Status Label oppinions

[vexxice]

I am making a game with a Lucasarts-ish GUI. I am now trying to revamp the status bar (Status bar= Look at toast, Pick up socks etc..). I thought what if the the status bar was right next to the mouse. This would save some of the eye-strain caused by looking up at the mouse and looking back down to see if the hotspot under it has changed. This may have been done in another AGS game I don't know, but I wanted some opinnions on which you all thought was better.

[GarageGothic]

Other games have definitely had hotspot descriptions following the cursor, but I don't recall anyone also showing the verb next to it. Sounds like a good idea if the text doesn't obscure the background too much (but please use a GUI with a transparent background, not a solid box around the text).

[mkennedy]

You may want to check out the verb coin interface as this sounds rather similar.

[m0ds]

I quite like it when the hotspot description appears by the mouse cursor. Though in my 10 years of AGSing I've never been able to code that But it would be painful if your entire inventory and verbs followed it. The best way is to hide it and have the user hold down the mouse button for a moment or two, and that, as mkennedy says, is a verb coin interface.

[GarageGothic]

vexxice never said anything about the whole GUI following the cursor, just the status bar, i.e. "Look at..." which then as you pass over a hotspot becomes "Look at house" or whatever. At least that's how I understood it.

[tzachs]

I did this in "The Energizer"  , well, not the entire verb+hotspot, only the hotspot description.

In general I liked it, but there were some issues, especially for the larger names (which might make it an even bigger problem for what you're aiming to do), hiding parts of the screen is one thing, but also if the mouse is near one of the borders you had to change the alignment of the label so it will be fully seen, which made it slightly weird to the eye.

Another small problem was due to the fact that I used a transparent GUI (like GarageGothic suggested), which made it hard to read in several of the backgrounds and I had to change the color of the label depending on the room, which is also a bit weird.

[GarageGothic]

Another small problem was due to the fact that I used a transparent GUI (like GarageGothic suggested), which made it hard to read in several of the backgrounds and I had to change the color of the label depending on the room, which is also a bit weird.

Oh yeah, forgot to add: Use an outlined font

[vexxice]

Is there a way to make it so if the label is off the screen it goes down a line?

[m0ds]

vexxice never said anything about the whole GUI following the cursor, just the status bar, i.e. "Look at..." which then as you pass over a hotspot becomes "Look at house" or whatever. At least that's how I understood it.

I see, yep. I believe it's already been tested over the years and ditched, carrying too much around with the mouse just isn't practical. I'm thinking of lower res games, perhaps like tzachs says, where even just text might be a little big or off putting. But a small font would be alright. Eg. Use cheese with supernatural entity - in 320x200 LEC font, would be most if not all the width of the screen.

And as he mentions you then have the problems with transparency. It's obvious LucasArts reserved this text by the cursor thing until map screens or aerial shots and stuff, rather than make it a permanent attatchment.

Hmm, the more I think about it, the more I realise why it doesn't exist like vexxice suggests in any games. I change my opinion - I think it'd be a bad idea

[tzachs]

@GG: Yep, an outlined font would have solved this, only I didn't know it at the time (D'oh!)....

@vexxice: I guess you can make the label go down a line, but then there are some more stuff to consider, like what happens if it goes under the bottom border, and how to make sure that it won't cut in the middle of a word, and if there's a big word and you don't want to cut you will still have to change the alignment, etc etc...

[GarageGothic]

I think it would be less confusing to simply not let the label move outside the edges of the viewport. Linebreaking the text whenever the cursor gets too close to the edge of the screen sounds a bit jarring - even more so if it happens gradually, i.e. one word at a time jumps down to the next line as you get close to the edge.
If you want to do linebreaking (which could be a very good idea - especially with constructions like "Use Inventory Item on Incredibly Long Hotspot Name"), I'd suggest simply having a preset label width so text longer than the max width stays on the second line no matter where on the screen the label is.

This is really the kind of thing that's best designed through trial-and-error. Do a quick script mockup of the basic functionality, then test it in a couple of rooms and see what behaviors annoy you or if there's any situations you hadn't considered. Then you can start refining those parts. I doubt any (good) GUI has ever been planned out perfectly from the get-go.

[Wyz]

A game I'm currently working on (click) has something like this. It is like a label that points to the object you are hovering over. It does not follow the mouse, it sticks to the object for as long as you are hovering over it. A bit hard to explain, but you'll see it when the game is done.
As for the verbs: not very apparent from the screen shots but those do follow the mouse, it is actually part of the cursor.