[HansMellman]

Originally Posted by nfg22

Its not just about intuition, information is not displayed readily on screens. Try and make a trade, can't see the opposing teams cap, cant add other players, only request an offer for your own player. Switching between teams? Janky and can't be done with keys reliably.

I understand this has never been Jim's strong suit but I can literally build a better UI in PyQt5 with chat gpt in hours. The UI is not any better than it was 20 years ago. Just my opinion, feel free to disregard. I'm not going to let my fondness for the product blind me to the fact that the UI is seriously lacking with all of the front end tools we have these days to make good UIs.

Jim went into some detail in a previous post as to why he leaned away from using QT and elected to go with something else.

Originally Posted by Solecismic

I'm hoping to make more use of screen recordings. Since I don't stream or even watch video, a lot of new concepts.

One thing I just learned: you have to screen-record an entire monitor to pick up child windows. For example, if you have a drop-down menu and you're screen-recording an app, the drop-down menu isn't recorded (you see a couple of places on that recording where the mouse is doing something, but it's all blank).

This comment will invite some mocking, but one thing I did once we backed out of the unnamed project is spend a lot of time learning some more advanced Windows drawing techniques. A lot of younger graphics experts would say this was a waste of time: there are modern tools that are far better.

OOTP's solution was a product called Qt. A lot of people use it (they use it for FHM). We were using it. It has a lot of plusses. There's a standard "widget" that Microsoft calls a List Control that's the basis of everything in an application that looks like part of a spreadsheet. I use it on pretty much every screen.

The Microsoft Foundation Classes List Control is tested, fast, robust. If computer programs were living beings, the List Control would be the Carbon. After a year or so of working with the Qt equivalent, I missed the MFC control. Qt "can" do anything, but not as well, not as flexible, not as fast. When I started over, I wanted my List Control back, and I spent a quite a bit of time taking the customized List Control from FOF8 and redesigning it for FOF9. Going back to it was like breathing again.

So, it's old school, but I am convinced that my customized List Control does more than any cutting edge equivalent, all things considered. It's also (sorry Mac fans) the reason I don't support anything but Windows. My coding for the most part is generic C++. But I stick with basic Windows device-context drawing because MFC is based on it.

One of my favorite new features with the drawing relates to the question Ben posed. What are all these abbreviations? In FOF9, whenever you run the mouse over a header on a List Control (and many data items), there's a pop up that tells you exactly what you're looking at. There are 17 different kinds of pop-ups in the interface, ranging from a pure text header explanation to play diagrams.