[PROPOSALS][PLAYER] New menu design

[namida]

Another question to discuss is - since these menus will be mouse-friendly, obviously, they need a visible cursor. Simply using the default Windows cursor is not out of the question, nor is using the same crosshair cursor from in-game. If the in-game one is used, it would by necessity always use the high-res one (as menus are always drawn in a resolution equivalent to high-res, and have been even as far back as DOS Lemmings).

I'm open to new options too, although I'll put down a bottom line that it must be visually clear even to someone not familiar with Lemmings which part of the cursor counts as the actual "position" (eg. on the default Windows arrow this would be the point of the arrow; while on the Lemmings crosshair it's the middle of the crosshair). I recall one Lemmings clone (I forget which - it might even have been an official port) that had a cursor that felt very misleading in this regard.

[Proxima]

The crosshair cursor sounds good to me.

[WillLem]

(c) Options like mass replay check, cleanse levels, etc, should be collected in a "Creator's Tools" sub-menu

+1. Yes! Brilliant

all buttons are clickable

Could they have "hover" and "clicked" versions as well? This could be a simple recolouring/edge-shading of the background; happy to do the graphical work for this if you like the idea.

I'm in favour of pretty much everything else you've suggested as well, apart from the following:

I never click on the rank sign, but I use it all the time to see what rank I am currently in, especially when using the up and down arrow keys to switch rank. That must stay.

It's simply much nicer to have a visual representation of what the rank is about, rather than it just being a string of characters in the level-selection menu.

+1 for rank graphics staying, for both of the reasons given by Proxima and Strato. It can actually be very useful for seeing where you up to at a glance from the main menu, even if you don't use it as a selection button, as such.

With the Talisman menu... having... an overview that is accessible without having to look at every single level separately in the level list would still be nice.

+1 for this (although I definitely think the F4 Talisman menu should be removed): one suggestion could be having the full list of Talismans visible from the F2 level select when clicking the title of pack itself. Doing so currently already indicates how many Talismans have been achieved - I guess there's no reason it couldn't also display the full list as well.

Also, it doesn't help with seeing the talisman requirements during play -- and maybe once that is addressed, there won't be any need to show them on the preview screen at all.

Agreed. I think a simple icon to indicate the presence of Talisman(s) in the level is all that's needed on the preview screen. I do kind of like the idea of showing the skill panel, though, and I suppose there's no reason that it couldn't also show the Talisman-related skills once the icons are clicked...

I'm generally all for keeping the preview screen as un-cluttered as possible.

Yeah, fair. I didn't expect the suggestion of removing the rank sign would go down very well... - it can stay.

Ah, good!

Does this need to be directly accessible from the main menu, though? Would it be acceptable for it to instead be accessed via the level select menu; either as a secondary tab when a level / rank is selected, or else as a "click to view talisman list" button with a similar effect to the existing menu option?

+1 for this, as per my suggestion typed earlier in this message.

I need to start changing the way I reply to threads...!

The main goal here is to have it as an efficient way of showing more info - the release rate and skillset - on the preview screen. The re-use for talismans was actually an afterthought, to be honest, but I do very much see it as a useful idea. I'd also note this wouldn't be a full skill panel, but would only show the release rate + skill buttons (I'm open to going either way on the "does it show placeholder slots when there's less than 10 skills in the level").

Since this idea needs a bit of support, I'm happy to +1 this. As long as the overall goal of the preview screen is to make it more readable and less cluttered, I quite like the idea of a visual representation of the skillset, RR, etc.

Another question to discuss is - since these menus will be mouse-friendly, obviously, they need a visible cursor. Simply using the default Windows cursor is not out of the question, nor is using the same crosshair cursor from in-game. If the in-game one is used, it would by necessity always use the high-res one (as menus are always drawn in a resolution equivalent to high-res, and have been even as far back as DOS Lemmings).

What about a blue arrow with a green edge... or a green arrow with a blue edge?



Also - if the menus are high-res, why not have hi-res graphics in them? Or run them through your upscaler?

[namida]

Also - if the menus are high-res, why not have hi-res graphics in them? Or run them through your upscaler?

