You're right, the layout is a bit jumbled. I think flag sets used to be under the flag list until I added the "Double-click on a flag etc." text. As for the copy preset button, it was intended as a limited way of making the lighting presets more useful, in case someone liked a preset but wanted to tweak it to their own tastes. I think it's easy enough to figure out what it does once you try it, and reversing the effects of pressing it is simple enough (just remove the text added to custom flags and select the preset again), but you're right, it's not great.
Yeah... It's easy for a newbie to just be adding flags this way, instead of replacing them. (Wonder what FSO would do when the same flag is set multiple times, with different values - I guess just take the last value?) Of course, you can't just clear the entire custom flags list, there might be more in it than just lighting settings. Hum... Perhaps two different custom-flag text boxes, one for the (selection/tweaking of) lighting settings and one for misc flags? So basically you'd have a text box instead of the "copy to flags" button, which gets cleared and re-set every time the user picks different lighting settings. Would probably fit best at the bottom of the flag list, with a "Custom:" radio button autoselected when the user changes something in the field.
Anyway, just tossing ideas around here.
Interesting, although people might have the impression that lighting settings flags will only work if in the "lighting settings" text box, which I guess isn't a huge problem. More problematic, though, would be if someone tweaks the settings in the lighting settings text box and then selects a different preset. If I understand you right, their settings would then be overwritten, and destroying user data (especially without their consent) is generally a big no-no. (Aren't GUIs fun?
) We could ask them "are you sure you want to switch presets?", but pop-ups are annoying.
A quick experiment shows that if lighting settings are repeated in the custom flags, FSO uses the last value.
Of course, another option is to remove the "copy preset" button, but that would reduce the value of the lighting presets somewhat.
Other ideas... I guess the UI can indicate with a warning somehow (custom flags box border becomes red, maybe?) that there are repeated flags in the custom flags, maybe with a message like "Repeated flag: -ambient_factor". I don't know of any situations where having repeated custom flags is desirable. Admittedly, that doesn't help that much with the problem you mentioned.
Yeah, with font size 10 it all fits nicely... Though I guess, with ever-increasing screen DPI, bumping the font size up every once in a while may not be a bad idea. Does wxWidgets have some way of auto-scaling the window?
Well, the font sizes are in
points rather than pixels, so text of a given font size should be the same size in any resolution. You can test this out by lowering your screen resolution and seeing if the text is still the same size. I'll try testing it out later. That said, the error text on the mods page seem to be quite different sizes across the three platforms, even though it's 12-point font in all cases. So I dunno.
Oh, definitely. The error message on the Mods tab already looks nice and native, with an "info" icon and everything - removing hard-coded newlines and copying it to Advanced Settings should do the trick.
If only it were that simple.
The advanced settings page is technically very different from the mods page, so achieving the same look might not be easy. We've already committed a change that makes the background the window color instead of white and that removes the bold from the text, since it looks better that way (the text on the mods page is not bold), so there's already an improvement. The advanced settings page also has a wider range of errors, since it covers all the ways in which flag file processing can go wrong.
As for the newlines, well, it might be nice to have newlines separating sentences, so that you don't end up with a monolithic block of text, although we try to make the messages short. And also, no matter what we do, there'll always be some combinations of font and font sizes where a word at the end of a sentence will end up stuck on its own line, like
this.
In short, we'll need to think about what to do with the newlines. If nothing else, there will be fewer of them. Lowering the font size might help (currently 16 in advanced settings vs. 12 in mods page). We might just have to try to ensure that bad wrapping doesn't happen with common combinations of fonts and font sizes. Originally, I was hoping that the line breaks would be at logical places (which is what the current line breaks are trying to do), such as keeping prepositional phrases intact, but that's probably too much to ask for.
Thanks again for your input. We like feedback.
