Grid Sage Games

Full UI Upscaling, Part 2: Holy Mockups!

By Kyzrati | Published: January 5, 2024

Last time was all about exploring a high-level direction for Cogmind’s shift towards supporting an increased size for interface fonts and tiles by reducing the amount of space available to display information, beginning especially with the map view. Now it’s time to make concrete plans to determine what we can actually fit into a 45-row terminal. Concrete interface plans means… mockups! Lots and lots of mockups.

During my earlier Year 10 of the Cogmind post I shared a collage of the initial set of mockups put together in late November, so today we’ll be referencing a bunch of those individually to examine what needs to happen in order to construct this new UI layout.

Mockups put together in REXPaint during a dev stream in preparation for Cogmind’s new UI layout (open for full size).

We’re now working under the assumption that almost everyone is using a widescreen aspect ratio display. Over a decade ago I didn’t go that far, instead supporting 4:3 by default and allowing for dynamic windows to fill any remaining width. The change doesn’t mean 4:3 players won’t be able to play, of course, there would simply be some letterboxing on the top and bottom (there aren’t yet any plans to make the full game height dynamic, although it wouldn’t be impossible to make it so at some point, just as width is dynamic now).

Before we continue, know that all mockups are designed in size 12, and all of them can be opened to their full size for closer inspection if desired. Also their content may sometimes include items and hint at mechanics that don’t actually exist--we’re just doing layouts, those details aren’t important ;)

It’s mockup time!

Main UI

Cogmind’s main UI is where the player spends the vast majority of their time, and the original goal of its design was to ensure that it provides immediate visual access to anything an experienced player needs without opening any other windows. Dropping from a 60-row to 45-row terminal is going to force us to bend that requirement, so it’s just a question of what to remove.

If you recall from Part 1 I showed a diagram highlighting the absolutely essential parts of the main UI, and the stored inventory is the only subsection of the right-side HUD that is not included in that highlighted area.

Modal Inventory

While a visible inventory can be quite helpful, it’s not what I’d consider absolutely necessary.

Now I wouldn’t have said that many years ago in early Cogmind development, but in the years since then we’ve gotten a lot of inventory-related QoL features that reduce reliance on the inventory window in the first place, for example the slot-specific type-wise swapping menu, or part auto-replacement which makes some common inventory management possible without even looking at the inventory at all, much less directly interact with it.

Slotwise part swapping, which doesn’t require any direct interaction with the inventory. (This old demo recording also includes some usage the inventory-first version of that feature, which isn’t relevant here, and I’m not even sure if anyone even uses it…) Keyboard input has the same access, though it’s harder to follow a recording of that so I’m sharing the mouse version.

Altogether this suggests that our number one target for info reduction is to turn the inventory into some sort of modal window as found in pretty much every other roguelike.

A basic 45-row main UI mockup without the inventory window.

It just so happens that the inventory alone saves us 14 lines of height, which is a mere 1 line below what we need :D

The other recovered line comes from removing a previously empty line from the top area, as marked by my notes on the mockup. With the data in that area becoming even denser, the order of the two bottom lines is swapped and the less important optional ones (if visible at all) are darkened to regain some of the desired visual separation.

The inventory is accessible via a button at the bottom of the parts list (and if it works out, simply moving the cursor over that button will also show the inventory and allow interaction that way, no click required).

cogmind_mockup_semimodal_ui_main_modal_inventory

The inventory window in its original form would simply pop up next to its original position, adjacent to the button. The button itself can hold the inventory capacity information normally displayed at the top of the inventory.

Pure keyboard players would be able to toggle the inventory window with the ‘i’ key, newly relieved of its functionality as described during the map zoom polishing stage. It will also likely automatically appear/disappear when using related “modal part commands” (the ‘p’ menu).

Aside: I’m currently writing about some of these new UI layout interactions in hypothetical terms, since these are plans rather than actually implemented at this stage, so there may be unforeseen roadblocks or alternatives necessary with respect to specific functionality depending on how everything works out in practice.

Another concept for supporting this new modal inventory is an indicator that pops up in the bottom-right corner of the map showing the name of the item and pointing to the inventory button any time an action adds an item to the inventory (such as picking one up) when it is hidden. These indicators could stack if there’s more than one in a short period, and disappear after a duration. Optional and adjustable, of course.

Dynamic Parts Window

Now it may be that experienced players well-versed in Cogmind’s inventory-related QoL features and familiar with parts, mechanics, and strategies won’t have much trouble managing a modal inventory if necessary. It does, however, interfere a bit with the natural flow of Cogmind’s highly accessible drag-drop interface, a fact which combined with hiding the inventory’s existence by default is not as great for new players.

Does the inventory have to always be hidden? The answer is a resounding NO! Also yay!

While Cogmind can eventually acquire up to 26 item slots to fill, that number starts at only 7, meaning we have 19 lines which start out unused. Recall that the inventory requires 14 lines, and you can see where this is going…

cogmind_mockup_semimodal_ui_dynamic_parts_list

The normal inventory window displayed below a shorter parts list that doesn’t yet make use of its full height.

For however long the parts list is capable of appearing in a shorter format and still show everything it needs to (vital, after all), the inventory can just be visible as normal! On starting a new run, with the inventory visible there are still 5 lines of extra space for slots going forward, meaning the inventory does not need to enter a modal state until Cogmind’s third evolution, or entering -7/Factory.

Technically we could also have the parts list shrink again and unhide the inventory if your total slot count is once again reduced below the threshold, for example due to host switching in Polymind, or for, uh, other reasons some of you know ;)

While thinking about all the ways to save space, I also came up with an even more extreme version of this “dynamic parts list,” one that would be optional and definitely off by default. It also wouldn’t even be implemented right away as part of the first iteration, but since we’re talking about mockups we might as well look at it--mockups are practically free :P

cogmind_mockup_semimodal_ui_dynamic_parts_list_no_headers

A header-free concept for the dynamic parts list.

Removing the headers and corresponding separators between slot types from the parts list gives us back another 4 lines, equivalent to 2 more evolutions, meaning under this layout style the inventory would not become modal until entering -5/Factory, or half way to the surface.

It’s harder to parse at a glance, but does save space and the essentials are still there, with categories instead reflected with light or dark bars along the side, and I guess they’d need to double as cycle buttons for mouse users who use those (as they normally appear along the separator line).

And with that our main UI is essentially taken care of! The changes I’ve described so far in support of a 45-row interface are enough to keep our main UI highly playable, which was what I was mostly worried about to begin with, being the main UI and all. I was pretty pleased with the [hypothetical] results this should produce, and it’s the main UI so that means we’re mostly done, yeah?! Well, no it turns out there are actually quite a few other things that need to be modified as well xD

Info Windows

There is a range of secondary info windows we’ll need to take a look at, some of which have always been especially crowded, so they could present some new challenges. This category includes item/robot/machine/status info and the machine hacking windows.

