User Interface

[Seravy]

While I can't guarantee I can do any particular improvement in this department, it's worth collecting ideas anyway so this thread is for that.

Here is mine : 
Cities screen should somehow show total rebels in city. (maybe instead of total gold? Or as an additional column if we can somehow make space for that?)
Main screen should show total amount of rebels in the empire above gold.

These two will likely remain dreams though - unrest is not stored on cities, it's calculated by a function.

[Bahgtru]

Undead creatures should have some distinctive feature to be able to quickly discern them on the map/in stacks

[zitro1987]

Main screen gold/food/mana

Gold to also show tax rate
Mana to also show your current power base (seems too important to hide in magic screen)

(mostly for new players) When right clicking a unit for the melee, ranged, armor icons, they also have a number rounded to the tenth, indicating avg damage or block.

City screen to have added columns of mana income and research income. Maybe 'race' being a removed column to make space

[Nelphine]

I love the race column!

[Seravy]

The only way I can think of to put more information on the cities screen is to use a smaller font.
There is only one such font in the game, that would look like this :
   

[Seravy]

Seems to have worked reasonably well.
   

I think I rather not put unrest on the main screen though, calling "calculate_unrest" for every city in every rendering frame would risk causing slowdowns. We'll have to enter "cities" to see how a tax rate works out, but that's still better than cycling through every city to scan for rebels.

[Seravy]

Investigated the main screen hotkeys a little.

Patrol uses L.
Wait uses Space.
Build uses B.
Meld and Purify use nothing.

Game is G.
Spells is S.
Armies is A.
Cities is T.
Magic is M.
Info is I.
Plane is P.

No idea why Cities isn't C really, it's not used by anything else? I have to assume earlier versions of the game had "town" as the name of the button, or the person coding it remembered the name wrong.

F1-F9 are the various info menu items.
F10 is quick save. (saves to the continue slot)
There are a bunch of debug keys (alt+something), which are normally not enabled.

I think that's everything here. I think space for wait is reasonable, rather not change that, we don't know how many people are already used to that button. Patrol as L makes no sense whatsoever, maybe the Esc key would be better for that. Changing cities to C is probably a good idea.

[Bahgtru]

Would ordering them (clicking on the column caption) be doable?

[Seravy]

Yes and no. Yes in theory - all it needs to do is sort the array that contains the indexes of cities to display. No in practice - registering that many new clickable areas, and checking input for them, then sorting, I don't think there is space for all that.

Let's see, I think I'd need like 500-800 bytes of free space in seg56 for implementing that. While the changes freed up some space, it's closer to 100 than 500, would not be enough.
So no, not without a risky far call and putting the code to the end of the exe file, but since the effect itself would also need far calls, I think the chance of that not crashing is low (I still don't know what determines when adding a new far call is safe). Considering the amount of work is high for a low chance of success, I won't try doing that.

Unless someone can point me towards at least 500 bytes of free space in ovr56, it's not happening.

[Bahgtru]

How about a single clickable area that cycles through the columns?