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Dev Blog: Tiptoe Through the Tooltips

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Gaijin Lanis
Gallente Federation
#1141 - 2014-06-14 11:30:29 UTC  |  Edited by: Gaijin Lanis
CCP karkur wrote:
Please see these screenshots to see where we are at right now.


The left side is beautiful. The idea of drop shadows on text to keep everything readable against the sun and the brighter backgrounds is also perfect. The boxes around icons could be tighter so create less space between entries, but that might create useless blobs of text for some people, so that could be a strong candidate for a slider bar.

But here's the million dollar question. Does it load/appear instantly? Because that is absolutely necessary. If if it possible to get a list of brackets that aren't useful, one needs to be able to instantly disperse it and get a new list. As drop shadow effects and transparency on text tend to be relatively expensive and those expenses are compounded by anti-aliasing. If you want to get overly technical, I realize instant loading isn't exactly possible, but it does need to be under 100ms for everyone.

Also, for the love of god, no scroll bars. Or at least make them optional. I'd rather have a bracket list march off the top of my screen and recreate it than try to scroll through. As when I get into a bracket list, I am looking for quick information. Scrolling is at odds with this.

Also, is it not viable to have the bracket list simply draft off the overview settings/entries for ordering? If there is a reasonable guarantee on a bracket list being completely useful, then you gain a large amount of wiggle room on appearance/dispersion delays.

The above was written and posted with nothing but love in my heart for all.
CCP karkur
C C P
C C P Alliance
#1142 - 2014-06-14 13:07:03 UTC  |  Edited by: CCP karkur
Gaijin Lanis wrote:
The boxes around icons could be tighter so create less space between entries.
There needs to be some space between the entries because of yellow/red boxes, tags and bigger ships which is not pictured in my screenshots. But we'll see how tight we can get it.
Gaijin Lanis wrote:
But here's the million dollar question. Does it load/appear instantly? Because that is absolutely necessary..
Yes, it does, I at least see no delay. My co-worker who's been working on this is very aware of those things, and has been running tests to analyze the performance (and while this effect could have been achieved in Python, we got a lower level solution developed for better performance).
However, we do not want to put this shadow on all text in the game, because that could hurt performance, but 15 entries are few enough for it not to matter.
You will have to give it a try when it hits the severs, but I'm pretty sure you will not notice any difference.

Gaijin Lanis wrote:
Also, is it not viable to have the bracket list simply draft off the overview settings/entries for ordering? If there is a reasonable guarantee on a bracket list being completely useful, then you gain a large amount of wiggle room on appearance/dispersion delays.
I kind of touched on this earlier, but that might get pretty expensive because you need to process all the brackets and find their relationship to you and then evaluate which ones are the important ones, instead of getting all brackets, order them by the name you know already and display the top 15.
I'm hoping this will be less of a concern with the changes to the picking because they should result in less bracket lists that want to display a great amount of brackets, but I'll bring it up with the team (if there are less mega bracket lists, then the expense I mentioned above might not be so great).

CCP karkur | Programmer | Team Five 0 | @CCP_karkur
Gaijin Lanis
Gallente Federation
#1143 - 2014-06-14 15:47:32 UTC
CCP karkur wrote:
There needs to be some space between the entries because of yellow/red boxes, tags and bigger ships which is not pictured in my screenshots. But we'll see how tight we can get it.
Would it be possible to shift targeting/aggression boxes from borders around an invisible border around icons to a background effect behind said icon? There would be room for this since all player icons are boxes and all NPC icons are some variation of a cross. It might get a little hard to see on "large ship" npc icons, but whether or not an NPC is targeting/shooting you is somewhat irrelevant. As with npcs, one is going to either run away or kill everything no matter what. New players also don't see battleship NPCs very often.

CCP karkur wrote:
Yes, it does, I at least see no delay. My co-worker who's been working on this is very aware of those things, and has been running tests to analyze the performance (and while this effect could have been achieved in Python, we got a lower level solution developed for better performance).
However, we do not want to put this shadow on all text in the game, because that could hurt performance, but 15 entries are few enough for it not to matter.
You will have to give it a try when it hits the severs, but I'm pretty sure you will not notice any difference.
Difference between the current bracket list system or the previous bracket list system? Because I am hoping against hope for a huge difference between current and next.

CCP karkur wrote:
I kind of touched on this earlier, but that might get pretty expensive because you need to process all the brackets and find their relationship to you and then evaluate which ones are the important ones, instead of getting all brackets, order them by the name you know already and display the top 15.
I'm hoping this will be less of a concern with the changes to the picking because they should result in less bracket lists that want to display a great amount of brackets, but I'll bring it up with the team (if there are less mega bracket lists, then the expense I mentioned above might not be so great).
My thinking on this subject relates to an idea that entity names in the overview window and in space are being translated from a lower level entity ID string that would be meaningless to the end user, therefore copying sorting settings from the overview window to the bracket list would be as simple as screwing around with the overview list. Granted I don't sit in belts toggling the "show in overview" states of asteroids... so I don't really know how expensive that is.