What really links all these as part of the same group is that they share the same dimensions and open in the same area: over the map. Based on the original assumption of a minimum 50×50 map view, they were all thus designed for a height of 50 rows. Now what happens when not only the map view is no longer large enough to contain them, but even assuming we no longer limit them to that area, the 45-row interface as a whole isn’t even big enough xD

The most worrisome of the group is item info. In many cases it’s fine with space to spare, but a portion of items have always pushed up against the height limit. Scrolling for stats is something I never want to require on principle, so we have to make do with what space we have.

Potentially helpful here is a feature I already conceived and implemented months prior to even considering a new UI layout: The possibility of a button to open additional mechanical details unique to an item. Item and effect descriptions normally hold this info, especially relevant to utilities, but there were always a handful of weapons (which mostly fill their window with stats) that also have abilities and there isn’t much room to explain those.

cogmind_part_info_expandable_sample_multitool

More!

This will be especially useful going forward as we get more and more unique items. But for our new layout it’s not enough! Nor is it even suitable since this is only for exception parts rather than the norm. Regardless of this functionality, what used to require up to 50 lines now only has 45. In the end the answer is pretty obvious:

Item info mockup, with art displayed off to the side.

Item art occupies a height of 10 in the item info window, so let’s just move that aside and there’s plenty of space.

Examining the other mockups in this category…

Robot info generally fits, although there are probably one or two cases of robots that have a ridiculously long list of parts and resistances that could cause it to extend outside the window bounds. I’ll just wait and see where this is an issue.

Status info can sometimes exceed 45 lines, but I’ll be alleviating some of the pressure by removing two lines of low importance, and we may need a pop up to display the full list of damage resistances or modifiers? This is another case where I’m just waiting to see it in action and will decide what to do then.

The hacking interface is essentially okay as is. With a completely full direct target list (not all that common) it still fits, even if the resulting output area to the bottom ends up on the small size. At most this window might have to cut short the list of relevant hacking utilities shown (if someone has an absolutely insane number of them in possession), which are there mainly as fluff anyway.

Escape Menu

The multipage Escape menu, or game menu, is a bit problematic.

It was designed around a 50-row map view, allowing us to display individual page info over the map while also displaying all the commands directly in their relevant main UI windows. I wouldn’t want to redesign it all to change this behavior, and not only because that would be a lot of work, but it was done this way because I very much like the immersive feel provided by that level of integration with the main UI. So we’ll have to find alternative solutions for whatever problems arise… and they’ll definitely arise considering the available space was reduced from 50 rows to 35, a 30% loss xD

The game menu and basic commands page (1) is fine, since that’s kept simple to avoid overwhelming new players with more than they need to know right away.

On the other hand, there’s no way the advanced commands (2) would ever fit. They fully-utilize the map view space, and I had to keep some of the more esoteric ones off the list in the first place, relegating them to the full in-manual list since there simply wasn’t enough room, meaning what is shown with 50 lines is already a somewhat slimmed down version. I tried to see if a two-column approach would be possible in order to fit the minimum required set, but the width is insufficient.

The answer is, finally, subpages. Advanced commands in the map area will just have to be given another page accessed by Left/Right or buttons at the bottom.

cogmind_mockup_semimodal_ui_advanced_commands

The first page of advanced commands when divided into multiple pages.

Seen above, with our dynamic parts list height the loss of rows also affects the space available to show its commands, but a number of those were either not really used or already covered in the basic commands, so I slimmed that one down just enough to fit.

In-game manual access (3) is pretty dynamic already since it’s just a list of topics and blocks of text, so no issues there.

The options menu (4) is already divided into to columns, both of which mercifully fit into even a 35-row area (well, 33 because we need the menu bar as well). We can attribute this favorable result to the fact that unlike the command list it’s an interactive window, and keyboard players need access, too, so we have lowercase options on the left and uppercase on the right (26 each, plus some lines for headers and category spacing).

What doesn’t fit due to the resize is the option descriptions, which normally display in an area below the options list when hovering the cursor over one. That can be simply be moved to another temporary popup window and we’re done with this page.

cogmind_mockup_semimodal_ui_options_menu

The options menu in a new layout, with dummy text showing to the side.

The news page (5) is quite simple. No worries there.

Credits (6) doesn’t have a ton of info on it, but definitely gets more squeezed than I prefer, removing a lot of the extra spacing that was available before. In the interest of finishing Cogmind some time this century, I’ll accept it ;)

The Records (7) page itself is just a menu to access more windows so no problem there, but the windows it opens are problematic. Lore Collection, Gallery Collection, and Achievements were all built to the same specification, 55 rows, so we’re going to need to hack away at least 10 of those from each…

For comparison here is the original Achievements mockup used to build the one currently in Cogmind, designed for a 160×60 terminal:

Cogmind’s current achievements UI (mockup). You can read all about how it was put together here.

To squeeze everything into 45 rows we need to reduce the number of achievements shown at once, merge and align the menus on the left, and, most importantly, find another way to display the secondary windows below the main one. This latter part is especially important, because all three of our interactive records interfaces use that same format, so whatever happens here needs to work for all of them.

It turns out there’s just enough width to move those things off to the right side, and then the new height comes out to be almost exactly what we need.

cogmind_mockup_semimodal_ui_achievements_ui

The new Achievements UI compatible with a 45-row layout (the page-wise object counter originally in the bottom left now appears along the top-left border of the main window, which is probably a better place for it anyway, even if it draws less attention there).

I prefer the original layout--spacier, better delineation of areas, but it’s gotta fit within our new restrictions, and thankfully it does without any more hacking.

Lore Collection is the easiest of the three, since like the manual it’s composed of just a topic list and corresponding text blocks. This means we can reduce the height without any real consequences in terms of functionality, and it’s fairly easy to do.

The Lore Collection UI shown instead with the new sidebar elements.

The Gallery Collection gets a bit cramped, removing almost all the extra spacing that was available in its original iteration, and also losing the extra lines devoted to providing extra information for those alpha supporters and others who have their name associated with a particular item (the original purpose of the gallery). I’ll have to figure out a new way to provide that info.

A much more cramped Gallery Collection UI (green blocks used to delineate element area for formatting purposes, not representative of what it’s supposed to look like).

It’s cramped, but it still works. Unlike with Achievements I didn’t want to further reduce the number of object visible at once, since it’s already just nine…

World Map

The world map UI was also built to fit within the map view area, requiring a minimum of 50 rows. We can easily give it the full vertical space, so 45 lines, but that still isn’t enough for its current layout.

