UI : About dialog

[babaissarkar]

Enhances the previous build info dialog into a general purpose "About" dialog following the discussions in #8768.

I've also adjusted the order of the title screen buttons, so that Preferences is now at bottom, just before Quit and Achievements have moved up, a priority change.

[irydacea]

I understand what you are doing with the script font for the caption of the dialog, the inclusion of the game's description in italics, and the liberal use of centred elements in the dialog. However, I don't think this is the way to go. It mainly just serves to make the dialog look cluttered and disorganised, especially with the Copy-to-clipboard and Log File options just thrown into the centre of the dialog for no obvious reason. (Speaking of which, you do realise that the Copy-to-clipboard option is meant to copy the full report, not just the Paths tab's contents, right?)

I'm also not sure what the Community button is supposed to accomplish here that wouldn't work better just integrated directly into the General tab.

Going back to the game's description, I'd like to think that the game describes itself just fine by being a game that people can play. Do we really need to show the description in-game like this? It feels redundant and more than a little pretentious.

The use of the script font is also completely inconsistent with the display of the game's name in any other place with the exception of the outro screen at the end of campaigns. If we're going to have the game's name be displayed in a stylised fashion we might as well use the full logo used in the title screen instead IMO, like the Help system already does.

[irydacea]

(Full disclosure: I made this dialog so I have a non-negligible amount of attachment to my design.)

[irydacea]

Another thing I forgot to add:

If we're going to have text on the button label on the main menu, I feel the best way to go about it is to use the "Version $version" label for it rather than a dedicated "About" label, otherwise both spans of text right next to each other look slightly odd.

[babaissarkar]

Another thing I forgot to add:

If we're going to have text on the button label on the main menu, I feel the best way to go about it is to use the "Version $version" label for it rather than a dedicated "About" label, otherwise both spans of text right next to each other look slightly odd.

I'd redirect you to #8768 (comment) and the following comments.
I have no problem with anything at all on the label, but it would be best for me if everyone reaches a consensus.
(My personal preference is to remove the version $version part from title screen altogether, since it would be shown when somebody clicks About, or in the title bar in windowed mode.)

It mainly just serves to make the dialog look cluttered and disorganised, especially with the Copy-to-clipboard and Log File options just thrown into the centre of the dialog for no obvious reason.

I didn't know that they copy the full report, but what would be a good place for them? And for the cluttering issue, another option would be to keep build info dialog as it is, and create a new and very simple "About" dialog (similar to the gnome ones) and add an build info button to it. (But that'd mean scrapping this entire PR altogether.)
Another reason for the clutter would be that the Paths tag is packing too many paths. I wonder if adding more space around and inbetween would help.

I'm also not sure what the Community button is supposed to accomplish here that wouldn't work better just integrated directly into the General tab.

I'd leave that to @Pentarctagon (#8768 (comment))

If we're going to have the game's name be displayed in a stylised fashion we might as well use the full logo used in the title screen instead IMO

A related problem is that the logo uses Celtic Garamond, but the default script font is Oldania, leading to the inconsistency. (It does use Oldania, the wiki page was outdated) I'd replace the script font title and the icon with the logo, but I'd prefer to keep the short description, since many of games and applications have them in their About dialog, and it'd would look bad to not have it.

A couple of images I'm using as reference are here.

Note that I think that Wesnoth should be more stylized and not less, including the title screen. This and #8510 are both created with that philosophy in mind. (#4531 (comment), #8768 (comment))

[babaissarkar]

Moved the copy report button to general tab :

(too much empty space, but don't know what can I do about it.)

[Pentarctagon]

I'd leave that to @Pentarctagon (#8768 (comment))

Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't usually think to look at a game's/application's About dialog for those kinds of links. I'd expect a link to a place to report bugs or get help with a problem.

[CelticMinstrel]

I wouldn't usually think to look at a game's/application's About dialog for those kinds of links.

Where would you think to look?

[Pentarctagon]

I don't have a specific place, but for games that have these links, they show them somewhere that they're immediately visible rather than needing to click something else to find them.

[CelticMinstrel]

Your community dialog already violates that…

[Pentarctagon]

Well I assume nobody actually wanted all those buttons listed on the title screen above the Quit button :P

The point though is that it's plainly visible to players rather than moderately hidden behind another button that's off in the corner of the screen.

[irydacea]

I don't have a specific place, but for games that have these links, they show them somewhere that they're immediately visible rather than needing to click something else to find them.

Normally they'd be on the main menu, just in icon form rather than as more text clutter plastered all over.

[Pentarctagon]

Are we allowed to embed other people's trademarks in Wesnoth? IRC and whatever icon we'd use for the forums I assume would be fine, but what about Steam, Discord, and Reddit?

[babaissarkar]

Are we allowed to embed other people's trademarks in Wesnoth? IRC and whatever icon we'd use for the forums I assume would be fine, but what about Steam, Discord, and Reddit?

