State of Zelda Classic 2.5

Revfan9 wrote:I seem to be the only person who dislikes large mode, so I'm most likely alone in this opinion, but...

Oh, there are more of us who still much prefer the small mode. 😉

Revfan9 wrote:Also, why can't the new project be open source? I understand that with the current ZC we're under agreement with Phantom Menace to keep the source code unreleased to the public, but with the rewrite there's absolutely no excuse. The only programs that ever benefit from being closed source are ones whose only goal is to suck money out of your wallet, and for christ's sake I hope that isn't how the new project will be...

The biggest remaining hurdle is that quest security would be compromised in that case. Not everyone wants their work to be used. On the same note, I think if a programmer simply does not want his work to be available to others freely, then that's his prerogative and no other justification is really needed. No one is entitled to anything by default.

So it wouldn't be open source because of quest passwords? Sheesh, isn't there another way around that?

jman2050 wrote:The biggest remaining hurdle is that quest security would be compromised in that case. Not everyone wants their work to be used. On the same note, I think if a programmer simply does not want his work to be available to others freely, then that's his prerogative and no other justification is really needed. No one is entitled to anything by default.

Since when does "Open Source" mean "No Security"? OpenBSD would like a word with you... Using other people's work is more of a community issue than anything else anyhow. If a quest is found to contain another author's work, and that author requests it to be taken down, it can be taken down. Hardcracking a password isn't necessarily difficult, and this fact doesn't change whether the source is available or not. In the end, the best way to enforce that people's work isn't stolen is through the community, not through the software.

And I wasn't saying the users of the program have a right to the source code, I was saying having the source code public would bring nothing but good things. I was putting forth a proposal, not a demand.

Well I remember Dark Nation mention that the big reason why it wasn't open source was because the original programmer Phantom M... I forgot his name at the moment. O_o... Anyways, what I was saying, the original programmer of Zelda Classic, requested that it wouldn't be open source. And since it really is his program, we have to respect his decision.

I think we're talking about if ZC 3.0 is completely re-written. It would technically be a different program.

While we're at it, if ZC were re-written, would it be possible to ditch allegro altogether so it could be ported to other systems?

For 2.5, yes. I completely understand that. But if we are going to start over from scratch, why should we still have to abide to the old rules? The entire point of starting over would be to get rid of ZC's old limitations.

What is the complaint against large mode?

I tried large mode for a bit and didn't really like it, but it's probably just cause I'm so set in my ways using small mode more than anything.
And at the time I wasn't making screens I was only scripting, so I didn't really need the three combo tables.

Can you program nostalgia into it? :blah: Kidding. Actually, my only problem with it is that I have to squint at the Tiles pages because everything is so small, but I know that that's unavoidable due to the inability to take proper screenshots of tiles pages if it were any different.

Actually, could there be a "screenshot" button added? I keep forgetting the key to take a screenshot in it. It's different than the key to take a screenshot outside of the pages. Counter-intuitiveness is something we should focus on getting rid of in ZC.

What is the complaint against large mode?

I like so much more Large mode because of its 3 rows of combo pages, user commands (just like shortcuts but easier to use), also the fact that we can see what's solid in the next screen so there isn't walkability issues.

Small mode screen is just too big. I don't like seeing those pixels being that big. :S

Dark Nation wrote:What is the complaint against large mode?

What's the complaint? Just look at it. It goes against every decent UI standard ever made. Let's look at a screenshot, shall we?

Holy fucking crap. This thing is a BEAST. And not in the awkward porno way. It's an insult to good UI design. Let's list through the problems here.

1. Bad placement. The golden rule of GUIs is to place the most important things at the top left, and the least important things at the bottom right. The whole thing is a mess. There's no real logical order to anything.

2. Too many options thrown at the user at once! Things are hidden behind sub-menus in most GUIs for a good reason. Throwing everything right into the users face is more likely to intimidate the user and wastes time, as the user has to spend more time visually scanning trying to find what they need. The only options that should be thrown directly into the user's face are the ones that need constant access.

3. The entire interface is... Cryptic, at best. Everything, when presented to the user, needs to be completely, 100% obvious. Any time that the user spends trying to figure out how to do shit is wasted productivity. Icons are almost always a big no-no, except for the most common, most obvious functions (New, Open, Save, Close Program, etc.)