I'm not sure what you mean by this?

[WillLem]

Also - if the menus are high-res, why not have hi-res graphics in them? Or run them through your upscaler?

I'm not sure what you mean by this?

So... if the menus are hi-resolution, why not have 1200 x 800 background, more pixels for logos, etc...

[namida]

Also - if the menus are high-res, why not have hi-res graphics in them? Or run them through your upscaler?

I'm not sure what you mean by this?

So... if the menus are hi-resolution, why not have 1200 x 800 background, more pixels for logos, etc...

You're suggesting making them even higher resolution?

There isn't so much in the way of technical obstacles to this, but it would invalidate a lot of existing content - which defeats the whole "people have worked on it already" argument for rank graphics, as well as anything else that might be saveable if we keep the same resolution. It'd also mean that any future content that wants custom menu graphics needs to produce higher resolution graphics than they currently do. Finally, it'd also mean we're back to the situation of the menu being higher-resolution than in-game ever is (which was the case prior to in-game getting a high res mode).

Having seperate low / high (or rather, high / higher) res modes for the menu is out of the question. It's plain and simply not worth the hassle - in game there are good reasons for wanting both (especially considering that NL's physics are low-res), in the menus it's far more logical to have a single universal resolution rather than options.

[WillLem]

There isn't so much in the way of technical obstacles to this, but it would invalidate a lot of existing content... Having seperate low / high (or rather, high / higher) res modes for the menu is out of the question

That's why I suggested running it through your upscaler. This would preserve any existing (and indeed, future) content that is made for the current 600 x 400 menu.

Thoughts?

[Dullstar]

Incidentally, I don't think the high-res mode cursor should be used in menu. I think the cursor should either be identical to the in-game one, or something completely different - let's not have one that is almost, but not quite the same as the in-game one. Conveniently, however, it would be pretty simple to use the low-res cursor in menu when low-res mode is enabled: the high-res cursor is exactly twice as large, so all we need to do is upscale the low-res cursor using nearest-neighbor rescaling to have an identical cursor in menus and in-game (which could be done either at runtime or by providing an extra set of cursor graphics if whatever NL uses for graphics doesn't provide an easy way to do this for some reason, which would surprise me).

As far as resolution changes go: If the new resolution is an integer multiple of the old one, then nearest-neighbor rescaling is an option; other scaling methods will affect how the artwork looks. I'd be hesitant to use any other scaling method as the one-and-only option (it's okay for high-res mode since you have the option of playing in the original resolution if you want).

That said, the menus currently appear to be using upscaled graphics; if this is indeed the case, can we replace the smooth resampling option with the resampling used by high-res mode? High-res mode's resampling is considerably nicer-looking than the smooth resampling options, which just adds a terrible-looking blur effect (I hate blur effects). It would also be nice to be able to provide graphics that are already the correct size to be drawn without any rescaling necessary.

[namida]

Okay, so I've had a skim over the topic and will address things that I feel need to be addressed, including mentioning things that I feel should be kept under consideration.

If I earlier mentioned something "will not happen" and I don't mention it here again, assume it's still a "will not happen". If I haven't responded to something at all, including here, feel free to bring it up again - it is probably going to end up overlooked completely otherwise (and it's very likely not intentional that they've been overlooked so far; it's easy to overlook some things when trying to put together a list of points to respond to then actually respond to them).

Some points are mentioned here as needing further discussion. Now is not the time to discuss them further - for now, please focus on if there's any points brought up that I've overlooked here, or any outright new suggestions.

General

Overall approach
It seems that even without worrying about whether people are willing to accept a total do-over, the most practical approach would be revisions to the existing menu - some of them relatively heavy, but still ultimately revisions rather than a whole new menu. So at this point, let's proceed under the assumption that we're keeping the existing menu as a base, but are open to strong changes.

Multiple menu styles
After further thought, it simply feels like there's too much room for disaster if we try to keep multiple menu styles in place. This means no "Legacy Mode" in particular.

Menu sizing
There are two different types of suggestions that have been made with regards to altering the menu screen sizes.

