Week Eight Report

It was becoming apparent that certain object panels would need to have focus within the viewport, so I wrote a simple window manager which allows the info panel to disappear if the order's panel is brought up or to close the right-click order's menu if the order's panel is up. However, this caused problems with the rollover objects on the map, and so I had to deal with that as well. It was a bit complicated how I set it up initially, and for the longest time I was having trouble with the z-index of things which is the stacking property in css. If two objects were close to each other, one of the objects would always interrupt the rollover subpanel for a map object. I believe the ultimate solution was to temporarily change the z-index of the current rolled-over object on the map. But there were several other issues with this that took a while to solve. It came down to one of those issues with css that end up taking hours to solve when it ultimately ends up being a single css property.

Initially when the player clicked an object on the map, the info panel would appear centered directly under the mouse pointer. However, when an object on the system panel was clicked, the info panel would appear centered in the browser, close to the top. Since it was a bit confusing to have the position of the info panel change so much, I had it position itself in one spot every time. This will allow the orders panel to appear in that same spot so that there's less confusion for the player.

In the info panel, there's always been a list of children objects that I've never found a use for, since there's already the system panel. I finally decided to take it out, meaning I can shrink the info panel a bit.

The other major change that happened this week was implementing functionality to the right-click orders menu and bringing back the order's panel. I ran into some code that was again using the object id to refer to a specific order set instead of the queueid, and this caused some confusion in the code for a time.

After orders could be submitted, I could the tweek the order's list on the info panel. It was mostly display issues that arose, and they weren't that time consuming to deal with. I added the links to allow a player to asc/desc/remove an order, but I think it'll look better and save some space if they're icons instead.

I still need to shrink the info panel and make the icons, as well as write some functionality for the orders, but it looks like I'll be able to start on the design panel this next week.