New area interface feedback

I’d been thinking about his for a bit and I decided I don’t actually like the new area interface. The stuffs below is mostly related the the desktop interface.

Firstly, a very useful feature of getting the area population at a glance is effectively crippled. To see it you’d need to scroll the right panel up all the way (becasue it mostly stays scrolled to the bottom as that’s where the interesting stuffs happen). Then you need to know to click on the second thingy in the bar and finally see the numbers. Then you’ll have to do the whole same process in reverse, because you still want to keep an eye on the room pops.

I kinda see the reasoning of having to “zoom out” from the room to the area to the parent areas but practically the room and the area communicate distinct stuffs and it just doesn’t work for me.

It’s a bit less of an issue with a phone where you need to tap things either way; but on the desktop it forces me to do so much more mouse stuffs than it used to be and it’s just not ergonomical.

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I have a similar feeling towards the new interface. I don’t necessarily mind it, but on desktop it does feel a tad clunky in terms of acquiring information, as it sorta forces you to have to scroll up from the sidebar showing characters in the same room as you if you wanted to check to see - for example - how many characters may be within that area, or other areas.

In a sense, it sorta tacks on a bit of time finicking around with the area menu. :shark::droplet:
I’ve also noticed that the bar above the navigation wheel doesn’t exactly do anything else besides displaying the name of the room you’re in. Maybe it could be reverted back to its old function? At least, that may relieve some finickiness on desktop to see the general, surrounding area.

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Yeah, I also think we should tweak it some more.

I could restore the top-corner info badge to show Area and Area population for desktop, and clicking on it would open the Area Info zoom-level, similar to before.
But, what about rooms without an area? Should we:

  1. Show room and room population instead of area
  2. Hide the badge

For mobile layout, I think we should keep current behavior.

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Maybe we should try to also improve the right-side Room Info page. Perhaps splitting it in two separately scrollable parts? The top part would be image and description. Bottom part could be a section with tabs for things like “Exits”, “In Room”, and “Objects” (once we have them).

Instead of scrolling for Exits or In room, it would then just be a single tab click.

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I honestly don’t think two scrolleing panes are the answer. Maybe the lost of people in the room belong to the left panel? I wouldn’t minght having that sectioned as

  • people in the same room with me
  • people I follow
  • all the rest

and it moves all the people actions to the left; leaving the navigation / exploration to the right.

The far left “Realm” panel?
Mm, I can see the reasoning, but that panel is currently not connected at all to which character you control. So, I think I would try to solve it in another way.

One way to solve the Area/Room issue might be to simply move the “Zoom bar” up to the title part of the “Room panel”, similar like we have tabs on the far-left “Realm panel”:

image
(Observe the divider line for the fixed header part, and the scrollable content.)

This way, we can always navigate to “Room info” or “Area info” without any scrolling - just a simple click on the zoom-bar.

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