Re: Gataxx

[MattyT <mattyt-spam tpg com au>]

On Thu, 2004-01-01 at 17:50, Arvind Narayanan wrote:

> > This might include games such as Dominoes, Backgammon, Scrabble,
> > Battleship, more miscellaneous dice games, and so on.
> Just wanted to mention that gtkboard is generic enough to support
> most of these.

I noticed after I sent the last mail that there were some weird "board
games" in GtkBoard, so this doesn't suprise me.  I guess it raises a lot
of questions however.

Firstly, what is to gain by throwing lots of different types of game
into one monolithic program?  Would we not be better served by having:

- one program for each type of game
- one or more libraries if needed
- consistent design/UI, perhaps enforced/assisted by the libraries

?  Could GtkBoard be compiled to support this?

> > think about how these mega-programs should present their UI for game
> > selection, and whether AisleRiot or GtkBoard has the best solution. 
> AisleRiot uses a separate dialog rather than a menu. Gtkboard uses a 2
> level menu hierarchy along plus a list of "recent" games.

If it became one program per game type it could possibly become one
level though, except maybe for multi-player cards where you might need
to deal with game families like Poker and Rummy which have a lot of
different games within them.  If that does happen I wouldn't see it as a
major UI inconsistency though, if it is called for.  What I would be
more interested is the widgets used and the names of menu items.

I think an MRU list is a good idea if there are enough games in the
program, I was going to mention this earlier.  It does raise the
question, if there are lots of megaprograms for each game type, whether
some might be too small for an MRU.  If that's so, would an interface
like this be appropriate:

Large Programs:

Open Game ...
Open Recent Game >

Small Programs:

Open Game >

That's not totally consistent, but might be a good tradeoff between
consistency and other usability issues.  The position and wording of
menu items is still consistent, as would be the selection mechanism of
using a submenu.

I certainly think that solitaire and board games could use the same UI
in this respect.

> An alternative would be for the user to see views of the game list by
> selecting various attributes.

I presume this is referring to a monolithic application like GtkBoard is
becoming.  I can see what this might mean, since a simple hierarchy
won't properly classify games (eg betting games may or may not be card
games).  I'm not entirely sure what benefit it would give the user
though.

-- 
         Matthew Tuck: Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy        
 My Short Autobiography: 1985 Grade Bin Monitor 1990 Class Clown Award
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