So I was working on cleaning up the UI a bit by adding a custom menu for sending a girl to the Farm, instead of the unwieldy succession of renpy menus we have now. And since I'm at it, is there anything you find particularly frustrating or cumbersome about the UI that I should take a look at?

No promises, I don't want to get side-tracked by a large refactoring effort, but if I can improve things a bit for 0.3 I'll give it a try.

• I wish widescreen was officially supported, but I understand that this is a massive undertaking that involves revisiting every screen & background
• I'm not very impressed by the DejaVuSans typeface and I think a different choice could really improve the game's presentation
• Some important menu's are accessed in unique ways that are often missed by new players:
• The [Schedule] menu is accessed through an icon on a girl's portrait just like the notebook, but for the notebook that makes a lot more sense since it's primarily used while dating free girls, while the brothel-specific UI elements are not accessible
• The [Customer Options] menu is a submenu of [Brothel]. It's fine that this screen is less prominent in the early-game, but a lot of new players struggle in the mid-game because they've never visited this screen
• Another common stumbling block is Moons. Too many new players seem unaware of this mechanic. Perhaps add a unique icon or background for each Moon displayed along the date in the top left
• The submenus of [Show Brothel Report] could use some attention: [Show last night's log] needs some padding and becomes a huge wall of text in the lategame. And [Show satisfaction report]... Not sure if that one even works anymore, I'm getting exceptions related to color strings
• In the [?] menu, [Reset food effects], [Repair girl/MC pictures], [Activate picture count...] should all be hidden away in a [Debugging tools] menu option
• In the main menu, the forum line should read henthighschool.net instead of .com (it already links to the right place, it just displays the wrong URL)
• The Traits/Perks list that's displayed when you hover over traits is fine in the early-game, but becomes a massive wall of text in the late-game when many perks are acquired. Would be nice if this element could become wider by also overlapping the right-side of the screen where your list of girls are displayed

During my first playthrough I thought the brothel helpers list were locked or something you get until further into the story. So I never bothered with it until I got my first security event. It turns out they were just sliders. Maybe add a simple symbol on the slider (pic 1). If you have the time, integrating it into the tutorial would also be nice.

When advancing to chapter 2, I did not know that the building comes with an automatic upgrade to the master's bedroom which also has it's own mechanics. I suggest when advancing to chapter 2, describe what you get in the brothel when choosing a district more explicit. E.g: "free X, double room, and bedrooms+" instead of just "free X".

For the menus, instead of making the selected text whiter, maybe invert the colors of the button or change it's background color when highlighted (pic 2). I accidentally overwritten a save file when I meant to load it because I thought I had "load game" selected. Thank god for autosaves.

Thanks

i would recommend having a confirmation menu for "clean up" button. i lost so much money by missclicking it

All great points, thank you guys.

A few comments:

Quote from: neronero on Oct 31, 2022, 05:10 PM

• I wish widescreen was officially supported, but I understand that this is a massive undertaking that involves revisiting every screen & background

I suppose you know but there has been work under the hood to better accomodate resolution changes, probably hit and miss though, extensive testing needed.

Quote

• I'm not very impressed by the DejaVuSans typeface and I think a different choice could really improve the game's presentation

I suspect that's a highly subjective debate, but out of curiosity, what type of font would have your favor?

Quote

• Another common stumbling block is Moons. Too many new players seem unaware of this mechanic. Perhaps add a unique icon or background for each Moon displayed along the date in the top left

For the record, the date tooltip gives information about the current moon, but I agree with your main point which is that it is too hidden.

Quote

• In the [?] menu, [Reset food effects], [Repair girl/MC pictures], [Activate picture count...] should all be hidden away in a [Debugging tools] menu option

I think [Repair girl/MC pictures] is used a lot by some players who manually edit their packs, so I would refrain from putting it in a submenu.

Quote from: Deimos96 on Nov 01, 2022, 12:05 AMDuring my first playthrough I thought the brothel helpers list were locked or something you get until further into the story. So I never bothered with it until I got my first security event. It turns out they were just sliders. Maybe add a simple symbol on the slider (pic 1). If you have the time, integrating it into the tutorial would also be nice.

Thank you for providing the pictures! I think there is a possibility to add a thumb to Ren'py bars, so it should be doable.

QuoteFor the menus, instead of making the selected text whiter, maybe invert the colors of the button or change it's background color when highlighted (pic 2). I accidentally overwritten a save file when I meant to load it because I thought I had "load game" selected. Thank god for autosaves.

Here I am limited by something very silly, which is that I have never properly found how to recolor the button shapes that come packaged with Ren'Py. You can see that for instance in the Quest screen, where buttons that are bicolor are actually squares and not the 'crayon' theme used elsewhere.

If someone can help me with that particular piece of trivia, then I can improve the menu buttons (and much more).

Quote from: Goldo on Nov 03, 2022, 02:32 PMA few comments:

Quote from: neronero on Oct 31, 2022, 05:10 PM

• I wish widescreen was officially supported, but I understand that this is a massive undertaking that involves revisiting every screen & background

I suppose you know but there has been work under the hood to better accomodate resolution changes, probably hit and miss though, extensive testing needed.

Yeah, when I tried it I quickly ran into a few screens which didn't fit the screen properly (I think the perks menu was one of them) and all the background images get a bit messy and lessen the experience. It's not very playable yet for now, but one day...

Quote from: Goldo on Nov 03, 2022, 02:32 PM

Quote

• I'm not very impressed by the DejaVuSans typeface and I think a different choice could really improve the game's presentation

I suspect that's a highly subjective debate, but out of curiosity, what type of font would have your favor?