The first is to have - it was never really clear to me whether this was "as an additional option" or "make it the standard" - a high-resolution menu. This is not going to happen. The menu's resolution is already equivalent to in-game high-res, I see nothing to be gained from thus dividing the menu into "high res" and "higher res". If anything, there would be a stronger argument to have a low-res mode in line with the game; but that feels utterly pointless too and will not happen.

The other one is to keep the same resolution, but adjust the sizing. The proposals were 800x400 or 711x400, both of which keep the existing height but adjust to widescreen proportions. I am willing to do a size change if it is specifically to a widescreen resolution. In such a case, I would like to aim for 16:9 specifically, though this need not be specifically 711x400 - eg 854x480 could be considered. The crucial details are it shouldn't be too different (aside from proportional adjustments to the width) from the current one - so eg. 1280x720 is out of the question.

One other case in which I'd be willing to adjust the size is adjusting it, either vertically-only or proportionally, if the font height is increased. Whether or not the widescreen thing happens, I will insist that it remain possible to fit 25 lines of text on-screen (for the sake of existing preview / postview texts).

Note that the menu would still behave like it does now in most regards - you could resize the window to a different proportion (menu zooms as much as possible while still remaining 100% visible, with black bars filling in the remainder) or a different size (zoomed in / out), the "size" here is really just the internal size used for rendering it.

tl;dr: Resolution changes ruled out, size changes okay if specifically moving to widescreen and/or to adjust for new font size, must be not too far from widescreen equivalent of current size but doesn't have to be exactly that, must fit at least same number of lines of text as current size (taking into account, if applicable, new font sizing).

Resampling algorithm
It was proposed that the high-res-mode resampler be used for the smooth resampling in the menus. Unfortunately there are multiple reasons this cannot be done. The biggest concerns are firstly, that the high-res-mode resampler is not fast enough to be used for live rendering (as it was written with the intent it would be used only at load-time, thus, speed is not a critical concern); and secondly, that it is specifically written to handle exactly a 2x zoom. You could achieve powers of 2 by applying it repeatedly (though I don't know how well it would work after multiple iterations), but even other integer values, let alone non-integer zooms, would require significant adjustments to the formula.

tl;dr: Impractical to use high-res resampler for smoothing, so it won't happen.

Add / remove some menu screens
Removing the Talisman screen has been proposed, in favor of the talisman list being integrated into the level select menu - with a full list for a given pack (and perhaps for a given rank, too) being visible when the pack, rather than a level in it, is selected.

It has also been proposed that features like mass replay test, cleanse levels, etc be moved into a dedicated "Creator Tools" submenu. This menu may end up being a bit on the empty side at first, but once it exists it may also be that we find more useful stuff to add to it.

Cursor
It has been brought up that a cursor graphic needs to be decided on (though just using the Windows default is not out of the question). Using the high-res in-game cursor has been proposed, though some people prefer the idea of using the low-res one scaled up. I'm open to either, as well as to completely custom ones.

Background
Proposals to use a different or less-edited background image have been brought up. Happy to replace if there's consensus over a new graphic to use.

Alteration to font height / color
Open to this if it's generally supported, but someone else will need to produce (or rip from Amiga, if applicable) the new font graphic. The menu screen size will need to be adjusted if this changes, to ensure that 25 lines of text can still fit on-screen. One target here could be 640x480 or 854x480 (4:3 or 16:9 respectively) with an extra 3 pixels of height added to the font.

Regarding the color, I'd need to see strong support before implementing any "multiple colors are used" setup like Amiga or SuperLemmini have, but I'm not outright opposed to it. I'm quite happy to go ahead with a "keep a one-global-color setup but change what color it is" approach, and I like Dullstar's (IIRC) mockup from earlier in the topic as a potential color to use. I will note that the suggestion of tweaking the font color seems to have support even among some people who are strongly against most changes to the menu, so this particular change could be considered all but guaranteed to be happening.

Main Menu

Logo sizing
This was originally proposed as allowing one of several sizes, or even just requiring a new specific size. There is basically no reason this can't become "allow any arbitrary size, up to a certain cap", with smaller logos being centered on the available area - so this is likely what will happen here.