4. Too big! Keyboard shortcuts are king. While they require a bit of memorization for new users, for experienced ones they're a godsend that shaves hours off of your work time. Not only is this interface not friendly at all to keyboard shortcuts, but the real estate the user has to move their mouse through just to get to stuff is daunting. Taking an extra second to do something may not seem like much, but when that something is something you have to do every few seconds... The wasted time and the frustration adds up quickly.

These are just my major complaints. I could go on all night about this if I felt like it.

Revfan9 wrote:1. Bad placement. The golden rule of GUIs is to place the most important things at the top left, and the least important things at the bottom right. The whole thing is a mess. There's no real logical order to anything.

Revfan9 wrote:2. Too many options thrown at the user at once! Things are hidden behind sub-menus in most GUIs for a good reason. Throwing everything right into the users face is more likely to intimidate the user and wastes time, as the user has to spend more time visually scanning trying to find what they need. The only options that should be thrown directly into the user's face are the ones that need constant access.

Revfan9 wrote:3. The entire interface is... Cryptic, at best. Everything, when presented to the user, needs to be completely, 100% obvious. Any time that the user spends trying to figure out how to do shit is wasted productivity. Icons are almost always a big no-no, except for the most common, most obvious functions (New, Open, Save, Close Program, etc.)

Revfan9 wrote:4. Too big! Keyboard shortcuts are king. While they require a bit of memorization for new users, for experienced ones they're a godsend that shaves hours off of your work time. Not only is this interface not friendly at all to keyboard shortcuts, but the real estate the user has to move their mouse through just to get to stuff is daunting. Taking an extra second to do something may not seem like much, but when that something is something you have to do every few seconds... The wasted time and the frustration adds up quickly.

(i don't know what to suggest with regards to their being too much space to move the mouse through. Maybe you need to increase your mouse pointer's speed? Or use the Commands more often?)

Revfan9 wrote:These are just my major complaints. I could go on all night about this if I felt like it.

In terms of the "Obviousness" thing, .. I know I've said it before, but I think it's an important enough subject to keep returning to. Not everyone reads the ZScript.txt or knows where to find the documentation, much less this very forum, even if they downloaded it from here.

Thus, if there was a way to hover your cursor over something and gain a basic description of what something is. That's a lot of text to write though, and I don't think the GUI would support it.

Even better, would be to have a "Help" item in the etc. menu in ZQuest. All it'd do, is pop up a little dialog box with a single line of text: "To find out how to use this program, please visit the following link." And then it would have, directly underneath it, a text box with the link already in it. Clicking on it would highlight it, and you could then copy it to your clipboard, if it can't already do that automatically. Obviously even better would be to just have a button to open up the ZC Wiki, but that's a bit much.

Is it possible to have "Shift+<key>" combinations for hotkeys in ZQuest? I.e. if for some reason the "t" key is occupied, perhaps there could be a Shift+T combination to access the tiles pages?

there already is a help file 😊 but maybe they can replace it with a link to the wiki during the "beta" phase or until the official documentation is finally updated.

maybe go for a "Flat Interface" instead of depressing buttons/icons you instead add a thicker/coloured border to the active icon/button? also maybe remove the icons for the MAIN buttons under the minimap, instead make them text descriptions.

State of Zelda Classic 2.5, what is it at the moment?

Sorry for asking dumb questions but around last spring I finally got tired of waiting and I forgot ZC for many months. Now I'm kind of semi-back to see what's going on, so anyone care to update me what's new with ZC 2.5? Is there any hope for it to be ever released? Everyone probably knows my opinion on that matter but I am asking seriously. I'm not asking a release date but is anything certain yet when it comes to getting ZC 2.5 in a stable and releaseable state? Thanks.

More bugs have been fixed! That's about it. Nothing else truly notable to be said, really. Progress is slow, but steady. Most of the crippling bugs seem to be gone, it's only minor things now. The alphas as they are right now are the most stable that ZC has been in years (Aside from the occasional build getting released that will corrupt your quests...)

Revfan9 wrote:More bugs have been fixed! That's about it. Nothing else truly notable to be said, really. Progress is slow, but steady. Most of the crippling bugs seem to be gone, it's only minor things now. The alphas as they are right now are the most stable that ZC has been in years (Aside from the occasional build getting released that will corrupt your quests...)

I'm going to hazard a guess that this is the most stable... ever? I wasn't around for the earliest days, but this is leagues ahead of 1.90 and 1.92

(Trivia: I played a quest recently that was designed for 1.90. I wanted to play it in its intended version so that I wouldn't encounter any bugs. Of course, since it was Dos only at that point, I had to run it in DosBox. Turns out, it doesn't like DosBox very much, and would frequently crash! So, I played it in 2.5 instead, and other than a few graphical glitches, it works just fine!)

