What do you think about the dialogue screen now?
JuliusBorisov
Member, Administrator, Moderator, Developer Posts: 22,724
This is how it looked pre-beta:
This is how it lookes in the BG2EE beta:
As you can see, now the overlook of the whole text of NPC name-his phrase-your answer options has been changed a bit.
Am I wrong in thinking that the new version lacks that space between the NPC portrait and their phrase, as well as the answer options? Or is it a habit of mine?
This is how it lookes in the BG2EE beta:
As you can see, now the overlook of the whole text of NPC name-his phrase-your answer options has been changed a bit.
Am I wrong in thinking that the new version lacks that space between the NPC portrait and their phrase, as well as the answer options? Or is it a habit of mine?
8
Comments
It gives that little bit of extra space for the text to display which could reduce text warping and in turn reduce the overall need of scrolling though the displayed text in the larger conversations. Also having the name at the top helps to separate the lines of text from each character to the next so when/if you want to scroll back though the conversation its easier to pick out each topic/conversation.
I know you didn't specifically ask if it was better or not but it felt like that's where the conversation may have been going :P hehe
@00zim00 google: design principles using space crowding
While aesthetics are subjective, good design has an aspect of science to it. This objectively isn't good design.
Got to admit it's not an easy task
You can see in the original that there is empty space between the picture and the second line of the NPC text, just under their name. With a smaller text box the text goes into many more rows and the empty space under the name gets much bigger. When the name is above this is taken care of.
(We'll make paranoid bug hunters out of you yet!)
First off, dialog responses are cut off with longer dialog lines. This is awful. The responses should either be displayed on a single screen, or they should scroll along with the NPC's line. There shouldn't be a separate scrolling area just for the responses, because that's incredibly unintuitive.
Second, now I cannot scroll up easily to access dialog and message history. In v1.3, accessing message history was as easy as scrolling up with the mouse wheel. Now I need to press a small button, then resize the default small history panel that opens up, and then I can scroll up. This makes the whole process needlessly difficult. How it used to be in v1.3 was perfectly fine.
Third, pressing space now skips forward in the dialog. As a BG player, I've learned to press space by instinct whenever something sudden happens. So when an NPC talks to me and a dialog window opens up that I didn't initiate, I almost always skip the first part of the dialog by pressing space to pause. This, of course, leads to even further annoyance when I have to open up the dialog history to see what I had skipped by accident.
Other than the freely resizable dialog panel, every single change to the dialog window has been a frustrating step backwards, in my opinion.
The game should be playable for every front size the options allow.