert back to the previous look without the tabs. This gives you time to fix any issues without affecting existing users experience.
• I, and expect many others prefer doing one thing at a time (KISS principle?). I have no interest in switching to the Deck Editor or whatever during the middle of a game. Forge is not an Excel spreadsheet.
• You have opened a whole can of worms with game and application state consistency. Now while playing a game I can open preferences and change settings, start downloading images - how will these affect the current Game or any other area of Forge? Just as an example, open the Deck Editor, do some stuff. Now open the Spell shop from Quest. Now go back to the previous Deck Editor and continue where you left off...?
• One of your justifications for the tabs was to let a user play multiple games. Regardless of why anyone would want to do that, have you considered the memory and performance issues? Not everyone is running Windows 7 with 16 Gigs of memory - Forge should be able to run on lowest of spec netbooks etc.
• Then there is the X to close. I know that it is strange behaviour in Windows but it is not in Linux and possibly Mac as well and it has been around for much longer than you or I have been involved with Forge. You seem to have an overriding Windows-centric approach to development which would be fine if Forge was written in C#.

Unless the tabs are made optional then when the next version is released, I fear the Forge development team are in danger of losing all the goodwill accrued with the recent changes because of your "my way or the highway" approach. Please consider that.

Cheers,
Steve

[throumbaris]

I agree that it should be optional as to not alienate the people that are used to the old system but really the complaint is that it's used in Windows environments and that there might be issues with a feature in-development? It's a pretty good step ahead of the X to close system and who knows what else might be easier to implement in the future now that there are tabs in the application.

[drdev]

What I'd like to propose is to tweak the confirmation dialog shown when clicking the X button to offer 3 options: Back to Home/Concede Game/Leave Bazaar (based on what screen you're on), Exit Forge, and Cancel. I'd make the previous behavior the default on that confirmation dialog, but the other options would be there. I will also add a setting that determines whether to show that dialog, and which option to default to (Back/Concede/etc vs. Exit Forge), controlled via a checkbox on the dialog that says "Always use this option" or something similar and also available in Preferences. That will hopefully be the best of both worlds.

Regardless of what the X button does, I see no reason that the tabs can't still remain available. They simply offer another way of navigating and another visual cue to what screen you're currently on. It's not like we weren't keeping these screens open in the background anyway, so I've added no additional resource usage in doing this. We could also optimize our resource usage in the future to release these screens when not in use and bring them back if the tab is clicked.

I already made it so you can't start a new game when you already have a game in progress. I only said it might be cool to run multiple games at once (which MTGO supports and will be more useful if we ever support network play), but as of now I prevent it.

As for the Deck Editor being reused for different activities, I have plans to split off the Spell Shop (and other editors) into its own closable tab to better facilitate switching between the different editors. Note that I would let all editors share the same resources as before. Then the Deck Editor tab basically is just a replacement for the old Deck Editor button on the Home screen.

The other "can of worms" issues you refer to can be fixed to work as expected, or plugged if it's not possible. The main use of being able to switch back to the Deck Editor while playing is to view the deck to remind yourself what could be left in your library. Hopefully any changes saved to a deck currently being played wouldn't actually affect the game, and if they do, we can either fix it or disable deck editing while a game is in progress.

I'm sorry if it seems like I did this as a "my way or the highway" thing. I ultimately just want to provide everyone, whether from a Windows background like me or a Linux/Mac background, an experience that's easy and intuitive, and the old behavior was very unusual and unintuitive for anyone using Windows.

I'm more than happy to get feedback and make adjustments until everyone is satisfied, and I intend to get to as close to that state as possible before 1.5.3 is released. The last thing I want is to alienate our user base or lose the respect of the other Forge developers.

Thanks.
-Dan

[drdev]

Alright, I just committed (r23457) a new setting that controls whether the X button closes the current screen (same behavior as before) vs. exiting Forge.

I also made it so if you haven't configured this setting yet, you'll be prompted the first time you click the X button to decide which behavior you want.

I realize this is slightly different from my earlier proposal, but that proposal ultimately changed the previous workflow by introducing a dialog, and I wanted to allow the previous workflow to remain intact once the setting is configured.

I hope having this setting will help those who liked or are used to the old behavior adjust to the tabs without completely ripping the floor out from under them. Please let me know if there's anything more I can do that I haven't already addressed.

Thanks for your patience.
-Dan

[friarsol]

Looks like there are some quirks still. I'm in the Quest Deck Editor after previously going to the Quest Spell Shop and basically all the buttons are on, some of which that shouldn't be, and some of which which are mislabeled.

http://imgur.com/smCWcUS

As you can see it's this awkward mismosh of buttons being labeled wrong, and some labels being there that shouldn't and a very confusing mess.

[drdev]

Looks like there are some quirks still. I'm in the Quest Deck Editor after previously going to the Quest Spell Shop and basically all the buttons are on, some of which that shouldn't be, and some of which which are mislabeled.

http://imgur.com/smCWcUS

As you can see it's this awkward mismosh of buttons being labeled wrong, and some labels being there that shouldn't and a very confusing mess.

I'm already working on a fix to the Deck Editors. It should be ready today hopefully.

[drdev]

I just released the fix for the Deck Editors in r23498. Please note that this ended up requiring me to re-envision the structure of the Navigation tabs, resulting in moving FControl.Screens to a seperate FScreen enum, for which additional screens were added for each specific type of Deck Editor (Constructed, Draft, Sealed, Commander, Scheme, Planar, Quest, Spell Shop). Each FScreen is able to appear in its own tab and defines the information used by the tab for display and event handling (instead of INavigationTabData which has gone away), as well as the view (IVTopLevelUI), controller (ICDoc), and where the layout file lives. Ultimately this refactoring should make adding new screens in the future much easier.

Hopefully the tabs should be behaving as expected now, both when switching between them and closing them. Let me know if anything still isn't working or if you have any questions.

Thanks.
-Dan

[friarsol]

r23517
I just noticed the same bug I posted a screenshot for two posts down. With duplicated icons and mislabeled ones too, which means your bugfix didn't actually fix this. Same screenie as before I still have. I don't know that I'm doing anything in particular aside from playing quest matches, going to my deck editor and going to the quest spell shop.

I definitely have not entered any other deck editors besides these two.

Ok, it seems like each time I go into the Spell Shop (after each match) all new icons are being created and the old ones are still there. Sooo.. hopefully that should help?