Layout and visual design issues

[tapio]

trafficstars

Most of these are not blockers, but annoyances or enhancements. Not in any particular order.

Song browser

1. I don't particularly like the current light blue color of the game and song title
2. Hiscores look somewhat like they are in a temporary position
3. I don't like the default background (black bg with the white performous guy on the right)
4. With light backgrounds, the right side of the song title becomes unreadable
5. Playlist menu needs separate theme from instrument menu and e.g. darker background
6. Playlist menu tooltips are in a bad position and with poor color, should probably just remove
7. Available game modes should be prominently displayed. I already moved them, made bigger and added some glow, but the glow doesn't seem to work very well on light backgrounds
8. I liked the fallback background of moving tiled covers so much that I added some (different) movement to the regular full screen bg images too. This could be improved.

Singing screen

1. Score dialog goes partially out of screen on 16:9 aspect ratio
2. Mic icon and the score seem to overlap a bit
3. Popup menus are rather ugly
4. Add some zooming, panning and fading into static background images?

Players screen

Much work to be done here.

Playlist screen

1. Displaying covers next to the list would be nice, or at least the next song's cover
2. Background could be the next or currently selected song's background

[nieknooijens]

Also the vocal track toggle seems to be a little buggy in the players screen.

[nieknooijens]

ok I created some logo's using blender, shading sucks, but I mostly use blender for 3d-printing and not for visual design.... edit: github is bugging and not accepting my images http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/3108/logo1kue.jpg http://img809.imageshack.us/img809/924/logo2pm.jpg

[Tronic]

@tapio

Songs:

1. I don't like the blue color scheme either. We really need a graphical artist, not another UI made by coders. One of my friends studies art and is an Inkscape expert but unfortunately I haven't been able to persuade her into making a new theme for Performous yet...
2. Hiscore position is intentional but the look would have to be changed
3. It could be a visualizer or something else but I cannot really think of anything that would be really easy to implement. Perhaps at least different backgrounds (cycle all default bgs, or choose background depending on what mode the song supports)?
4. Not much of a problem here (song names are rarely that long)
7. The change you made is good but I couldn't actually see that first at all even though I read about it in the commit message. It is currently very subtle. Maybe some kind of animation would help it? I've been thinking of a HDR+bloom renderer too and that would allow for more realistic glow effects.
8. Good modification. The motion should probably be more subtle, though. It would also be nice to unify the drawMultimedia stuff so that almost identical code is not duplicated for songs and sing screens.

Today's development: The New Rocker font is now included in master branch and installed during make install. This should lead way to replacing other fonts as well, for a genuinely fresh look, and for getting rid of that MSTT CoreFont dependency (vs. crappy fonts). It might also allow us to choose fonts that do have those Unicode arrows or other special characters that currently display incorrectly on Windows.

Playlist:

2. This too should probably share the same drawMultimedia code. Play preview and show song graphics while browsing the menu. Possibly even use the cover browser for it, although then it needs to be modified so that it is clear that one is modifying the playlist and not using the song selector. I am not entirely sure whether playlist editing is needed at all, though.

Extra point: when editing playlists for larger parties, it would be nice to be able to enter singer name(s) as well. Ideally the signer and the next song would be announced on screen right after the previous one ends, or even slightly before that, so that they will be prepared when the song changes.

[Tronic]

I'd like to hide the hiscore when there are no scores but this couldn't be easily hacked with the current implementation so I didn't do it.

Last night's development: all fonts are replaced by ones that we now ship with Performous. There might be some new layout issues created by this but I did a quick review and it seems mostly correct. The biggest difference is that the new default font Goblin is much larger than the old one, causing some of the text not fit, and causing song lyrics to use full width most of the time (with altering font size, which is somewhat annoying).

[Tronic]

Instrument type icons in song browser are not large enough for the glow (there is some clipping on the sides).

[nieknooijens]

I had a little experiment today:

what do you think?

[nieknooijens]

we should also implement screen transitions, like fade in/out etc. if the playlist sildes over the singing screen from the top would be cool too. my first attempt to implement this failed.

what I was trying to do: (fade transition) 1: add an enum to Game::activateScreen() which transition had to be loaded with NONE as default. 2: set an animvalue to 1.0 (1 second) 3: enter() on new screen 4: draw both screens with the previous screen having an colortrans alpha of the animvalue.get() (fade out) and the second screen an alpha of 1-animvalue.get() (fade in) 5: finish transition exit() from previous screen.

somehow this crashes with M_max_range errors.

[marwin89]

Maybe I resolved some of these layout and design issues listed here with this pull request #920 . I made (blindly) a complete new design and didn't know any of these Issues or documentations here. Fading screens would be good.

[Tronic]

Only black and white? Looks boring. Colors are not entirely forbidden you know (should also come as news to website designers who now use only black and dark grey).

[Baklap4]

@Tronic Please see the previous edit in #920 (it has colored versions which look more ambient)

[marwin89]

Only black and white? Looks boring. Colors are not entirely forbidden you know (should also come as news to website designers who now use only black and dark grey).

your reaction is very unkind 👎

[Tronic]

your reaction is very unkind 👎

Would it help if I sugar coated that? You did not state that this is a draft or anything but in fact have an open PR to replace the current theme. While the old theme (in part made by me) has its issues, what you are presenting is objectively worse and you don't seem to like constructive feedback on it (add some color).

While at it, I should point out that I also find the fonts boring. This also lacks the shadow effect on the logo. It certainly is another part of the current fashion trend (like not using color) to make everything as simplified and flat as possible. I disagree with this trend, as I already pointed out in the previous message, but clearly opinions on that differ.

The differently shaped fret buttons shown on #920 are an improvement but would need 3d models matching the shape. Similarly one could easily improve on the note symbols used in dance mode by giving them a new shape and some suitable shading.

[twollgam]

I like what I can see on the screenshots (I actually have not used it). My suggestion: Don't replace the current default, offer the new additionally. IMO it would be good if the user has a collection of themes to choose from.

@marwin89 I like your avatars too. I would like to use them in Performous.

[Baklap4]

Hmm Performous+ is a theme which sits beside the current default theme. Nothing gets replaced....

The items being replaced are some backgrounds. I guess these could co-exist. But this is something for the PR not for this issue.

@Tronic I agree with @marwin89 statement. Please be a little bit more supportive to newcomers. This item hasn't been touched ever since february 2015. If this were my introduction towards Performous i'd quickly bail out again and nobody gains anything from that.

A PR has been made, please redirect some feedback over there while on this issue we stay on topic and try to counter them.