Another Possible Solution to the Occupants Display Problem

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

Another thought just occurred to me as to how we might solve the 
occupants display problem:

Transport occupied with 2 units:

|------------|
| TTT        |
|  T         |
|  T         |
|            |
| OOO    OOO |
| O O    O O |
| OOO    OOO |
|------------|

Transport occupied with > 2 units:

|------------|
| TTT        |
|  T         |
|  T         |
|            |
| |--------| |
| |  Occs  | |
| |--------| |
|------------|

Big "T" is transport unit. Big "O" is an occupant unit. Figures not 
drawn to any sort of scale or proportion. "Occs" is a button that brings 
up a popup containing images of the occupants.

This would be for an 88x88 (64x64) or 44x44 (32x32) view. For 22x22 
(16x16), it might be necessary to abbreviate down to "OV" or maybe just 
a plain rectangle with no text, since even the small font might be too 
tall to fit. For 11x11 (8x8), clicking anywhere in the transport should 
probably bring up the occupant view popup.

As to how the occupant view popup would present information, that is 
still an open question. I would suggest that it be centered over (and 
obscuring the transport), and should always present occ images at least 
at 44x44 (32x32), and that the transport's name, location, and 
similarly-sized image should be near the top of the popup. This means 
that the popup would be variably-sized according to the number of occs. 
The benefit is that all of the occs would be shown clearly and in easily 
clickable spatial regions. The popup could be dismissed by either 
clicking a close box in its upper, right corner, or by hitting the 
escape key. Popups could be layered for transports inside of transports.

|----------------------------------------|
|                                    |X X|
| TTT  Your transport "Foo"          | X |
|  T   in plains at (x,y)            |X X|
|  T                                 ----|
|                                        |
| |---|  |---|  OOO   OOO                |
| |T  |  |T  |  O O   O O                |
| ||-||  |O O]  OOO   OOO                |
| |---|  |---|                           |
|----------------------------------------|

In the above example, the popup for transport "Foo" shows 4 occs, two of 
which are transports as well. The leftmost occ has a popup button in the 
lower part of its transport box because it has more than 2 occs. The occ 
to the right of it (second from left) only has 2 occs and so they are 
displayed as is. The big "X" in the upper, right corner is the close box.

Thoughts?

Eric