It just so happens I wanted to redesign it anyway, since as linked there the original focus was on animating the complete route, which may have not been too bad many years ago, but Cogmind’s world has expanded greatly and routes can get quite long now (which means it takes a while to fully trace). Furthermore, the architecture is such that it actually has to animate the whole thing in order to draw it at all, and it can only be sped up so much, so yeah, something needs to be done here.

A new 41-row mockup for the world map.

It turns out that the original style still works fine, and I rather like it because it provides a very condensed format for reflecting all types of movements, transitions, and maps. Simply by removing the one extra line of padding between each depth we end up with a 41-row interface, which will fit! Like some of the other changes before, it’s a bit cramped but works fine.

I will still have to rebuild it to enable snappy opening, but at least the design is familiar and effective.

A Huge Problem

It was only after drawing all the mockups and taking a ton of notes that I was going through to make sure I hadn’t missed anything when I realized there is a huge problem: the intro/ending animations. Especially the latter. There are a lot of them, they’re pretty involved, and all were designed specifically for a terminal of 60 rows. Wider is fine, but they can’t be adjusted for something shorter. Oh no.

For that I came up with a crazy solution that I’ll be covering next time, in yet another engine-related detour…

This is the second in a multi-part series about building Cogmind’s fully upscaled semi-modal interface layout:

Posted in Dev Series: Full UI Upscaling | Tagged Cogmind, GUI, Scaling, UI | 2 Responses

Full UI Upscaling, Part 1: History and Theory

By Kyzrati | Published: January 2, 2024

A long time in coming, but here we go! This marks the beginning of what will be the most significant undertaking in Cogmind’s UI development history: making everything bigger. Not just the map, for which zooming was recently implemented as a toggleable option, but all the text as well.

This will be fun since I do love me some interface work, as evidenced by the massive number of optional QoL features I’ve introduced over the years, but despite pouring many hours into accessibility and streamlined gameplay before, this particular feature took the longest to get to.

Back in Cogmind’s early years I gave strong consideration to implementing it then--put together some mockups, discussed options with the community, and so on, but the time wasn’t right. Back then I couldn’t nail down what would be the most extreme (but still acceptable) options. We didn’t yet know what reasonable limits to put on such a feature, as in what’s the absolute furthest it could go without compromising other parts of the game design. It had to wait.

Being the way a player interacts with all of a game’s content, UI is naturally central to the experience, thus one of the most fundamental aspects a game’s design needs to address is matching up that design with its corresponding system requirements, including the display device!

To take an extreme example, there are obviously different considerations when developing for mobile vs desktop, and the results of the different decisions made to optimize a design for the target platform is also why ports between various platforms don’t always come out the same, whether technically or in terms of feel.

Not surprisingly, starting in the 2010s there began a trend towards developing games in order to ultimately target as many different platforms as possible (desktop and consoles being the most common crossovers), and it was very interesting to see player reactions to this trend, especially PC players lamenting how games were changing to ensure they could accommodate consoles as well. A necessary evil if you want to maximize profits, I guess :P

Finding middle ground so that more people can enjoy a form of entertainment is in some ways also a noble goal, although this naturally waters down the experience at the same time. The more strict your requirements, the more you can make assumptions about the target player’s experience, and in turn optimize a design for what you know to be true. Basically if done right, the end result will be better, for that particular group of players.

And that’s the backdrop for how Cogmind came to be born in its original form over a decade ago, wanting to have a large enough terminal grid to be able to simultaneously show a huge amount of info at once--Cogmind’s terminal dimensions are easily the largest of any roguelike, and also better support very large and active maps--Cogmind has the largest maps of any subterranean roguelike, and also by far the most active maps, with lots of entities milling about doing their own thing, some more or less important than others, but all worth of being aware of for various reasons.

The scope could not be so ambitious without what I decided at the time: This design will lean really heavily into having a large screen to play on. “Large” meaning physically large, resolution being irrelevant since we’re talking about a traditional terminal here, all that info simply appearing bigger when the screen is bigger, the display always being divided into at least a 160×60 grid. (By comparison, the classics use 80×25, and some later roguelikes use something in between, so Cogmind has nearly five times as much display area as the original roguelikes, or several times what is found in some other later roguelikes.)

Fast forward more than 10 years, and a much greater portion of people now play games on laptops, not to mention a greater variety of players have begun discovering and becoming interested in Cogmind, so the demand for alternative interface options is clearly growing ever larger.

Even if not the original target audience, I always wanted to accommodate more people when possible, and although my intention was to wait until somewhere around 1.0 to experiment with the possibilities, it’s also becoming clear that there’s no idea when Cogmind 1.0 will actually happen :P

Fortunately at this point we also have a very clear idea of Cogmind’s development needs, how players interact with the game, and pretty much all the UI considerations and limitations that we’d need to take into account to design the “most extreme” alternative interface layouts that could still work.

So it’s time to do that.

UI Requirements

Cogmind’s original UI concept had two basic requirements: a sufficiently large map view area, and a persistently visible list of all parts.

Interface components we can’t really do without, even if some were to take a slightly different form. Basic stats reflecting current resources and status are also pretty important!

Parts List

Unlike pretty much every other roguelike in which the player has a mostly persistent set of equipment, Cogmind’s parts list involves items that are subject to frequent tweaking and toggling, or at least warrant much closer turn-by-turn observation due to damage and/or status changes. The list also includes up to 26 different slots at once, whereas other roguelikes generally have half that, at most.

As such, being able to see and interact with this list in its entirety at all times is quite important, so it was given its own area on the interface. That will always be there.

cogmind_parts_list_various_late_game_RIF

Sample parts list.

Map View

Seeing the map, where most of the action happens, is also kinda important, too. But how much of it do we want to see at once? How large does this view need to be?

Cogmind was not designed to require widescreen support. In fact, the UI layout we have was originally built to fit snugly in 4:3 aspect ratio, only expanding horizontally to fill more space as available.

Therefore although it can be expanded to show more area, under that layout the minimum map view area allowed was set to 50×50 (in terminal dimensions this is actually 100×50, because map cells are square rather than rectangular, each occupying two terminal cells).

The number 50 is incredibly central to Cogmind’s design, because almost no weapons or active intel should have a range that can exceed the area a player can see by default. Cogmind being a game focused on ranged combat, repeatedly getting attacked from out of view would not be great, nor is having data on enemies roaming around you in multiple directions, known but out of view. These and other drawbacks of a small view area don’t make for an optimal play experience.

Assuming map view dimensions of 50×50, placing Cogmind at the center means the player can see out to a distance of approximately 25 or more in any direction. So ranges should for the most part be kept within that value.

