hide crossing

[kianzarrin]

@aubergine10 When I wanted to merge hide crossing into TMPE other team members had lost interest.
are you still interested?

[originalfoo]

@kianzarrin Yes, it would be great addition IMO.

It's weird that we need external mod to do it, given that TMPE has the most commonly used UI for toggling crossings on/off.

[krzychu124]

Hmm for settings...
Maybe instead of new tabs we should try to build internal options screen.
I see it like we have a special tab which contains list of buttons (with label and icon, layout is grid-like) and you can click on specific button (say Hide Crossing, with icon) to see related settings and in the upper corner of that whole screen display either "<= back" button or just and arrow "<=" to return to main view (selection of buttons). So when you click on any button we just hide everything (current tabs view) and show container with new settings specific for selected option on the first screen. Theoretically we could reuse existing functions like OnSettingsUI, it expects UIHelper so we could create UIHelper from new panel. Limits required changes to minimum, rest could be just wrapped nicely. IUserMod should be swapped to TMPE version so we could reuse as much as possible without making too many changes. Extension classes like SerializationExtention/LoadingExtension will be handled by the game with ease (I'm pretty sure it doesn't care how many implementation you've created in your mod so it'll take everything).

Ugly example 🙃 (HC - hide crossing, DC - Direct Connect, either abbrev. or full name, doesn't matter):

[originalfoo]

Probably need to do this scale of change in 11.6.6.x branch; 11.6.5.x contains lots of bug fixes and improvements we need to get to STABLE

Ditch tabs completely. Could have a settings "home" page something like (screenshot from cslmodding.info website):

EDIT: Layout would probably need to be more compact, eg. text at side of icon. Screen space is limited.

Each panel representing an options "group" (we've already got most stuff split in to group files, but can easily move stuff around, especially once the option UI definitions get moved to Options.cs. So the option group class will define title/tooltip/icon of its panel on the "home" page.

EDIT: Bonus round - do the group AddUI() on-demand. Faster loading times due to not instantiating UI components during load.

Once in a group, we could have a nav bar at the top - something like you see in web browsers (hasty mockup made by customising my browser toolbar lol):

That allows user to return to the main "home" page (panel grid), scroll through the groups (left/right arrows), save as global default, load from global default, and reload main config. At some point in future "save as..." - allowing user to create custom/sharable options profiles. We could have buttons on there eg. for "what's new", "user guide", "language", etc?

EDIT: The nav bar at top could exist on the "Home" screen too, but with options such as (very rough mockup):

[kianzarrin]

also possible to have multirow tabs like windows

[krzychu124]

Or... scrollable tabs, would be better than multirow.
I would like to remove tabs since sooner or later we run out of space and variant with clickable tiles might help us dividing setting into simplified and advanced/all options screen

Probably need to do this scale of change in 11.6.6.x branch; 11.6.5.x contains lots of bug fixes and improvements we need to get to STABLE

Yes but 11.6.5.x also introduced breaking change so users from TEST won't be able to load savegames using STABLE version once we release it to 11.6.5.2 to the TEST...

Integrating HC/DC etc. should not be done before releasing 11.6.5.x to Stable.

[originalfoo]

tagging #652 which is related