I've been pretty quiet lately, but the newer builds of ZC 2.5 are getting better and better. The bug fixes seem to get less critical (there are a few exceptions, like the hammer-doesn't-work bug 😛). Some nice recent features are that you can rename shop types and click on the minimap in the tile warp editor in order to select the destination (rather than having to type in the screen number, which you can still do).

Revfan9 wrote:What's the complaint? Just look at it. It goes against every decent UI standard ever made. Let's look at a screenshot, shall we?

Holy fucking crap. This thing is a BEAST. And not in the awkward porno way. It's an insult to good UI design. Let's list through the problems here.

1. Bad placement. The golden rule of GUIs is to place the most important things at the top left, and the least important things at the bottom right. The whole thing is a mess. There's no real logical order to anything.

2. Too many options thrown at the user at once! Things are hidden behind sub-menus in most GUIs for a good reason. Throwing everything right into the users face is more likely to intimidate the user and wastes time, as the user has to spend more time visually scanning trying to find what they need. The only options that should be thrown directly into the user's face are the ones that need constant access.

3. The entire interface is... Cryptic, at best. Everything, when presented to the user, needs to be completely, 100% obvious. Any time that the user spends trying to figure out how to do shit is wasted productivity. Icons are almost always a big no-no, except for the most common, most obvious functions (New, Open, Save, Close Program, etc.)

4. Too big! Keyboard shortcuts are king. While they require a bit of memorization for new users, for experienced ones they're a godsend that shaves hours off of your work time. Not only is this interface not friendly at all to keyboard shortcuts, but the real estate the user has to move their mouse through just to get to stuff is daunting. Taking an extra second to do something may not seem like much, but when that something is something you have to do every few seconds... The wasted time and the frustration adds up quickly.

These are just my major complaints. I could go on all night about this if I felt like it.

These are all things we can take into consideration. The one thing that people seem to not be getting is that Large Mode in its current iteration is not final. Large mode will become the standard because I can no longer stand to shoehorn the GUI into a 320x240 pixel space. That doesn't mean that what you see is what you're gonna get no matter what. Obviously we can't please everyone, but we can look at different options and see what will work and what won't. The comments about things not being obvious, for example, is one I tend to agree with.

But, just to be clear, large mode is here to stay, so everyone please spend time thinking of how it can be improved instead of complaining that we should keep small mode around forever.

I'd like to add that if someone can design a better GUI for the main screen (even if it means practically gutting the current way of doing things), then by all means, submit some mockups. If you want to generate text for your mockup, you can use the subscreen editor and edit a text object, then set the font to "Proportional", the screencap whatever you type. If you want the small font used on the main GUI, you can type your text into a message string, then assign it to a room, then look at the room info panel at the bottom to see the text in the small font.

I'd love to see what other people come up with.

Maybe we should have a contest or at least a collaboration.

I wouldn't say much of anything is wrong with the current GUI. My only complaint is the atrocious button icons at the bottom. If one thing needs to be fixed, we need to fix those icons.

Pineconn wrote:I wouldn't say much of anything is wrong with the current GUI. My only complaint is the atrocious button icons at the bottom. If one thing needs to be fixed, we need to fix those icons.

*Snickers* I do have to agree with the button icons. They are confusing as all hell. Maybe we should dump allegro and go SDL *gets shot*

Yeah, instead of having little checkered boxes that we're supposed to see and think "Oh, those are the room warp destinations! Duh!" We could have, you know, text or something.

They are confusing as all hell. Maybe we should dump allegro and go SDL *gets shot*

Revfan9 wrote:More bugs have been fixed! That's about it.

Yeah, and more new bugs have born, right? 🙄 Like always, it's a neverending cycle.

But thumbs up to the developers that they still haven't abandoned this hopeless project. However, seeing Dark Nation this active gives at least some hope, the guy is just that awesome. 😊

Yeah, and more new bugs have born, right? Like always, it's a neverending cycle.

Look forward to the future with a smile on your face. It's all we really have in this otherwise bleak human world.

Or, y'know, at least drop the pessimism. What good is it doing anyone?

ShadowTiger wrote:Getting hit by a bus, for example, is a game-stopping bug. Getting a bad haircut is not.

Dude. A bad haircut SUCKS. ;_;

I am very proud of Dark Nation that he has been on task recently, I would say keep up the great work, Dark Nation! If I ever see him in person, I would make Christmas Cookies for him!