Another reason to have a decently large map view in the first place is, again, the sheer size of maps to explore, and the potentially high level of local activity out there. A view area as large as 50×50 can still only see a mere 1/16th of the area comprising primary maps--more for some smaller maps, and even less for larger ones.

cogmind_sample_default_map_view_area_vs_full_map_size

Demonstrating a 50×50 area visible around Cogmind as seen while exploring a map (export provided by Mojo).

Like some roguelike classics, in TGGW it’s quite nice that you can see the entire map at once without any scrolling whatsoever, though it was clearly designed for such from the outset, with correspondingly short attack and sight ranges, and a smaller amount of concentrated content per floor, making each floor experience short and sweet.

Sample screenshot from The Ground Gives Way, with a mostly-explored map floor showing its layout.

Cogmind needs space for the scope it aims to fill, and a UI to match that, or at least facilitate exploring it instead of having to scroll a million times to form a mental picture, or constantly checking different directions to be aware of potentially impactful developments out there.

Basically from a gameplay standpoint roguelikes are best built with an optimal interface designed with optimal play in mind.

But now let’s switch gears and see what we can do in terms of making everything larger by breaking that design while attempting to mitigate the downsides :D

Alternative UI Layouts, an Evolution

Back in late November over on Patreon (and made available to everyone a little later) I put together a diagram and basic explanation for a hypothetical route Cogmind’s interface could take on the way to something that would expand the potential number of players for which it’s suitable.

Here I’ll be diving into that diagram again to give a more organized summary with some extra details.

General overview of potential semi-modal and modal UI layouts for Cogmind. See below for explanation.

Phase 1

The first phase is Cogmind’s current UI layout since mid-2013 when I started the commercial version (the 7DRL version was slightly different, always using 4:3). I’m using 76×50 for the map dimensions since that is the default map view width for 1080p users, which comprise the majority of players. As you can see, both the base sight range and good sensor/attack ranges are safely within the map view (these images are all drawn to scale!).

Phase 2

Before I started considering an immediate move to an across-the-board increase in cell size, I experimented with just zooming the map. Early experiments were promising enough to convince me to just do it--plow through the implementation and see what it feels like in practice (I wrote a series on that).

Quick map zoom recording taken while implementing the related animation work.

One argument for prioritizing map zoom over figuring out how to enlarge the rest of the UI (if even possible) could be that such an approach might just be satisfactory for some players who say they’d prefer “a larger interface.”

Most play time is spent looking at the map, after all, and although this would not impact text in the rest of the interface, humans are better at recognizing familiar letters at smaller sizes than, say, game-specific monochrome sprites on a map. While Cogmind’s tiles were designed to be fairly recognizable via general shape, that’s still not comparable to our existing familiarity with letters (on that note, this is also why Cogmind ASCII mode can be more easily enjoyed on smaller screens than tiles).

That said, for everyone else who still can’t handle the smaller text, a zoomable map would only serve to further highlight the disparity between tile size and text size. Not only that, but as you can see from the Phase 2 diagram above, playing with the map zoomed pushes even base attack/sight/intel ranges somewhat out of view, much less enhanced the ranges. We’re going to need some powerful QoL features to make that playable in a serious capacity! (Update 240211: Some time after finishing this article I put together another piece detailing all that, with numerous demos.)

In that light, I decided it wouldn’t be a great idea to release just a Phase 2 UI with map zooming. I think for a lot of people it would feel more like a band-aid than a complete solution, and the latter is what I’d rather provide, especially as this will define a portion of peoples’ first impressions of a “new and improved” UI.

Phase 3

Phases 1 and 2 combined are basically the same old Cogmind interface, just with the ability to zoom the map (and supporting QoL features in that case). Phase 3 is a significant departure from the norm and requires a lot more work to realize.

The differences start at the lowest level, converting what has always been a 60-row terminal console to one that only requires 45 rows. This allows for an up to 33% increase in font size from what everyone is using now. For example if you have a 1080p resolution, 60 rows translates to a font size of 18 (=1080/60), where 45 rows would instead translate to a font size of 24 (=1080/45). So anyone currently using a size 18 font would see their maximum increased to 24, a 33% boost.

A summary of the most common resolutions and the corresponding font size increase enabled by a 45-row layout (among a few even lesser-used resolutions than these top four, the increase might instead be closer to 20%). It’s interesting to compare this chart data to a similar one I made back in 2014 in an article about fonts, when the most popular resolution 1080p stood at a much lower 33%, and 768p was ranked a much closer 25%. 1440p/2160p were barely footnotes by comparison and there was a somewhat wider spread of resolutions in use.

The increase in font size results in a 44% reduction in total space to display info, and a 54% decrease in visible map area, which is a lot, but the latter is at least less severe than that caused by Phase 2 map zooming, which drops visible map area by 75%! The main difference is that Phase 2 zooming can be toggled in real time, whereas this info loss to accommodate a 45-row architecture by default is not capable of seeing full ranges as originally designed.

That said, as long as the QoL features built around map zooming work out well enough, they can also be of help in the Phase 3 UI, which technically already handles most ranges fairly well, and keeps the base sight range fully within its boundaries.

Overall I believe if given a choice between using a Phase 1/2 interface or Phase 3, the latter is probably a preferable default (except for among a good portion of current/frequent players who are quite used to having easy and efficient access to all the info provided by the regular interface).

And once players are using this Phase 3 layout, map zooming will likely become less useful overall (docked before it’s even been introduced xD). For one it would shrink the map view even more ridiculously, while turning size 24 tiles in our 1080p example above into 48px tiles, which is kinda huge :P

cogmind_semimodal_ui_layout_1080p_map_zoom_sample

Combining map zooming with a 45-row interface is… yeah. (sample assuming 1080p resolution, open for actual size, which is even larger than it appears here)

That’s probably overkill for most needs, though I can see zooming occasionally coming in handy for some people who still prefer the regular UI layout. In any case we’ll have stats on preferences in the future, and it’ll be very interesting to see how usage of various modes, and map zooming, plays out. (I can say that so far among the patrons who have access to test builds with zooming/Phase 2 enabled, almost no one is making serious use of the feature, but that’s not saying a whole lot because they were frequent players used to the playing without zooming to begin with.)

One welcome side effect of the font size increase is that 1080p players, who as noted form the majority, will be using size 24, which is a 2x upscale of the base tile size, in other words the original size for which the tile designs were optimized! Both myself and Kacper (the tileset artist who created most of them) are very happy about this :) (2160p players will also have access to such a multiple as one of their options)

So the next job in this process is to figure out how to squeeze Cogmind’s normal 60-row interface into only 45. Say goodbye to 15 rows from… somewhere :P

This will require a fair number of window and content adjustments, but it’s doable, with the biggest change being a semi-modal inventory. I’ll cover that part of the design in my next article, along with mockups and a more detailed look at just what we need to change.

