Talk:Summary
Summary Tab
Background for anyone coming in fresh to this - John produced an earlier prototype of the summary tab. The biggest difference was that prototype did not include borders around the various fields.
Extreme Makeover
The 'scrap parchment' design will, I think, be quite difficult to implement. I also feel that the borders are a bit heavy.
Our planned approach to handling the parchment background was to add that to the tab by means of a custom Java Look and Feel. Each panel (e.g. Character Basics) would then be made transparent so that the parchment was shown in that panel. This preserves the normal function of having the UI resize when the window is resized and giving extra room where it is helpful. With the 'scrap parchment; design we would be up for a lot more work with a backing image needed for each panel and custom borders for each side of each panel. Resizing would also be problematic - presumably we would have to allow for borders and the panel image to be resized. To my mind this is a lot more effort then the first prototype and I think that one looked fantastic as is.
The new headings look great and shouldn't be too tough to implement. The only factor that might be difficult is internationalisation - here we might need to try and render these as text rather than graphics, to allow for different languages, but with a suitable font that should be ok.
In your Statistics section could you show a racial and other modifier just to show how the columns should work please?
PS: I assume the fonts used are either open source or distributed with Java? Bets to avoid commercial fonts in an FOSS application like ours.
Oh and lastly - as I mentioned before - John, I am really impressed by the design and I think this is an amazing makeover. I'm looking forward to getting in and making it happen.
--James 20:44, 9 March 2010 (UTC)
Minimalist Enhancement
I'm just one user voice in the crowd, but I think the whole parchment thing is a bit busy and hokey. I get my RPG feeling at the gaming table...I don't really need it within the character editing program.
--Allen Cohn, San Francisco, 9 March 2010
1. The eye-candy should be left for the final part of development and, additionally, it should be optional in case it does not fit a particular taste.
2. Regarding specific items:
2.1 "Things to do" should refer to specific tabs or dialogs. Vague terms are not helpful to beginners, especially since they may feel lost due to number of available options.
2.2 "Statistics" depends heavily on game system used. As such, "modifier total" and "stat total" are unlikely to be useful.
2.3 "Summary" / " Summary" - replace with with a statblock template output (chosen by user, default set by main preference of a specific subsystem). This will both make it more adequate, and make dependencies easier on developers (dependencies specific to systems supported).
--Ruemere, 10 March 2010
The new color theme on the summary tab looks great. I like the icons in the middle summary panel too. I think those style of icons should be extended to the tab bar at the top too.
The ordering of the layout from left to right does make it more obvious what order things need to be added to the character in. This works well with standard races, however there is still a problem with races that have racial hit dice.
The racial hit dice get added as class levels automatically when you select the race, without even giving the user the stats warning, so the skill points are going to be foobared for all the racial levels if the user didn't set the stats first.
Either adding the racial hit dice needs to be suppressed until later (addable with an extended 'Create Monster/Add Kit', or some new option on the races tab), or races with racial hit dice shouldn't be listed on the dropdown in the summary page.
I'd also like to continue polling for adding a Deity dropdown to the Character Basics section.
Eric Jarman
Will this be a choice or somehow selectable? I'm not a fan of this "torn paper" look, or generally any kind of "fancy" look for applications and windows that deviates too much from the general look and feel of the operating system. If this is a fixed look, I'm not really happy about it.
Regards, Stefan.
I really hate the torn paper thing.
andrew wilson
The Summary is okay, the UI "needs" to be spiffed dp for new users. But it needs to be skinnable, for the ones that are used to it, or are playing in non-fantasy systems (note make it an option setable by the gamemode/dataset). Also we should keep in mind that not all systems will have the 6 (or 7 with deities) stats that d20 has.
Paul (Nylan)
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