I found a related page (https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-icons/). Summary : Can be used, but under specific guidelines.
Personally I'd prefer to stay away from social media icons. The community dialog stays as it is, but we move the Community button to an icon in one corner, in a way similar to the Language and About buttons, and we use a public domain or GPL compatible icon there (https://openclipart.org) or make one of our own.
(Already suggested by @Wedge009 here)

I also think that the titlescreen should not have too many icons.

I can probably also put all of them as links on the right hand side, similar to the Blender About dialog, Community button stays on main page, and clicking Community simply opens the about dialog. Duplicitous, but does the job.

[Vultraz]

I think this would be better served by a tab in Prefs, similar to how other games do it, than here which serves a specialized purpose.

[babaissarkar]

New design :

(The extra empty space is caused by the Paths tab)

[CelticMinstrel]

Hmm. That has space for a Community tab that lists all the links from the original community dialog, rather than just the most important ones.

Side note: The architecture is listed as unknown, yet it's shown on the line above. Wonder if that can be improved?

Wonder if it makes sense for the copy line to be changed to…

[Copy] a full report

Integrating the button into the phrase… or does that just seem weird?

[babaissarkar]

Hmm. That has space for a Community tab that lists all the links from the original community dialog, rather than just the most important ones.

We can remove the community dialog and redirect the community button to here, if @Pentarctagon agrees. Community Button stays in title screen.

Side note: The architecture is listed as unknown, yet it's shown on the line above. Wonder if that can be improved?

Any suggestions? I did earlier change it to Unknown from <unknown>, but that wasn't much of an improvement.

Wonder if it makes sense for the copy line to be changed to…

[Copy] a full report

Integrating the button into the phrase… or does that just seem weird?

Can do that, provided I change the button's definition to a Link style button. This dialog would have really benefited from the rich_label functionality in #8655. I am also planning to make the copy button give an indication that the report has been copied (similar to how some web UIs do that nowadays, they changed the text to "Copied!", add a checkmark and green color).

Would adding a right arrow marker to the selected tab header look good? Something similar to this (could be made more ornate later) :

[CelticMinstrel]

Any suggestions? I did earlier change it to Unknown from , but that wasn't much of an improvement.

I was thinking more along the lines of somehow parsing the line above to extract the architecture string… but I don't know how viable that actually is in practice.

[Pentarctagon]

We can remove the community dialog and redirect the community button to here, if @Pentarctagon agrees. Community Button stays in title screen.

Works for me.

[irydacea]

I need a reminder to look at this more closely in the upcoming days, but I wanted to quickly point out something:

Side note: The architecture is listed as unknown, yet it's shown on the line above. Wonder if that can be improved?

If it's ever listed as unknown, that means something went wrong at compile time (see the comment above the string). This should never happen. The compiler obviously knows what architecture it's building for and so should Boost, which is where I source the arch info from. I intentionally chose not to use the OS arch because the application arch does not need to match the OS arch (x86 app running on x86_64, x86_64 app running on aarch64, etc.) This design choice actually made it quickly evident for me back in the day that Steam wasn't launching the aarch64 version of Wesnoth on Apple Silicon.

Another side note: the canonical domain for the Wesnoth website is www.wesnoth.org, not wesnoth.org. While the latter is 100% guaranteed to work as a shorthand and will result in a correct HTTP 3xx, we don't need shorthands here.

[babaissarkar]

Couple of observations on the arch issue :
1.16 screenshot :

1.19, running on Windows 10 :

Another side note: the canonical domain for the Wesnoth website is www.wesnoth.org, not wesnoth.org. While the latter is 100% guaranteed to work as a shorthand and will result in a correct HTTP 3xx, we don't need shorthands here.

Will fix that.

[babaissarkar]

@irydacea Adding #include <boost/predef.h> in build_info.cpp seems to solve it for me.

[irydacea]

@irydacea Adding #include <boost/predef.h> in build_info.cpp seems to solve it for me.

Thank you, the problem was introduced by the PR that was supposed to remove unneeded includes.

[Wedge009]

#8347? There's no change to build_info.cpp there, nor any removal of predef.h, but presumably it could have been a dependency of something else that was removed.

[irydacea]

#8347? There's no change to build_info.cpp there, nor any removal of predef.h, but presumably it could have been a dependency of something else that was removed.

I feel this is a discussion we should be having in #8836 or on Discord/IRC instead since it's not relevant to the current discussion.

Anyway, see commit d88ddec.

[Wedge009]

Was just trying to track down what led to the breakage on the basis of your comment and this page hadn't refreshed with your just-submitted PR at the time I was writing.

[babaissarkar]

Moved the community dialog as a new tab into the about dialog. Community button redirects here. The previous community dialog is removed.
(I've mentioned @Pentarctagon as co-author in that commit because I just copied the contents over.)

[babaissarkar]

Rewritten with the tab_container and the editable property of the text boxes from #8390.
Scrolling and copying from the text_boxes in Path tab are possible (cursor not visible for some reason in the screenshot, sorry)

Tabs look like following now : (should I add more padding around text?)

Copy All button shows success indication. (should use this for other copy button on Paths tab?)

[Pentarctagon]

Copy All button shows success indication. (should use this for other copy button on Paths tab?)

Keeping it consistent would be good.