Re: Three thoughts

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu>]

On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Jim Kingdon wrote:

> If I understood the design correctly, the idea was that the
> non-selected units would become very small and be arranged around the
> outside of the cell.  

When you say around the outside of the cell, do you 
still mean inside the cell perimeter or outside of it? I think 
that outside the cell perimeter could create quite a bit of 
confusion about which cell an unit is actually in.

>So to try to render it in ASCII art:

Couldn't draw a hexagon? ;-)

> where the big "I" is the selected unit, and the "i", "i", etc are the
> non-selected units.

I can think of some potential issues with this:
(1) Scaling images to non-standard sizes would likely be 
necessary to accomodate the suggested scheme.
(2) In the case of units that are using large icons, if one is 
blown up to normal size (44x44), then there is no room left in the 
cell (assuming that you mean to place the others inside the cell 
perimeter). So, either one would need to scale to a non-standard 
size or else half-size (22x22). In the case that only 3 other 
units were in the cell to start with, there would be no gain; 
rather, the selected unit would be centered in the cell, and 
the other 3 images would be scaled down. I see information being 
lost in this case.
(3) Scaling down the images of other units would likely degrade 
their identifiability as certain types, which would cause problems 
(or, at least, squinting) if a player went to select another unit 
in the same cell.

(All 3 of the above arguments also apply to why I don't think 
shrinking neighboring units when dealing with unit closeups is a 
good idea either.)

I still think that putting a "portrait" of the selected unit in 
the unit info window would be better. But, that's just my 
opinion....

Eric