Topic: Content and looks of the new "cheap in-game help"

Astuur,

I though that you had no interest in learning to program :). Frankly, why I am trying to sell the point is to underline the possibilities and limitations of the current implementation. I'd rather not have the situation though that I'd force something upon you, rather that you find something along the lines of "oh, I wish this could be made simpler". I urge you to contact me then so I can provide the tools. For this, I feel that you need to have an understanding of what is possible; this is why I jump around on functions, code and so on.

What I really like you (and others) to understand is related, but still different.
I am sure you have followed most of the discussions about new graphics, houses in that case, that I had with Chuck.
We both agreed that the genuine charm of especially a game like Settlers or Widelands lies, among other things, in the attention that
is given to tiny little details. "Giving some love" to the work is more than a figure of speech.
And look how Chuck has succeeded in doing exactly that!
Recycling - as in "using the same thing again at different places and for a different purpose" may be something that coders go for, but when it shows, like in prefabricated blocks in houses, it becomes detrimental for the feeling of "love" being invested.
This is obvious in graphics, but IMO it becomes just as obvious when a text block is re-used over and over again.
So far, there has been not much chance for falling into that pit textwise with WL, since there has not been a lot of text in the game itsself. (except for the campaignes, where there is no redundant information).
In any case I'd like to keep my safe distance; i.e. when in doubt, write things twice in different words rather than using text blocks. I am writing all this because I sense your tendency to keep things terse and structured - the way a programmer would.
Me, I'm more of a language man. I believe in the power (and the beauty) of language and I tend to rather write more for clarity, than less accepting ambiguity or incompleteness.

I let this paragraph in because I feel that we both agree and disagree here. First and foremost, yes, widelands is all about love into the small details. And we do that I feel. And I also think we have to do it for the help. And I also share the believe in the power and beauty of language. Nevertheless, we must be very careful not to waste energy in something that might be decremental to our users. I feel this help will be used in two cases: Either a player has build a building and has no idea what it does; he will then open the help window and expect a short, clear paragraph that explains what purpose the building fulfills. I feel you adressed this nicely with the general section in your examples. The second use case will be for reference: I need to know which tool I am missing when this building is vacant or if I really get the diamond back when dismantling this or how long it takes to make a ration. I am not interested in all information than, but I want to get an information quickly and at a glance. It will be beneficial if I can recognize the layout and the ordering of this information in other buildings. This is the reason I see a clear split between text based information and at a glance information.

So, all in all; though I really want this to look "handmade" and avoid any "auto-generated" feeling, I acknowledge the need for a
concise quick information at a glance, even for linguistically challenged players.

I disagree here. One part should be felt handmade, but the reference part should feel autogenerated (imho) because it is essentially a dictionary of common information for the player.

What would you think about tabs for "not so quick" or "in-depth" descriptive help with predominantly text?
For me nothing speaks against doing both: a quick help for forgotten details, and, behind tabs, some longer texts for more details.

Having the same information in two places means that they need to be kept up to date in two places as well. I feel this is a suboptimal choice, but I am willing to look at examples.

I am not so sure what information you would expect in the "lore section" of a lumberjack? Please clarify!

I had something like hjd in mind. I would even combine the general section and interwine this with lore to get a feeling for the tribe's identity across. An example for the lumberjack could be something along the lines of

"Take 300 hits to fell a tree and you're a baby. Take 200 and you're a soldier. Take 100 and you're a hero. Take 50 and soon you will be a honorable lumberjack". Krumta, carpenter of Chat'Karuth

Since the days of the ancients the barbarians have lived inside huge forests. Their culture has become accustomed to having trees in vast number available which lead to the simple trunks becoming the main build item for the barbarians. The builders are generally wasteful in their usage of the tree which leads to huge consumptions. The lumberjacks have become very swift in cutting trees to fulfill this ever rising demand. Also, a lumberjack is only truly happy out and about, only home when his body needs rest.

Note that this is just a quick improvisation. There is very little lore really written down - most is in my head, some in nasenbaers, some in winterwinds. Generally there is only so much consensus, therefore new lore elements can freely be added and discussed as they arise. Generally those help texts items will not convey story, only backstory where we can allow much more liberty. The lore is obiously only gravy, the help can also work without it and it is not a must-have.