Also, you just know someone is losing their mind because they think you're talking about money every time you say the word "expensive." Which is quite amusing.

The above was written and posted with nothing but love in my heart for all.
Worrff
Enterprise Holdings
#1144 - 2014-06-14 19:59:18 UTC
People are getting irate because it really does appear that you have been ignoring all our concerns.

The changes you have made here do go someway to solving some of the issues, however, you also need to split up the delay sliders, one blanket slider for all the tootips just doesn't work.


There are a number of different categories and types which need to be dealt with separately:

Important information:
Capacitor, shield, armor, hull levels

Useful information:
Ammo loaded, range, dps and other module information

Other Information:
Neocom buttons

New Player information:
Station, star, close window

Other overview rollovers:
Ship info

Brackets


These options have been asked for many times. If you could implement these additional sliders, combined with the brackets changes you have made, people may think that you are actually listening :)

CCP Philosophy: If it works, break it. If it’s broken, leave it alone and break something else.
Rommiee
Mercury Inc.
#1145 - 2014-06-16 07:01:33 UTC
Worrff wrote:
People are getting irate because it really does appear that you have been ignoring all our concerns.

The changes you have made here do go someway to solving some of the issues, however, you also need to split up the delay sliders, one blanket slider for all the tootips just doesn't work.


There are a number of different categories and types which need to be dealt with separately:

Important information:
Capacitor, shield, armor, hull levels

Useful information:
Ammo loaded, range, dps and other module information

Other Information:
Neocom buttons

New Player information:
Station, star, close window

Other overview rollovers:
Ship info

Brackets


These options have been asked for many times. If you could implement these additional sliders, combined with the brackets changes you have made, people may think that you are actually listening :)



This
Mag's
Azn Empire
#1146 - 2014-06-16 09:11:00 UTC
Rommiee wrote:
Worrff wrote:
People are getting irate because it really does appear that you have been ignoring all our concerns.

The changes you have made here do go someway to solving some of the issues, however, you also need to split up the delay sliders, one blanket slider for all the tootips just doesn't work.


There are a number of different categories and types which need to be dealt with separately:

Important information:
Capacitor, shield, armor, hull levels

Useful information:
Ammo loaded, range, dps and other module information

Other Information:
Neocom buttons

New Player information:
Station, star, close window

Other overview rollovers:
Ship info

Brackets


These options have been asked for many times. If you could implement these additional sliders, combined with the brackets changes you have made, people may think that you are actually listening :)



This
Indeed. But they are not listening.

And no before some others ask, we do not think selective hearing is the same thing.

Destination SkillQueue:- It's like assuming the Lions will ignore you in the Savannah, if you're small, fat and look helpless.
Wilhelm Ormand
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#1147 - 2014-06-16 10:43:57 UTC
CCP karkur wrote:
[...] We have been working hard on improving the bracket list, taking your feedback into consideration.
We now have a version that is a combination of the "old" bracket list and the new one. [...]

But I love the black box! It's the best way to get bracket information without getting a spaghetti like mess on your screen with unreadable text. And the abilility to scroll is genius. The only thing missing is that it needs to display all the brackets you're hovering above.

To defend the scrollable bracket list (preferably with black box), consider the following use case:
You are in space and there are three fleets around you in. They are all in a different direction but at roughly the same distance. You want to know their composition. The options you have:

  • Overview -- because they're at the same distance the overview isn't of much use as it can't group by relative distance
  • D-scan -- too cumbersome for this and will miss a lot (!) of the information you need
  • Scrollable bracket list -- this is where a good bracket list shines: you hover on the fleet and you will be able to scroll through all the ships (and with a modified xml-file get most of the information you want, if you want even more: click on an entry and look at the overview)

Therefore here's my (multi-)request: (1) could you please keep the black box (or make it optional)? (2) Keep the ablility to scroll through the list, and (3) enable the list to encompass all the brackets under the cursor.

A note to the people complaining that the black box is immersion braking for them: for me personally, immersion braking consists of not instantly having all the necessary information at ones disposal in a futuristic sci-fi world wherein pilots are directly interfaced with their space ships.
Alexis Nightwish
#1148 - 2014-06-16 15:54:31 UTC
CCP karkur wrote:
Hi all,

A little tooltip update:

Today we deployed 2 tooltip fixes to TQ:
  • Fixed an issue where tooltips persist after the mouse goes outside the client borders.
  • Fixed an issue where entities no longer on grid would not gray-out correctly in in-space brackets.