One potential drawback of our map view returning to its original “pre-widescreen” width of 50 is that it goes against the flow of Cogmind’s on-map QoL design work. Because pretty much everyone has a horizontal rectangular map view wider than the area originally required by design, over the years we’ve benefited from some new interface elements that appear directly over the sides and/or corners of the map--alert messages, full combat log, special mode UIs, audio log, achievement popups… These will now be closer to Cogmind and potentially crowd the view under some circumstances, so we’ll have to see how they fare and whether some kinds of new adjustments are required.

Anyway, after being pleasantly surprised by the map zooming feature of Phase 2, I look forward to seeing how Phase 3 turns out :D

Funny enough, with a new 45-row minimum terminal height Cogmind could be played using the size 10 font in a window as small as 450p! (mockup shown here with zoomed map, open for “full size”… okay the crisp version) The original minimum was 600p.

Phase 4

Phase 3 is definitely being worked on now, with plans to release it in early 2024. There is no timeline for Phase 4, and whether or not it could even happen depends on the outcome of Phase 3, but purely in theoretical terms it seems like a natural progression from Phase 3 that isn’t completely out of the question.

In the interest of reclaiming more of our map view, I like the concept of making the top-side windows modal as well, and see it as a reasonable possibility, if requiring yet more compromises to convenience and gameplay efficiency.

At the same time, doing this would have some nice advantages over Phase 3, like almost fully restoring our original 50×50 map view, and also alleviating some of aforementioned corner/side pressure caused by other on-map UI elements.

This is the first in a multi-part series about building Cogmind’s fully upscaled semi-modal interface layout:

Posted in Dev Series: Full UI Upscaling | Tagged Cogmind, Gamedev, GUI, Scaling, UI | Leave a comment

Year 10 of the Cogmind

By Kyzrati | Published: December 22, 2023

Well then, we’re well into Cogmind’s 10th year now xD

It’s kinda hard to nail down a clear “ten-year” mark, since we could measure Cogmind’s age from its birth as a 7DRL nearly 12 years ago, or when I started working on it full time in mid-2013, or its first commercial release in May 2015, but anyway yeah this is my 10th annual review, a thing I started doing every year since I decided to build this world of robots in full.

In previous years I’ve opened the review with a collage of dev images of varying themes and content, but approaching the end of this year we have one major theme that stands out, and that I’ll be writing more about below, so let’s hear it for the interface mockups!

Mockups put together in REXPaint some weeks ago during a dev stream in preparation for Cogmind’s new UI layout (open for full size).

Development Time

As of the latest tally I’ve reached a total of 16,785 hours of work in these 10 years. Numbers go up.

One of the things I’ve been focusing on a bit more in recent years is a revival of the greater game:non-game work ratio that Cogmind enjoyed in its early years when I was less interested in promoting it and more interesting in just building cool stuff.

Sure even now I still spend lots of time engaged directly with the active player community (which has other benefits for development like feedback!), though definitely less so outside that, as evidenced in part by the lower blog activity until very recently :P

This trend held in 2023, in fact marking the first time I’ve spent more than twice as much time on building Cogmind rather than doing other supporting work since the pre-alpha days!

cogmind_graph_annual_work_game_community_ratio_2014-2023

The ratio of direct work on Cogmind vs optional supporting work, mostly community-facing stuff. (2013 excluded because that year I did very little outward-facing work aside from quick blog posts and little progress updates on various forums, so 2013 would significantly skew the graph as an outlier.)

The dip below 1.0 for more than a year was the Steam release, a hectic time demanding that lots of effort be redirected to promotional needs and fielding customer support and such.

As for 2023 though, the extra focus on Cogmind itself can also be reflected in another graph with a similar path…

cogmind_graph_annual_item_count_increase_2016-2023

Net number of new items added to Cogmind each year. (<2016 excluded as outliers and mostly pre-alpha content being created to seed the first version)

I’ve included 2024 in that graph because the work on all those items was already completed on this year’s dev time, but have yet to be released, and as you can see it’s quite a cache. The final 2024 number by the end of next year will also be higher, almost certainly breaking the record.

Now obviously items are not everything--building the game involves other elements, plus raw item numbers can’t tell a full picture since some are very easy to add while others are quite involved, but Cogmind is an extremely item-centric game, plus they’re easy to quantify :P. This new batch of items in particular is composed of quite a few belonging to the mechanics-heavy very interesting category, so in that regard this spike is quite meaningful. Shown another way:

cogmind_graph_annual_item_count_2015-2023

Net total item count in Cogmind, 2015-2023 and beyond. The first three years there are Alpha, followed by Beta.

I’d share another of those cool item art collages, but I’ve already done that several times this year--scroll down SITREP #51 Another Big Bang to see one.

So overall I think this has been a pretty good use of time, and admit I’ve also also been increasingly motivated (and freed up) by Patreon support to keep focus on development itself, so that’s been quite a boon!

On the flip side, 2023 has also brought significant headwinds that somewhat reduced the total time I could devote to development in the first place (another reason to prioritize game work!). Basically lots of health issues, ugh, among them a repeat of what seriously incapacitated me back in 2017 (albeit from a different source--got randomly attacked by a bird wtf xD). That’s also why I had to cut most of my streaming this year, only doing 7 streams in the last 8 months (25 total streams in 2023 vs 40 last year), but anyway forcing me away from streaming also freed up time for development, so there’s a positive in there somewhere :)

Regardless, development has been accelerating rapidly into the latter months of 2023 and I’m excited to share what’s coming down the pipe, but first there’s more recapping to do…

Releases

A year ago as the end of 2022 approached I decided to pour a couple weeks into building a cool special event, producing Polymind.

“This holiday season you are NOT the Cogmind”

Aside: My annual reviews each year cover a Dec~Nov period, and usually come out in the first days of December--this year’s is late since I was too deep in the coding mines at the time. So Polymind is technically part of Year 10.

It’s a pretty cool mode (still available) that turned out well, I wrote a post-mortem about it, and the effort behind Polymind is already serving as the basis of at least one new official mechanic, after it was proven feasible from a technical standpoint :D

This year’s primary release was Beta 12, featuring revamped Garrisons, a major new faction mechanic, and the generative Scrap Engine build crafter.

All your base are belong to us.

The release turned out nicely, but is… definitely not what I originally planned to happen. What was released as Beta 12 was actually supposed to be part of a larger release, but itself grew so large in scope that it took a while to complete and had to be split off and released alone. Funny enough that was a mere precursor to what is continuing to happen to the other content it was to be a part of (now Beta 13, but soon to be more than that xD). More on that later.

