New menu system

[thelusiv]

Oops, there was something left out of my "mock up" earlier...actually I put it in there but didn't realize it didn't show up because I used greater than/less than symbols to make "arrows" for a wheel, and the forum I guess removed them thinking it was weird HTML. So this is what it the "Steer Left" page should have been like:<pre>Action: Steer Left[ Add a Control ]&lt; Key:Left &gt;[ Change Control ][ Delete Control ][ Done ]</pre>Cycling through the wheel would change the value to the next assigned control - right now it is Key:Left and could maybe also contain Mouse:Left and Joy0:Axis0(-) or something. When the user selects Change or Delete control, it acts on the control selected in the wheel.Your idea would work well with a mouse where the user can select any button they wish. However, if they're using the keyboard or joystick to move around the menus it would take a while to maneuver to the button they wanted. Right now, buttons are traversed in their order in the page file regardless of their placement on the screen. So a line of buttons for each control would mean that the user would have to go through each button on one line (the add button, and all the binding buttons and their respective delete buttons) just to get to the next line.Now, I could set up a table widget that would make it so that the user could move up/down in the rows, but they'd still have to go through twice as many buttons to get to the binding they want (since each one has a delete button). In fact, I'd have to make a table widget, and it'd also have to be able to scroll up and down because all these bindings would not fit on the screen at the same time (the existing control mapping menu barely fits, adding buttons will make each row taller, and we may want to add even more controls than we have now). As you can see this is becoming more complex...now if you have to take into account scrolling, the user must scroll all the way to the bottom of the list to get to the "OK" button (or cycle around from the top of the list). All this is compounded by the fact that the gui system does not allow for keys or joystick axis events that are held down to be repeated.So what do you think? The system I was talking about is more or less the same, it lists all the actions and their assigned controls, and provide one widget to change each the controls, which leads to a page that can edit all the controls for a given action. This simplifies the page with all the actions - I would have enough space ot make two columns of actions, and I think this would be enough to cover all our controls without any scrolling. There would be no need to manage a row of buttons that may possibly be longer than the screen, since the wheel to select different controls can have elements added to it indefinitely without changing its size. A user would still have to go through each control if using the arrow keys/joystick axis to navigate menus, but there shouldn't be any need to scroll up or down, which I think will reduce 'user confusion'. Also not having a column for each possible control will make it look better - we won't have several columns of unassigned controls displayed all the time.One idea you have that I really like is the small icons for each control rather than text. That would save a lot of wasted space. We can use this regardless of how the menu is laid out. For instance for joystick axes, we could have a small picture of a joystick with arrows indicating axis movement. For joystick buttons we could have a circle with a number in the middle indicating the button index. For keys of course we could have a little key icon with a short representation of the key - either a letter, an arrow representing direction or something like that. And the mouse is kinda obvious, a little icon with an arrow showing motion or a colored-in or highlighted button denoting a button control.