One row of cards
If they fit - which may be more so with a move to widescreen - sure. Following on from some of the other proposals, it appears we'd need 6 cards: Play, Level Select, Settings, Rank, Creator's Tools, Quit. Not sure if 6 would fit without adjusting their size, which would be preferable to avoid for the sake of existing custom ones - though this could also depend on what the size actually ends up being.

Clicked graphics for cards
Open to this. If we're considering it, we may want to also consider decoupling the parts of the card graphics a bit more (seperate graphic files for the lemmings holding the cards, the cards themself, and the text / graphic on the cards) - this might make customization tidier too. The downside is that even implementing this at all will likely be a backwards-compatibility break, although at least one that only affects cosmetic aspects of packs.

Animated cards
If there's a lot of demand for this from people who are actually intending to make animated cards themself (not just those who think "it'd be cool to see this in a pack") I could look at it. Most likely though, I wouldn't hold my breath on this one - it's a lot of work for not much gain. If the graphics of the cards are decoupled as per above, it could be considered whether only some parts can be animated.

Load replay directly from menu
I like the idea at the most basic level, but I question whether it's the most effective use of menu screen space. With that being said, I'm not sure where else to put it. It could perhaps be accessed by right-clicking an existing panel, though ideally I'd like to move away from "hidden" menu features like that.


Level Select

Additional info about level
I absolutely agree on this. At the very least it should show the level's stats, skillset and talismans. The "what layout?" is a finer point to discuss later.

Display player's records
Yes, I'm in favor of this idea. I would prefer that it be on a secondary tab, away from the main level info.

Search by level name
I understand this was a feature Nepster promised a while ago, but didn't get around to implementing before he left the forums. It's something that should happen - though I'm not promising it will happen as part of these revisions (as it is, really, a major new feature on the inside, even if it seems quite minor on the surface).

Find replays for level
Or some variation, like "show all replays for this level" in the level select menu. Nice idea, implementation could be tricky though - and could have a HUGE performance impact if the player's replay folder has a lot of replays. Unlike Lix, NL does not have particularly strong links between level files and replay files - it has mechanisms to match them up, but these are more designed for "when presented with a level and a replay, check whether or not they match up" rather than "when presented with one, find the matching other".



Preview / Postview

Additional level info
It has been proposed that more info about the level could be displayed, perhaps in the form of a "mock skill panel" showing the release rate (including whether it's locked or not) and skillset. This would almost certainly not include the always-present-never-changing buttons like pause, nuke, etc, nor the info above the main panel.

Talisman info
There seems to be agreement that something needs to change; there isn't so much agreement about what it should change to. Proposals so far include "don't show it at all" and "show icons to indicate that talismans exist / how many / what color, but nothing more". A more complex proposal, tying into the above, is to have clickable talisman icons that adjust the skill display / etc to reflect the talisman requirements.

"Continue", "Exit" etc options
In line with the general mouse-friendliness goal, the "Press ____ button to _____" texts would be replaced with simple "Play", "Exit", etc labels (exact wording to be decided later) that are clickable.

[Dullstar]

For clarity, I'd like to mention that I think the choice between low-res cursor scaled up and high-res cursor should be based on the currently selected option: if high-res mode is enabled, use the high-res cursor; if low-res mode is enabled, upscale the low-res cursor.

I like the idea of being able to load replays from the menu, but I definitely see the potential for technical issues. For one thing, the replay format would need to store the source level (not just be able to tell if they match). Also, it's not entirely unreasonable for someone to want to group packs by author, which would currently be done by placing the levels in a subdirectory of levels instead of directly in levels - but this would almost certainly break the mechanism used to reference the level in the replay. Adding the ability to group by author in the level select menu without having to alter the folder structure might alleviate this issue. The benefits would be quite nice though - for instance, if I've released multiple versions of a level, and someone submits a replay, the replay file itself would automatically be able to fetch the version of the level it was recorded on. But we'd want to make sure we can still load replays when the ID matches even if the filename doesn't, as when I make small changes to a level in an attempt to fix a backroute, a nice test to start with is loading a replay from the previous version, first because it can save me the effort of redoing the solvability proof replay, and second because it's a simple first step to make sure the fix actually fixes the backroute testing (though admittedly some followup testing would usually be required).