Community

The player community continues as strong as ever, with new blood (oil?) joining all the time and friendly veterans teaching the ropes, guiding folks to their first win and beyond. Great to see and be a part of.

The latest prereleases have been experimenting with a unique form of optional Discord integration, which has been good for additional discussion and extra reference material. I wrote about that implementation earlier this year.

Cog-minder and its wiki and tools continue to grow. The original wiki I set up many years ago has been taken out of action by the host’s poor server maintenance--it still exists but recently became inaccessible to most browsers. It had already been partially gutted (the imported stat data) by an impossible MediaWiki upgrade path, so I was going to replace it with something else eventually. In the meantime it’s now a temporary landing page that redirects visitors to Cog-minder.

I’ve added functionality to support another of aoemica’s awesome projects, a combat log analyzer that produces pretty graphs and summaries based on the full export data from Cogmind’s newly-detailed combat log.

aoemica_cogminder_combat_log_analyzer_WIP_231222

aoemica’s combat analyzer! Before the next full release I’ll make further adjustments to Cogmind to further improve the potential accuracy and usefulness of this tool.

Normally I use the annual review to put out a call for some Cogmind votes over on IndieDB in their annual Top 100 list, but being too busy this year and not really wanting to bother with it anyway, just dropped a couple links on the Discord back then--apparently that was enough because Cogmind made the list for the 9th year in a row xD

Far more important is Patreon support, which really keeps things humming along. I greatly appreciate it! It’s especially helpful in this relative lull in outside interest until I get the new UI in order.

A 2023 “cogtree” by veradux, adorned with Runia’s excellent 3D-printed models :D

2024

This is where things get interesting, because 2024 is going to dwarf 2023, easily becoming Cogmind’s biggest year yet. We’re getting map zooming (already built), a new UI layout with larger font sizes for everyone (in the early stages of implementation), and of course the UFD expansion (a sizeable chunk of which is already built as well), plus most likely additional very significant things but I don’t want to speak too soon lest the birds come after me.

nervously glances out the window

Late this year I paused the expansion to prioritize major new UI features, including map zooming after figuring out how to make it compatible with the engine and game in general, as described earlier in this series. Its time has come.

Just this week I streamed the first playtest of that feature, and was pleasantly surprised. With help from new QoL features it was quite playable, even while zoomed in most of the time.

I tried it out with both pure mouse and pure keyboard input. Note that it was streamed as regular play rather than focusing on demonstrating all the relevant features in a short time, so the video is not a good source for a quick summary, but if you want to see it in action that’s one current option, and I did eventually have natural opportunities to test all the features and talk about them.

For better reference I’ll be finishing off that article series with a writeup on the QoL I built to support map zooming (there’s a lot :D).

cogmind_map_zoom_comparison_demo (scene from my test stream)

A snapshot from the stream I modified for use as a cover image to demonstrate the difference from zooming (open for full size).

Following that I’ll be documenting the process of an even bigger new interface project. Yep, even bigger than zooming.

Last month I wrote a little preview about this here, if you’re interested in the details and related numbers, but the gist can be garnered from the scale diagram I compiled:

cogmind_interface_phases_potential_layout_evolution

General overview of potential Semi-modal and Modal UI layouts for Cogmind.

This is what the mockups were created for, allowing Cogmind to be played in a 45-row terminal instead of the current 60, meaning a font size increase of up to 33% depending on resolution. (Although I streamed the mockup work, it wasn’t archived on YouTube since it was a pure laid back impromptu dev stream and we were listening to music.)

There were very significant design and architectural challenges to making this a reality, but having already surmounted them and built the foundations to make it possible, it’s now safe to say this can be a thing, and what I’ll be working on next. Phases 1 and 2 are complete (2 has yet to be released outside patron test builds), and 3 is under construction.

In the coming weeks the blog will start seeing articles about these Phase 3 developments.

That brings us to the 2024 release schedule… As usual I can’t give dates, but what I’d like to do here is give a general idea of what each future release contains, especially since it varies from what was originally projected.

As mentioned there was just going to be Beta 12 and that was Scraptown and friends. Well, “friends” got way too big so I thought I’d split it up into 12 and 13. Then while working on 13, “friends” got even bigger, one map becoming three maps and expanding to include a huge range of mechanics, a major faction, more large-scale events, and a new ending. With the new emphasis on inserting UI enhancements into the process, more splits are in order :P

Below is what I’m thinking for a tentative summary of the coming Beta releases, including what they might be called:

Beta 13 “Zoom All The Things”: Subcaves, map zooming, upscaled/modal UI layouts
Beta 14 “United Federation of Derelicts”: Scraptown/UFD
Beta 15 “0bPrime”: New late-game map and ending (mysterious)
Beta 16 “Unchained”: Unchained! (you die here, so maybe we don’t need more betas? ;)
Beta 17 “Hexidium”: New map for only the bravest minds

Take this list with a pinch of salt, because as you can see plans do change when I decide to add yet more Stuff, but anyway delays only mean simply that--more content and features, so the timing is not super important in that regard. However I do want to try releasing a little more frequently than in past years with these ever more massive updates, so somewhat smaller cuts would be nice where feasible.

Notice I don’t have Phase 4’s modal UI in there anywhere yet, either--it’s too early to say much about that one since it depends on how Phase 3 fares.

I very much look forward to bringing you some awesome releases in 2024!

cogmind_photo_recycler_eating_source_code

Unless a Recycler eats the code.

Posted in Annual Review | Tagged Cogmind, Gamedev, Progress, Roadmap | 2 Responses

Adventures in Map Zooming, Part 4: Polishing

By Kyzrati | Published: December 12, 2023

The core functionality of our map zooming feature is operating smoothly--common windows are popping up where they’re supposed to go, map interaction itself appears normal… however there are plenty of less vital systems that still need to consider the effect of zooming.

And after those there’s the public-facing side of this feature, like how do you access it, and do we need to animate it?

Odds and Ends

Gotta check every little thing, like the tiles-ASCII toggling animation, does that work?

Nope.

How about the map export function?

Nope.

Anyway yeah just a case of going in and seeking out what prior assumptions they made about the interface that no longer held true when zooming is possible.

For the tileset animation I think it was as simple as having needed to set it to match whatever tile size the map is currently using, rather than always using the standard size. Funny result though :)

The map export issue was similar, resulting in only the top-left corner of each oct tile being rendered, but to a huge mostly empty image. Resolving that was a little more complicated than simply switching to a dynamic tile size because you don’t want the output to actually use larger tiles (doing so takes forever and results in a massive image file that doesn’t even add any extra data since it’s purely a pixelwise upscale). Instead what happens now, assuming the player is zoomed in, is an automatic zoom out, prepare the image, then zoom back in, all behind the scenes. (Map export images are created by repeatedly moving the map view, rendering the view area, and copying that view to an image surface, eventually stitching together all the views into a final image.)