The current font reminds me a lot of Verdana. Makes sense, since it's a continuation of a typeface of that era. Around that time "digital-first" typefaces were a very new idea. A big selling point was that they're designed to remain readable on low-resolution screens. Today they tend to look a bit clunky in high definition (to me at least, YMMV)

Here are a few open source alternatives
I wouldn't blame you for tossing such a change on the "widescreen-support" pile since it'd impact every screen. Another snag to keep in mind is that BK expects support for the "thunder", "yingyang" and "heart" glyphs (fixations) - I'm not sure if all these examples include those.

Quote from: Goldo on Nov 03, 2022, 02:32 PMHere I am limited by something very silly, which is that I have never properly found how to recolor the button shapes that come packaged with Ren'Py. You can see that for instance in the Quest screen, where buttons that are bicolor are actually squares and not the 'crayon' theme used elsewhere.

If someone can help me with that particular piece of trivia, then I can improve the menu buttons (and much more).

I vaguely remember struggling to find the same answer... Could it be that it's based on an image file?

Quote

Quote from: Goldo on Nov 03, 2022, 02:32 PMHere I am limited by something very silly, which is that I have never properly found how to recolor the button shapes that come packaged with Ren'Py. You can see that for instance in the Quest screen, where buttons that are bicolor are actually squares and not the 'crayon' theme used elsewhere.

If someone can help me with that particular piece of trivia, then I can improve the menu buttons (and much more).

I vaguely remember struggling to find the same answer... Could it be that it's based on an image file?

I know for a fact Ren'py does it on its own, because the base image is black & white. So it manages to recolor it somehow. But it's hidden somewhere in Ren'Py's code and I'm not sure where to look.

In game/options.rpy from line 39

    theme.crayon(
        ## Theme: Crayon
        ## Color scheme: Creamsicle

        ## The color of an idle widget face.
        widget = "#D96B00",

        ## The color of a focused widget face.
        widget_hover = "#FD9B1C",

Thanks I will give it a look.

For the font, In the end I went with Lato. I cannot for the life of me figure out why it is better then the
Ren'Py one, but I am extremely clueless about this kind of things so I'll just trust you.

Quote from: Goldo on Nov 04, 2022, 11:24 AMFor the font, In the end I went with Lato. I cannot for the life of me figure out why it is better then the
Ren'Py one, but I am extremely clueless about this kind of things so I'll just trust you.

You can trust me, I get paid the big bucks to have an opinion on this stuff  (but I'm open to dissent, it's more of an art than a science)

Quote from: neronero on Nov 03, 2022, 07:36 PMAnother snag to keep in mind is that BK expects support for the "thunder", "yingyang" and "heart" glyphs (fixations) - I'm not sure if all these examples include those

"✓" Checkmark - BKscreens
"♥" Heart - Used in dialogue, BKchapter1, BKchapter2, BKday_events, BKevents, BKinit_variables, BKstory_events
"☯" YingYang - BKfunctions
"❤", Outlined Heart - BKfunctions, BKcity_events
"⚡", Lightning - BKfunctions

These are the main ones I can think of

Quote from: neronero on Nov 04, 2022, 01:06 PM

Quote from: neronero on Nov 03, 2022, 07:36 PMAnother snag to keep in mind is that BK expects support for the "thunder", "yingyang" and "heart" glyphs (fixations) - I'm not sure if all these examples include those

"✓" Checkmark - BKscreens
"♥" Heart - Used in dialogue, BKchapter1, BKchapter2, BKday_events, BKevents, BKinit_variables, BKstory_events
"☯" YingYang - BKfunctions
"❤", Outlined Heart - BKfunctions, BKcity_events
"⚡", Lightning - BKfunctions

Yup, I went around that by adding code such as:
define emo_heart = "{font=DejaVuSans.ttf}❤{/font}"
And replacing ❤ in the code with [emo_heart].

I did curse you slightly in the process, but overall it wasn't that much trouble. 

Quote from: neronero on Nov 04, 2022, 10:07 AMIn game/options.rpy from line 39

Code Select Expand

    theme.crayon(
        ## Theme: Crayon
        ## Color scheme: Creamsicle

        ## The color of an idle widget face.
        widget = "#D96B00",

        ## The color of a focused widget face.
        widget_hover = "#FD9B1C",

So, unfortunately (and weirdly), no setting for the color of a selected widget face...

Apparently one of our old forumers stumbled upon this too a few years back:
https://f95zone.to/threads/solved-with-renpy-theme-any-way-to-change-use-multiple-colors-for-button-using-tags.19392/

While this is helpful, it's not really clear how I can apply a new widget face to the whole game... I will need to experiment.

Edit:
Okay, this was needlessly hard, but here is what did the trick:
    style gm_nav_button:
        size_group "gm_nav"
        selected_background Frame (
            im.MatrixColor(
                "UI/cry_box.webp",
                im.matrix.colorize(c_white, "#000")))

    style gm_nav_button_text:
        selected_color c_darkorange
I wish there was a guide on how to port the game to the new GUI, because getting anything done with these old themes is very annoying.

One of the things that I don't like about the 0.2 UI compared to 0.15 is that you can no longer skip through the day end screens with Ctrl.

Quote from: Smaug on Nov 07, 2022, 01:51 PMOne of the things that I don't like about the 0.2 UI compared to 0.15 is that you can no longer skip through the day end screens with Ctrl.

Just to be clear, you mean using 'ctrl' to skip all night events including the results screen?

It's kind of a feature not a bug, because otherwise people could miss something important. But I could make it an option in the preference menu if needed.

That would be great! I usually stop and reverse the scene if something unexpected happens.