[IchoTolot]

Some points are mentioned here as needing further discussion. Now is not the time to discuss them further - for now, please focus on if there's any points brought up that I've overlooked here, or any outright new suggestions.

I think you got them all, at least I didn't see a missed point. Even if it's not the great discussion time, I still want to give a little statement on my current point of view regarding the list - also as a little note to myself about all mentioned points:

I mostly agree with namida's proposals.

I especially support the proposed changes to the "Level Select" , "Preview/Postview" and the font in the way proposed by Dullstar (https://www.lemmingsforums.net/index.php?topic=4920.msg83377#msg83377).
In these categories I see real player experience gain potential! Especially changes to the "Level Select" screen could go a long way and really improve NL.
On the other hand, I struggle to see the gain in tinkering further with the main menu and cards and would tend to be very conservative here. The main menu is fine as it is in my opinion and we have other areas that could be improved on to MUCH more effect.
The changes I can see advantageous from the menu side are the "allow more sizes" and the widescreen compability points. I also don't see any harm in adding a cursor.


Where I strongly disagree is the "One row of cards" point. It just looks worse and overall cramped. In the current 2 row style we don't have to ask the question if signs fit and it looks nice and ordered. We have a lot of space and we should use it so that it looks clearer and ordered - cramping everything together in 1 row works against that.
The "One row of cards" argument seems to me more like a "make it more like Amiga" argument anyway.

So I would align myself with namida's proposals for the most part.

[Proxima]

The "One row of cards" argument seems to me more like a "make it more like Amiga" argument anyway.

It's rude to put words into other people's mouths. I find the current stretched-out cards ugly, and having them in a line would allow them to have much nicer proportions.

Creator's Tools could be accessed from buttons in the level select menu; they don't need to clutter up the main menu.

I really don't like the suggestion for the bright blue font. It may be clearer, but it clashes with the overall colour scheme and feels out of place.

I am absolutely against making the menu a different size from the game, because this would interfere with recording software.

My preferred option for talismans is having a hotkey (maybe that works both on the preview screen and in-game) that brings up a pop-up with talisman requirements in plain text. This could be combined with icons on the preview screen to show how many talismans a level has and which ones have already been obtained.

[IchoTolot]

It's rude to put words into other people's mouths. I find the current stretched-out cards ugly, and having them in a line would allow them to have much nicer proportions.

In the "One row of cards" case you may not count towards the Amiga-like case, but it still feels like it to me in some other cases. Sorry, but that's just how it seems to me at least to some degree.

I would again disaggree in the "nicer proportions" point as it just feels really cramped to me. The current layout doesn't feel stretched-out at all in my opinion and I would have it rather strached a bit than cramped.

I am absolutely against making the menu a different size from the game, because this would interfere with recording software.

Yes, that's an important point to consider! Good thing you mentioned it!

I really don't like the suggestion for the bright blue font. It may be clearer, but it clashes with the overall colour scheme and feels out of place.

I am 100% open to another color is it has a similar effect on clearness and feels less out of place to you.

[namida]

I am absolutely against making the menu a different size from the game, because this would interfere with recording software.

Yes, that's an important point to consider! Good thing you mentioned it!

This would be an important point, if it were true - but it's not. It is possible that a change to the underlying menu size might in turn lead to changes to the default window sizing, but the current status quo of "you can make the window any size you want and NL will not usually resize it" will remain - with no change to what said minimums are, and no change to what "not usually" covers. In particular, just like now, it will not change between menus and gameplay.

Current NL allows arbitrarily sizing the window. Menus resize proportionally (with black bars if needed) to fill it; while ingame uses the additional space to show more of the level. There is zero reason why changing the under-the-hood size of the menu screens would require any change to this existing behaviour.