Many of Cogmind’s optional special modes also have their own UI elements, usually an interactive window in the bottom-left corner of the map, and although I don’t generally update those, failing to have them take into account a zoomed map would almost be equivalent to leaving them behind. That would be bad, especially the fan-favorite Player 2, and the essential-for-some RPGLIKE.

This ended up requiring that some of them be moved to the new window-container-map-view-thing I described last time, or in other cases slight architectural changes.

cogmind_map_zooming_special_mode_UI_compatibility

Sample special mode consoles remaining functional regardless of zoom state.

Okay we’re just about finished up with the zoom function here, let’s not forget about the last but not least important test of all… stress testing!

Repeatedly zooming in and out doesn’t seem to break anything, except maybe a few eyes if you keep this up.

Access!

From the beginning and throughout this entire process so far, I had simply dropped the zoom toggling code into the input section for responding to the map intel key, ‘z’. Now it’s time to consider how the player will access this feature…

Actually, as far as keyboard input goes ‘z’ seems appropriate, yeah? Obviously.

Then where does intel go? Under past circumstances I’d be tempted to leave map intel to F8, its matching window key which also works, and despite the awkwardness of F8 being a function key, I don’t believe toggling intel has been a common need in the first place.

That said, while working on map zooming I’ve also been somewhat thinking about interface developments down the line, and realized we’ll later on need to free up yet another key anyway, so where can we get two keys? The answer is inventory sorting.

Cogmind’s inventory can be sorted by type, mass, and integrity, each with their own key (t/m/i). We don’t really need the latter two. It’s not that they absolutely never come in handy, but after the Beta 11 storage rework the largest build inventories are no longer as extreme as they used to be, so there are fewer items to parse through, and you can also relatively easily see the mass/integrity info fairly easily in different data visualization modes--colored bars and numbers for integrity (which are also automatically subsorted for matching parts), and the ‘q’ info mode shows mass as its first number.

Two whole keys! And lucky for us they match our needs perfectly: ‘z’ for zoom, ‘m’ for map intel, and ‘i’ for… well you’ll found out what that’s for later ;)

The inventory’s {t/m/i} buttons have been replaced by a single large {sort (t)} button.

So anyone wanting to toggle the zoom state of the map can tap ‘z’ and boom, but what about mouse users? Can’t forget mouse users.

I had some different creative ideas* for this one, but settled on just making it a typical button. The <ZOOM> button appears directly over the center of the map, in the bottom left corner of the central multiconsole. It uses the same style as the <MAP> and <ESC/?> buttons, and is similarly capable of glowing.

There is also a new tutorial message shortly after starting the game that points out the zooming feature, after which the button will glow until it’s used for the first time.

The button disappears completely while keyboard mode is active (like the CYCLE buttons in the parts list), since it’s not needed in that case.

*Before getting creative I originally wanted to use the mouse wheel for zooming, but it’s a mere toggle rather than a smooth zoom, so that’d be a bit of a waste for the wheel, and making such a change would remove the simple method mouse users can use to pass turn(s).

Fluff

Towards the end of the map zooming work I couldn’t help but take advantage of the opportunity for a new animation to test out a lot of possible concepts. Like dozens and dozens of them.

I shared a bunch of samples from that process on Patreon, like this one I thought was pretty neat:

cogmind_map_zoom_animation_ascii_merge_unused

In this animation test, zooming the map in ASCII mode merges multiple copies of each character into a larger version to fill the final cell size.

The problem with such animations is that they can be too distracting when the purpose of adjusting your zoom is clearly to get a better look at something or some things, be it closer up or further away. So you need to be able to quickly focus, a need which most animations are likely to detract from.

And while sure it’s fun to get a cool new animation, if it gets in the way it would more easily “get old.”* Yeah we could make it optional, but if it’s detrimental and most people would presumably want it off, then why add it in the first place?

*on that note, I do plan to eventually swap out the world map animation for something snappier! the world outgrew that thing a long time ago…

In light of that analysis, and having not found anything extremely compelling while exploring animation styles, from early on I was already leaning towards having no animation at all--short and sweet, right? Instantaneous results, either big like you want it or small like you want it.

But maybe there’s some other type of animation that could add a little style and maybe even be somewhat helpful for quickly digesting the new view area…

I got to thinking that one of the main elements that’s universally important and the first aspect you might visually analyze is the general layout of the map. This is usually defined by walls and doors, so what if we just highlighted all of those after a zoom?

Wall highlighting shortly after a zoom state change. Zooming out lets the highlight last longer since it’s more relevant in that case, having added new content to your viewport.

I also considered highlighting other objects like machines and hostiles and/or something more, but figure it’s easy to go overboard and get back into distraction territory, so decided to stop there for now.

And that’s it, the map is now zoomable, and zoomable in style, and can be played that way. But it’s not yet ideal! Playing with a zoomed map introduces yet more challenges that we’re going to need some new QoL to help resolve next time…

This is the fourth in a five-part adventure through the process of putting all this together:

Posted in Dev Series: Map Zooming | Tagged Cogmind, GUI, Scaling, UI, Zooming | Leave a comment

Adventures in Map Zooming, Part 3: Implementation

By Kyzrati | Published: December 7, 2023

Time to get serious! Last time I told you about my engine upgrade and the new “quads,” now it’s to put them to use.

If you recall, for my initial Cogmind map zoom demo upon adding Quad support to REX, all I did was change one thing in the game: the map font size.

The game doesn’t care about the engine side of things so it simply worked, or at least didn’t crash and we could easily see how it’d appear, despite of course numerous input and secondary display issues in some other windows. By just tweaking a few more variables it would be easy to solve all those problems in order to purely have a consistently larger map view. Things get a lot more complex if we want to support both the regular map font and quads, not to mention the ability to swap them dynamically while the game is running.

But with the engine fundamentals solid and behind us, we’re ready to tackle those challenges.

Normally with UI feature implementation I’ll start by writing out a comprehensive list of everything that needs to be done, and any other elements I can think of which might be affected and therefore need testing and confirmation. While I drew up at least part of such a list like a good dev, this is one of those rarer cases where attempting to write a complete list ahead of time is probably not all that feasible or helpful, as it’s basically… the entire interface :P

With a change like this I would need to test pretty much everything, so instead of trying to be complete about it, I just noted areas of the code to be adjusted as I thought about them while working on fixing high-priority features, trying my best to finish off entire groups of related interface elements to speed up the process.