What's the current schedule for the next official version? You want this in there, don't you?

Sure, as with every cool feature I want it rather sooner than later in widelands. There are no concrete plans for build 17; there are still a lot of blocker and some stuff that people wanted to finish - with some I am not sure if they really will. For me personally I have to get the editor back into a workable state and finish the atl02.wmf scenario. When this is done, I will start pushing for build 17, this will not be this year though.

Top

Quote

I think we might be talking past each other in a couple of areas but here is my take on it. I don't think splitting the help into "at a glance" and "more info" is something we should do. We should rather focus on making one great help, than splitting the information across two. And I think as long as all the information use a common format this can be achieved easily. If you are only looking for the build cost you will know which section to find it in and will be easily able to scroll down to it. If you want to know what the building does you start at the top, reading the description. Multiple use cases will be solvable through the same window as long as a player is able to predict where the information s/he is looking for resides.

This is partly why I think it lore and description probably should not be mixed. I can see why, but I would rather like a straight description of how the building works, and then we may sprinkle it with some reference or hint in the introduction (which is clearly set aside as not a part of the description). That way people wanting only to know what the building does don't have to filter it out.

To clearify my position on the build cost/dismantle wares shown. While ideally this will be automatically previewed when selecting building to build or hovering the dismantle button (or confirming it?), as of today we do not offer this information. Therefore it would be better to have it in the building information, though it may not make 100% sense but at least the information will be available. Once we are able to display it when the player is selecting a building though, I think it becomes redundant in the information and should be removed.

Another thing I noticed is the list of where the ware produced is used. While this sort of makes sense, I wonder if this may fit better in the ware encyclopedia. To some extent the building merely produce it, and after that point it is done with it. From the ware's point of view, though, it would make sense to note where it is made and can be utilized. I am not saying I am completely against it, but we might want to consider this. Also, I think this could make the info for metalworks really long and messy listing all the wares produced and places they are used.

Ships!

Top

Quote

Are we? Which ones?

The formatting and "split into two views"-thingy. (Might be just my impression though)

You see, my point is, that I want to have room to be wordy, knowing I don't annoy a hasty player and his need to get his hands on fast and solid information. At the same time, I hope to satify those, who'd rather have the game "explained" in real-world language than figures, formulars and numbers.

Well, the problem is most people are not going to read longer texts (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Make_Me_Think) That wasn't really my idea, but I think it is something we have to deal with either way. Basically if no one will read the texts, I am not sure what we gain by writing them. I am not saying we should cut it down to just figures and numbers though. While they can (and should be) used where they make sense, there are areas where text is far better.

That said, I think we should keep the information concise and informative. My suggested format for the descriptions would be one sentence explaining what the building does, then a short paragraph or two elaborating. I believe this would work for the majority of buildings.

scrolling down is always a pain. Often you want to see more than one thing, and then you're jumping around ..... I say no, scrolling on the "quick" part should be avoided as best as possible.

I agree that we should avoid scrolling as far as possible. However, I would imagine the two main use cases for the help window is either "I want to learn more about this building" or "I want to check X for this building". As long as it is easily possible to find/spot whatever X is, I don't think people will mind scrolling past other information.

This is partly why I think it lore and description probably should not be mixed. I can see why, but I would rather like a straight description of how the building works, and then we may sprinkle it with some reference or hint in the introduction (which is clearly set aside as not a part of the description). That way people wanting only to know what the building does don't have to filter it out.

(Regarding removing buildinfo) I'm with you so far, (seen my comment in the pdf?) except for the removing. Why? It's one line of display area in a relativly small window! And it's not something that we're shovelling across the CPU a thousand time per second.

In my opinion the logical place to list the wares required to build a building is to preview them when selecting a building to build and that's where people will look for it. (I really wished I was able to find this discussion again.) Though, this is a future issue and we can probably revisit it once/if the preview is added. Currently this is hard to find in the game, so at the present moment I am all for adding it.

Again, HJD - why do you want to be so restrictive? This is just a few bytes, I think. What is wrong to have this info be redundant and let the user find it, no matter whether he comes from the house or the ware?

As SirVer mentioned above, the problem with redundant information is that if it is stored in multiple places, it neeeds to be updated in both places. And as I mentioned, I wonder if this is information which more naturally belongs to the ware. Granted, if we could fetch the information from one place (so that it is easy to update and maintain) I would probably mind less that it is included here.

In general, I realize I am a bit restrictive in this discussion. I am really happy we finally get in-game help, but this is a hard problem and I think we should strive to make it as good as possible. That said, I think I'll wait a bit and see once we get a couple of examples in the game. I think this might be easier to discuss once we have some examples and are better able to see what works and not.

Ships!

Top

Quote

Nah, HJD - in that point we're not talking past each other, we really do disagree here

The rest is pretty much cleared up, I think and I fully agree that I want see more examples.
I'll tackle the metalworks next (pdf-style) to see how I can cope with the challenges.
One thing, however, I just have to comment

Well, the problem is most people are not going to read longer texts (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Make_Me_Think) That wasn't really my idea, but I think it is something we have to deal with either way. Basically if no one will read the texts, I am not sure what we gain by writing them.

OKay, I haven't read that book. But even if I assume the thesis to be factually true, I wonder if we ought to comply with that presumed tendency.
What if reading the extra information would actually lead to a better understanding (for newcomers) of the game?
What if it really gave an advantage? If some of those users should learn the lesson that it may pay to delve a little deeper into things, I honestly wouldn't mind. Yes, you correctly sense an educational attitude here And why not. WL is a bit outside of the time-critical, trigger happy, 3d-orientated "modern" games anyway, so we're not getting too much of the "hopeless kind" I suppose.
Some may even like reading, who knows.
The main question remains for me: Would it hurt WL if some short texts were included in an unobtrusive way that presented an alternative? I hope not.
If so, the worst case would be that I invested a lot of time in vain. So be it. It's my time and I'd be willing to risk that - and I won't blame anyone else either if the thing goes unnoticed.

Being no programmer, I apologize for all my suggestions that imply undue workload and for other misjudgements due to lack of expertise or relevant skills.
I am on Win32, have no means to compile, and rely on prefabricated distributions (Thanks to Tino).

Top

Quote

I will not quote now, for I want to do a summary. This will be for the second part of this post though. First I want to present a screenshot from Battle for Wesnoth which sets the standard for my understanding of open-source ingame help:

The underlined yellow text are hyperlinks to other places in the help. The books to the left are a treeview of all help items. the help starts out with an image of the ingame graphic and a portrait which is just eye candy but gives the unit some character. Then there are the most important facts in one line; a lore/description section and then follow the detailed reference style information (Attacks and so on). Units are all listed like that, so it is easy to find a specific information on another page, yet it clearly communicates the love that went into graphics and lore of the units; each unit of a tribe (Elves, Drakes and so on) all are connected via the lore sections which gives each tribe a unique feel even though there are similar units in each tribe.

Okay, so this was mainly what I am aiming for with the widelands help. Tables for data that can be put in tabular form and texts to round things up and give them some character. May you be inspired Astuur

Back to our discussion. I try to summarize and give my point on the one open issue; please correct me if I understood something wrongly in the summary:

1) Astuur wants to be wordy in the help. This is to avoid being unclear and to give players as exact information as possible. He acknowledges a quick tabular view on data can/will be useful but feels that writing this data again (redunantly) in text form will benefit some players.

2) hjd and me have an feeling that redundant information is not good. Our main argument is that it is harder to maintain on change. I also feel that having a clear "go to" location for certain information makes the help clearer - I acknowledge that I am the structured guy so that this might be different for other people.

So for now, I will follow Astuur's suggestion of trying to do both in a good way: having a quick listing of all data and - likely on a second tab in the same window - a more wordy and maybe loreful description of the building. I also suggest to ignore scrolling for now till we have more experience with the help - I share hjd's opinion that scrolling is not too much of an issue if the headlines separating different information are big enough.

Technical issues (like configuring window size, different number of tabs) and so on can be figured out. It might be best to start out with one of each building type from one tribe and get this into the game for more feedback and discussion.

Great discussion! I feel like we really homed in on something good now.

Top

Quote