The "One row of cards" argument seems to me more like a "make it more like Amiga" argument anyway.

I should stress that "Amiga does this" or "DOS does this" is meaningless either way to me. I will neither agree more with, nor reject, an idea on either of those basises.

[WillLem]

Regarding the size of the menu: To echo Icho: resizing the window simply results in more of the level being displayed, so there is absolutely no reason why it should affect recording, even in windowed mode.

Regarding the cursor graphic: it might be simplest to allow these to be user-customisable like most of the other graphics. So, even if the decision is to make it the same as the in-game cursor by default, create these as a separate graphic (titled "cursor_menu", for example) so the user can decide either to leave it as-is or change it to something else, without it affecting the in-game cursor.

Regarding the background: again, as long as users can change the background to whatever they want, I suppose it doesn't massively matter what happens regarding this. It would be good to find a cleaner, higher-res (and unblurred) version of the existing one, though.

Regarding the font color: I agree with Proxima that the shade of blue chosen by Dullstar looks a bit out of place, but I appreciate the efforts towards making it more visible. Once again, leaving this as something users can recolour and change themselves (if they so wish) is ultimately the safest bet. It is, of course, important that we agree on a decent default colour though. Also, +1 for having different colours for different lines of text (although I can understand why people would be against this).

Regarding logos: you've pretty much hit the spot with your proposal here - my suggestion was always that different sized logos ought to be allowed and then simply centred/placed according to the standard. This stops the need to stretch logos disproportionately to "fit" the current size. By all means keep the current size as the max (or maybe extend it a bit), but allow smaller logos to be centred. You've found the wording for this suggestion that I was struggling to find, so thanks!

Regarding the cards: I'm somewhat inclined to agree with Proxima that Creator's Tools could be made available from the F2 or even F3 menus rather than being yet another card on the main screen. If anything, it would make more sense for Creator's Tools to be an Editor thing rather than a Player thing. The main screen ought to be kept as simple as possible: PLAY, LEVEL SELECT, SETTINGS and RANK are all that's really needed, as far as I can tell. Do we really need a QUIT button?

Regarding the card layout: I am strongly in favour of a single row. To address this directly (since it seems to the one of the issues upon which there's the most polarisation):

Where I strongly disagree is the "One row of cards" point. It just looks worse and overall cramped... The "One row of cards" argument seems to me more like a "make it more like Amiga" argument anyway.

I agree with you that the way the cards are presented in the Amiga menu makes them look cramped; if anything, they look stretched vertically whereas NL stretches them horizontally. However, none of the suggestions to have one row of cards have ever stated that they should be cramped together or that they should emulate the Amiga version; I think you are making this assumption based on my general preference for Amiga Lemmings (when it comes to the original games), and it was me who originally proposed one row of cards.

However, my reasons for wanting one row have nothing to do with the Amiga version: I just think that 2 rows feels very cluttered, especially when there's a different number of cards on each row, and it makes it difficult to know where to look first. A single row keeps everything more aligned (literally!) and easier to process quickly. Add to that the fact that giving the cards more vertical space allows them to be better-proportioned, and it just seems to be the obvious way to go. That said, if the menu size isn't also increased to 16:9, then I can understand the concern that a single row might look more cramped.

Ultimately, it comes down to the relative size of everything. Have a look here for a version of the menu I mocked up that shows the cards as they could be on the current menu screen. This might help to allay any fears that a single row would look cramped; the cards in this image could easily be spread out even further or made slightly smaller to create even more space. It's possible to make one row of cards look great, thus improving upon anything that Amiga or DOS did in their menus.

Anyway, whatever happens as regards to layout, I'm more than happy to help edit/design correctly-proportioned card graphics, and separate them into different elements for "clickable" purposes if necessary. It's good to have the opportunity to resize and redesign the cards to fit the new menu as perfectly as possible.

Finally, regarding replay loading: maybe this is also something that could be done from the Level Select menu so as not to clutter up the menu screen further. I also agree with Dullstar that it's important to preserve current replay functionality as much as possible (that is, if adding the ability to load levels from replay means significant changes to the way levels and replays work with each other).