We have been working hard on improving the bracket list, taking your feedback into consideration.
We now have a version that is a combination of the "old" bracket list and the new one.
For brackets that are floating in space, it’s very similar to the old bracket list, but on the edges, we have a box similar to the bracket list that you currently have on TQ.
The reason is that on the edges there are often other UI elements that the bracket list needs to overlap, and it becomes very messy and hard to read without the background.
Please see these screenshots to see where we are at right now.

This is still work in progress and we are iterating on it, and we would really like your help with it. We are hoping to put it onto a test server as soon as possible (hopefully next week), and I hope you will log in then, give the brackets a try and tell us what you think.
We are open to and asking for feedback, but please keep it constructive and to the point.

Here are some of the changes that have been made in the new version:
  • The picking of the brackets has been improved
  • As you can see from the screenshot, full entity names are always visible
  • The lists are now "stickied", and stay until some other bracket is moused over or the mouse is clicked.
  • The scrolling has been removed, and now we list only the top 15 brackets (same as the old bracket list).
  • One of the reasons for the background in the box was to make it easier to read the bracket names against bright nebula/sun, but in order to remove the black background, we have now developed shadow for the text that will make it easier to read the text in those situation.
(until we have this on a test server, feel free to ask further about this implementation).

Also, we want to change the tooltip in the map so it does not follow the generic delay and appears instantly, since it’s not really “extra info” but rather important part of the ui.

Have a nice weekend all Smile

On the bottom right screenshot the list appears in front of the overview. This reminds me of the dark ages when the overview wasn't considered to be in front of in-space objects and you could accidentally CTRL-click a ship that was supposed to be behind the overview. Please tell me that the list of in-space objects will NOT appear when you happen to mouseover a blob that's behind the overview.

CCP approaches problems in one of two ways: nudge or cludge

EVE Online's "I win!" Button

Fixing bombs, not the bombers
Rommiee
Mercury Inc.
#1149 - 2014-06-17 11:57:01 UTC
Rommiee wrote:
Worrff wrote:
People are getting irate because it really does appear that you have been ignoring all our concerns.

The changes you have made here do go someway to solving some of the issues, however, you also need to split up the delay sliders, one blanket slider for all the tootips just doesn't work.


There are a number of different categories and types which need to be dealt with separately:

Important information:
Capacitor, shield, armor, hull levels

Useful information:
Ammo loaded, range, dps and other module information

Other Information:
Neocom buttons

New Player information:
Station, star, close window

Other overview rollovers:
Ship info

Brackets


These options have been asked for many times. If you could implement these additional sliders, combined with the brackets changes you have made, people may think that you are actually listening :)



This


Quoted again as CCP are apparently now ignoring this thread
Arec Bardwin
#1150 - 2014-06-17 12:41:44 UTC
Worrff wrote:
People are getting irate because it really does appear that you have been ignoring all our concerns.

The changes you have made here do go someway to solving some of the issues, however, you also need to split up the delay sliders, one blanket slider for all the tootips just doesn't work.


There are a number of different categories and types which need to be dealt with separately:

Important information:
Capacitor, shield, armor, hull levels

Useful information:
Ammo loaded, range, dps and other module information

Other Information:
Neocom buttons

New Player information:
Station, star, close window

Other overview rollovers:
Ship info

Brackets


These options have been asked for many times. If you could implement these additional sliders, combined with the brackets changes you have made, people may think that you are actually listening :)
Something like this would be nice.
Oraac Ensor
#1151 - 2014-06-18 00:46:48 UTC  |  Edited by: Oraac Ensor
Wilhelm Ormand wrote:
A note to the people complaining that the black box is immersion braking for them: for me personally, immersion braking consists of not instantly having all the necessary information at ones disposal in a futuristic sci-fi world wherein pilots are directly interfaced with their space ships.

I don't understand why this is directed at those of us to whom it's immersion-breaking. The fact that it doesn't break immersion for you has no bearing on the fact that it does for us.
Rommiee
Mercury Inc.
#1152 - 2014-06-18 07:12:26 UTC
In addition to it being immersion-breaking, it is also game-breaking....which is pretty freaking important, CCP.
Rommiee
Mercury Inc.
#1153 - 2014-06-20 11:48:35 UTC
Still a hushed silence from CCP
War Kitten
Panda McLegion
#1154 - 2014-06-20 15:34:47 UTC
CCP karkur wrote:

Gaijin Lanis wrote:
But here's the million dollar question. Does it load/appear instantly? Because that is absolutely necessary..
Yes, it does, I at least see no delay.


NOOOOOOOOoooooooooooo....

Do not want instant popups every time my mouse passes over a bracket in space! Please leave the delay in, or make it configurable. Because that is absolutelier necessarier.

