UI suggestions

efrancis76efrancis76
in Remastering

I just finished Guild of Thieves (and will soon move on to Jinxter). First of all I'd like to thank you for making these remasters of my all time favourite text adventures.

While playing, there were a few behaviours of the UI that disturbed me slightly, so I would like to send you some suggestions:

  1. When I choose the size of a picture, and move to a different room with a picture it remains visible, however if I cross a room that does not have a picture it closes and does not reopen when a new picture appears. I'd prefer the picture size to be saved and the pane to reopen to selected size as soon as there is a picture again.
  2. When clicking shortcuts in the text to examine objects, the text entry loses focus and you have to either click into it again or press tab to activate it before being able to type. It would be much more user friendly if the focus was automatically returned to the text input after clicking something.
  3. Sometimes when I mistyped something I want to go back the previous entry and correct the mistake. It would be great to have a history like in a shell, where you type arrow up to get the last entered command.
  4. When I enter a word the parser does not know, this word is saved for autocompletion (with TAB) anyway. That seems pointless, since it will never be used in the game.
  5. When autocompleting with TAB it would be great if the first proposed words are those actually present in the room or my inventory (in case of objects), because they are the most likely to be used.

That's it. No big things, but convenience stuff that makes gameplay smoother.

Comments

  • hughhugh

    Hi,

    Thanks a lot for playing our games and sending in your thoughts and suggestions. I've added your points to our list of todos/bug/suggestions, which we maintain here.

    We always like to make improvements and sometimes a good idea can be really simple to do.

    I've addressed your points below.

    Thanks again

    1. Good idea. Currently the size is not remembered. Added this to our suggestion list.

    2. Yes. Checking our todo list, this is a known problem. Thanks for reminding me of this. I'll bump this one up a bit. I think this should be fixed.

    3. This one has also been suggested. I think i'll look into adding it. The reason it's not there already is because there is no "up arrow" on mobile, but it would be very handy for desktop. You can actually slide up the command line area to reveal the previous few commands. You can then tap on them to re-enter and edit then. Although this feature is not obvious from the UI. It might actually be better to get rid of this.

    4. This will be when commands typed are echoed into the main text area. The word suggestion works by examining the game transcript so far. This works nicely to prevent spoilers, but obviously bogus text in there will also be processed by the word suggestion. It doesn't use a dictionary. If your commands aren't echod it won't do that, although we found most people like to see their commands echoed. Originally this option was off by default.

    5. That would be nice. I've added your suggestion to my list. What it would have to do is filter the word suggestion list by object availability, perhaps to re-order rather than filter out. Currently it orders by "word proximity" which is basically how long ago in the text the object was mentioned. Most of the time, this is OK, but obviously not totally reliable. It would have to do some hybrid ordering of the two ideas. Something for me to think about.

  • efrancis76efrancis76
    edited August 2020
    • Oh, I was unaware of the history functionality indeed. But arrow up on a desktop seems like the de facto standard. Also I believe that Infocom had this option back in the days (I may be mistaken though).
    • Right, I did immediately switch on the echoing of commands. It helps bring structure in the text.
    • I agree, sorting by availability first, then by word proximity in the history seems like the best compromise.
  • eriktorbjorneriktorbjorn
    edited January 2021

    @efrancis76 said:

    • Oh, I was unaware of the history functionality indeed. But arrow up on a desktop seems like the de facto standard. Also I believe that Infocom had this option back in the days (I may be mistaken though).

    I don't remember seeing it in any Infocom game, but of course it's possible that some interpreters had it while other didn't. Some games had an "OOPS" command that allowed you to correct one word, e.g.

    >COUNT MONNEY
    [I don't know the word "monney".]

    >OOPS MONEY
    You're carrying $12.81.

    I think that command may date all the way back to the mainframe version of Zork, but the earliest Infocom game to have it seems to be Ballyhoo?

    From what I remember, Magnetic Scrolls had more advanced command editing than Infocom did. (I thought they might have had a button to recall the previous command, but maybe they didn't. The up/down arrows are used to move the cursor one word to the left/right. At least in the original Macintosh and Atari ST versions of The Pawn.)

  • efrancis76efrancis76

    I don't remember seeing it in any Infocom game, but of course it's possible that some interpreters had it while other didn't. Some games had an "OOPS" command that allowed you to correct one word, e.g.

    Right now I'm using Lectrote interpreter to play Infocom games and that one definitely supports arrow up to get the last command. I'm not sure if the original executables by Infocom supported this or not.

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