F5F5 cargo, contracts, and missions screen too full!

[Switeck]

Too often I have too much cargo, contracts, and active missions at once...and all its text does not fit on a single window.
So I cannot read the last items.
Can this be made multiple screens similar to the equipment lists?

[Kaks]

With great difficulty. I'm afraid it's going to require a lot of fiddling with some very evil GUI code, but we'll keep it in mind as a feature request for post 1.76...

[Switeck]

I can understand the delay if the GUI code is a crawling horror.
But I do consider it a serious bug rather than an annoying feature.

[Fatleaf]

I can understand the delay if the GUI code is a crawling horror.
But I do consider it a serious bug rather than an annoying feature.

Personally I'm with Switeck on this. More than one occasion I have been rather miffed with the screen going off the bottom to the point of being useless. So if a fix is on the way I thank the Devs in advance for the effort put into fixing this.

[Kaks]

Ah, the memories this brings back...

Memories from 2 & a half years ago actually! time does indeed fly...

Anyway, the various F-screens weren't quite right ( sometimes needing 2 keypress, sometimes 4 for some screens, etc... ) for 2-3 months afterwards due to the difficulty of getting the gui code ( yep, still basically the same one ) to do anything remotely sensible... fixing one bug in one screen would create another bug in another, pretty much like playing wack-a-mole...

I can understand the delay if the GUI code is a crawling horror.
But I do consider it a serious bug rather than an annoying feature.

Yep, crawling horror it is. And best tackled with a steady post-MNSR hand...


One possible interim 'fix' could be to grey out the contrancts screen if the player has already got 10 between cargo deliveries and passengers on board.
Most captains won't even have ships capable of accepting that many contracts, but the few that do will then be forced to take a reduced amount of contracts...


Hmm, I believe the best option for now is to just show the first 10 lines or so, thus leaving some space for mission descriptions, then add a line with three dots (aka ellipsis) to indicate we didn't have space to show the rest...

[Kaks]

Hmm again.

There's no simple way to display the mission info when there are too many passengers / contracts unless we move things about - we could possibly show the mission info before passengers & cargo stuff.

However, not really doable at the moment since doing that would make the tweak more of a feature change than a bugfix.

The good news? Well, if someone is really into doing 10+ cargo & passenger contracts they probably wouldn't want to be distracted by pesky mission stuff anyway...

I went ahead and fixed the display so that the writing doesn't go over the HUD elements, and did away with excess blank lines.

This screen:



now looks like this:



If nothing else, at least it's less buggy looking!


BTW Switeck, thanks for your mega-trader savegame!

[Wildeblood]

I went ahead and fixed the display so that the writing doesn't go over the HUD elements...

Doesn't go over actually drawn HUD elements, not just the area at the bottom of the screen where the standard HUD is usually drawn? I ask on behalf of all who use a script to switch to a completely blank HUD while docked.

[Kaks]

You got me! Not actually drawn HUD elements! The lowest line that gets written is at exactly the same height as

Cash 100 Cr. Load 0 of 20t.

in the F8 screen. (assuming you're looking at the F8 screen with a fresh Jameson!)

In other words, if your docked overlay & background looks OK on the F8 screen, it will look OK on the new F5F5 screen too.
And if you've got no background you'll have the same amount of blank space in the lower part of the screen as in F8.

[Switeck]

Usually, when I have more than 10 Cargo Contracts they're all Gold/Platinum/Gems...so they take up minimal cargo space each.

I guess an OXP could be made which displays the contracts in special mission briefings?

[Fatleaf]

How about removing the cargo section from the top of the page, that would free up some room. As you can go to the F8 screen for that information anyway. Or at least put it at the very bottom under the missions.

[Eric Walch]

Hmm again.

There's no simple way to display the mission info when there are too many passengers / contracts unless we move things about - we could possibly show the mission info before passengers & cargo stuff.now looks like this:



If nothing else, at least it's less buggy looking!

Nice fix. Also the fix for missing alien items when the hold contained all commodities. (I didn't even know we had a bug there until you fixed it )

[Kaks]

@Fatleaf: yep, it's an option! If we do that we'd have to rename the F5F5 screen from 'Manifest' to 'Contracts' though...
There are a number of of other ideas already floating around too - as well as paging that screen, we could make the yellow 'section header' lines clickable so they expand/collapse their section, and also we could add the contracts & passenger info to the galaxy maps whenever we highlight a destination system.

Once we're out of feature freeze I'm definitely going to have a proper look at all those options! I really like the in-map info concept, and it shouldn't be too horrible to code either!

Nice fix. Also the fix for missing alien items when the hold contained all commodities. (I didn't even know we had a bug there until you fixed it )

Neither did I! I only noticed we've got 17 types of commodities when I was testing to make sure I hadn't broken anything. Up to yesterday I could have sworn we only had 16 of them!

[Kaks]

Usually, when I have more than 10 Cargo Contracts they're all Gold/Platinum/Gems...so they take up minimal cargo space each.

I guess an OXP could be made which displays the contracts in special mission briefings?

Don't quote me, but I'm fairly confident you could have a 'detailed contracts oxp' that's activated whenever you switch to the manifest screen. You could then have a series of mission screens displaying every contract...

Actually, if no-one else makes it, I'll see if I find the day or so to make just such an oxp - warning: my oxp making time is even less more limited than my dev time, so do take this 'promise' of mine with a pinch of salt - or two!

[Eric Walch]

so do take this 'promise' of mine with a pinch of salt - or two!

Is this enough salt?

[Kaks]

Just about!