I don't judge people by their race, religion, color, size, age, gender, or ethnicity. I judge them by their grammar, spelling, syntax, punctuation, clarity of expression, and logical consistency.
CCP karkur
C C P
C C P Alliance
#1155 - 2014-06-20 16:29:37 UTC
War Kitten wrote:
CCP karkur wrote:

Gaijin Lanis wrote:
But here's the million dollar question. Does it load/appear instantly? Because that is absolutely necessary..
Yes, it does, I at least see no delay.


NOOOOOOOOoooooooooooo....

Do not want instant popups every time my mouse passes over a bracket in space! Please leave the delay in, or make it configurable. Because that is absolutelier necessarier.
The slider still works Smile

CCP karkur | Programmer | Team Five 0 | @CCP_karkur
CCP karkur
C C P
C C P Alliance
#1156 - 2014-06-20 16:39:59 UTC
Sisi has now been update with the changes I mentioned in this post.

Please test it out and tell us what you think Smile (what do you like, what do you not like and why?)

CCP karkur | Programmer | Team Five 0 | @CCP_karkur
AutumnWind1983
Reboot Required
#1157 - 2014-06-20 23:53:48 UTC
CCP karkur wrote:
Sisi has now been update with the changes I mentioned in this post.

Please test it out and tell us what you think Smile (what do you like, what do you not like and why?)


Reusing my response to CCP Rise regarding the need for multiple sliders: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=4728071#post4728071

The expansions of tool tips seems to be to replace to the NPE and google. This could let you put tool tips in one of two broad bins, ones designed for NPE (e.g. book mark names) and ones presenting information that you cannot get anywhere else (heat levels). Giving us the option to turn off the NPE ones is a sorely needed quality of life improvement. A single slider just does not cut it but two large bins shouldn't create too much work for maintenance going forward.

TLDR:
(1) Group tool tips into (a) information you can only get from tool tips and (b) information you can get elsewhere
(2) Provide a slider for each group
(3) If 2 cannot be done, provide information in alternate manner in UI that doesn't require a tool tip.

James Arget for CSM 8! http://csm.fcftw.org
Mag's
Azn Empire
#1158 - 2014-06-21 09:20:44 UTC  |  Edited by: Mag's
AutumnWind1983 wrote:
CCP karkur wrote:
Sisi has now been update with the changes I mentioned in this post.

Please test it out and tell us what you think Smile (what do you like, what do you not like and why?)


Reusing my response to CCP Rise regarding the need for multiple sliders: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=4728071#post4728071

The expansions of tool tips seems to be to replace to the NPE and google. This could let you put tool tips in one of two broad bins, ones designed for NPE (e.g. book mark names) and ones presenting information that you cannot get anywhere else (heat levels). Giving us the option to turn off the NPE ones is a sorely needed quality of life improvement. A single slider just does not cut it but two large bins shouldn't create too much work for maintenance going forward.

TLDR:
(1) Group tool tips into (a) information you can only get from tool tips and (b) information you can get elsewhere
(2) Provide a slider for each group
(3) If 2 cannot be done, provide information in alternate manner in UI that doesn't require a tool tip.
Another player that gets it. +1

Destination SkillQueue:- It's like assuming the Lions will ignore you in the Savannah, if you're small, fat and look helpless.
Panterata
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#1159 - 2014-06-22 11:51:03 UTC
CCP karkur wrote:
War Kitten wrote:
CCP karkur wrote:

Gaijin Lanis wrote:
But here's the million dollar question. Does it load/appear instantly? Because that is absolutely necessary..
Yes, it does, I at least see no delay.


NOOOOOOOOoooooooooooo....

Do not want instant popups every time my mouse passes over a bracket in space! Please leave the delay in, or make it configurable. Because that is absolutelier necessarier.
The slider still works Smile


There is no need to log in SISI to test it! I can confirm that 1 slider is not a option and is not satisfy us.

Still waiting to make the old system by implementing on/off tooltips button

Btw DEV team if are are blind I can make a voice record for you about these 58 pages.
If you are deaf I speak the deaf language and we can make a skype to explain you
Rommiee
Mercury Inc.
#1160 - 2014-06-23 12:53:56 UTC  |  Edited by: Rommiee
CCP karkur wrote:
The slider still works Smile



CCP karkur wrote:
Sisi has now been update with the changes I mentioned in this post.

Please test it out and tell us what you think Smile (what do you like, what do you not like and why?)



Jeez, for the HUNDRETH time........



The changes you have made here do go someway to solving some of the issues, however, you also need to split up the delay sliders, one blanket slider for all the tootips just doesn't work.


There are a number of different categories and types which need to be dealt with separately:

Important information:
Capacitor, shield, armor, hull levels

Useful information:
Ammo loaded, range, dps and other module information

Other Information:
Neocom buttons

New Player information:
Station, star, close window

Other overview rollovers:
Ship info

Brackets



Don't just keep asking over and over about what the problems are.....just READ and ferking LISTEN to what we are saying.