I started in the most important place, restoring the basic functionality required to speed up the rest of the implementation, like fixing map panning and cursor-map interactions. And realtime zoom toggling in order to easily compare and confirm that everything functions properly in both states.

And it was shortly after getting those bits operational that I discovered I wasn’t quite done with the engine xD

When examining the details of what still needed to be done in the map area itself, I realized that while zoomed in we’d probably also want to increase the font size of many types of text that appear over the map, especially object labels which are already integrated pretty tightly into the map coordinate and orientation systems.

Yeah these labels are not great like this, using the regular text size (ignore the fact that they’re not even pointing at the right objects here :P).

To maintain the proportionality of map-related text when zoomed in, we’d need… zoomed text. Oh no.

Back to REX

Last time I introduced the engine’s base cell size that fits individual text characters, wide glyphs for square map tiles, and the new “quad,” or four map tiles in order to enable a zoomed effect. To zoom text we’d need yet another type of glyph size, one that like the doubling of map tiles for quads (2×1 to 4×2) instead doubles text/base cell size (1×1 to 2×2!).

For me one of the first annoyances was what to call this new type, and I decided they’re probably best named after the number of base cells they occupy, meaning I had to go in and retroactively rename all the quad stuff to oct. Now our zoomed text glyphs can assume the name “quad.”

A new member joins the REX glyph type family!

Because I had built a generalized system to simplify handling of both wide glyphs and octs (previously quads), inserting this new type was actually fairly easy (whew!).

REX again displaying operation of the newly renamed octs, and the new quads (the main new area of interest being the large olive-colored box).

Well, the initial implementation was fast, but on returning to Cogmind to apply it to map labels I found an issue…

cogmind_map_zoom_wip_label_text_shearing_bug

The text quads worked nicely in most places, but sometimes this happened. Perhaps we’ll just say this Recalibrator is corrupted and leave it at that? :P

It took a while to figure this one out, since I couldn’t quite tell if it was a Cogmind problem or a REX problem. This was particularly tricky to track down because it looked like an engine bug but also had a property that suggested it couldn’t be an engine bug, yet its other behavior pointed to it to being impossible to be a bug caused by the game itself… Anyway, a really weird confluence of situations managed to hide the real reason for a good hour. It had to do with a specific type of partial transparency of the new quads/octs, and of course it was caused by just one line of code in the engine.

Zoom Text Applications

Yay now we can have some large text on the map, too!

Revisiting the scene from earlier, this time with larger labels.

Beyond labels, I also enabled the on-map mode indicators to make use of quad text. To facilitate this (and by necessity for architectural reasons), I also refactored that part of the UI--they used to be drawn directly to the map at the end of its rendering process, but now they are a real window.

cogmind_map_zoom_item_large_text_label_category_mode_indicator

Cycling through item label categories, with the mode indicator visible at the top of the map view.

On-map popup alerts like low matter/core/etc. also got the zoomed text treatment, for one because they otherwise looks fairly small compared to everything else and would be even more likely to go unnoticed.

“ALERT” announcements are also larger now, almost too large when they include longer strings, but again having them remain at normal text size doesn’t seem ideal for getting noticed among the larger map cells. I might tweak those later when the UI undergoes more changes down the line, but for now they’re large.

I also decided to convert the program shutdown animation to the zoomed text, and unlike its other uses described above, this is the only instance in which it is used regardless of map zoom state.

cogmind_close_animation_new_strip_size_2

Cogmind’s program shutdown animation with larger central bar.

The MegaTODO

The UI is way more than just a handful of temporary popups though! Back to that growing list of challenges… well, technically most are not especially challenging, it was just a case of putting in all the necessary hours to scour the source for anything affected by the advent of new glyph types.

There were lots and lots (and lots) of alignment issues due to years of relative coordinate assumptions behind the fact that map spaces were always twice as wide as text, and both text and map spaces had the same height. Now map cells could be four times as wide as text, and twice as tall!

Most popup windows relative to something on the map needed to have their dynamic coordinates take into account additional calculations.

cogmind_cursor_hover_detection_debug_visualization

The old REX debugging visualization for examining UI z-depth and cursor hover focus came in quite handy for solving some of the more mysterious issues.

cogmind_debugging_console_index_structure_output

I also finally built an exporter for Cogmind’s window index structure to help track down some issues related to cursor input. In fact it also helped me find and resolve an unreported and difficult-to-notice bug in Cogmind’s UI that’s been in there since the very first version!

A chunk of the adaptation work actually required larger architectural rewrites, like the project of splitting the map interface into a trio of classes.

The first new class was purely to hold interface data that must be preserved during zoom events. Whenever a zoom occurs, the entire map interface is actually destroyed and recreated from scratch (far simpler than trying to convert everything over), but doing so would also lose some important info needed to facilitate various QoL features such as targeting history and resource alarm records. So data of that nature was moved to an external class to preserve it regardless of any zooming.

The second class is more interesting, a kind of container for other windows, those that are positioned over the map itself.

A number of windows such as on-map dialogue lines, combat logs, and achievement popups may need to be placed on any UI row within the map area, and these being organized under that window itself was never an issue before. But what happens when the map is zoomed such that a single “oct” occupies two rows? The map window’s grid coordinate system now no longer has any values corresponding to every odd row of the main interface, meaning its child windows cannot be placed on those rows.

So all of those map-related windows in which vertical alignment is important down the sub-row level needed a new parent window, kind of a fake alternate map window that always has a finer coordinate system regardless of the viewable map’s zoom state.

None of these informational windows are interactive, either, so this “finer map” window doesn’t need to capture mouse input and only has to occupy a 1×1 spot in the top-left corner of the map. It is a good example of an “unhidden yet transparent and therefore invisible” control window, allowing it to update normally and its children can both appear visible and use their parent as a coordinate reference (placing subwindows outside of a parent is fine).

The reason it must have an unhidden state is because that’s a prerequisite for actually updating itself and updating children, but is at the same time transparent because the window doesn’t actually want to display anything of its own.

Another useful debugging feature, the ability to show all windows that exist under a given cursor location and their z-depth. With the cursor in the top-left corner of the map there, it shows that there are two map classes overlapping at that location, the single-cell window container CMapFine, and the regular CMap class. The other values can show things like coordinates, indices, current colors, tile values, and any active animations at that point.

So yeah, long story short, this process wasn’t just about changing font settings and recalculating coordinates.

At this point all the heaviest lifting was done, but there was still an awful lot of residual work before map zooming could be called feature complete. I’ll share more on that next time.

This is the third in a five-part adventure through the process of putting all this together: