Towards V7...

[Kroki]

Basically any interesting innovative gameplay I have seen on AAO could have benefited from customized buttons instead of resorting to CEs, clickable pictures, question boxes... Gampelay starts with inputs, and case authors have been 'cheating' with the available input systems to create new stuff ever since the early days of AAO.
Interface customization is the next biggest thing that can happen to AAO after customized ressources, variables, and layers*.
And it is very big indeed.

(Although I have yet to see them become as disruptive as I trust they can become!)

[GanonZD]

On top of that, it doesn't have to be very hard to implement. It could be very low-level on the editor side, something like a simple text field where you have to input a small selection of allowed HTML tags. I don't know if that can be made to work, though.

[enigma]

Also, frankly, I think the only reason we HAVEN'T seen cases attempt to use custom buttons is because they can't. I can think of at least one instance in my own cases that would have benefited from having a custom button in the CE's (Elizabeth's testimony in Infinities Prism which required selecting a statement from the testimony to use against another statement, for example.)

[GanonZD]

So I guess the real question is if someone familiar with the source code and with sufficient programming skills is ready to do it?

[mercurialSK]

Also, frankly, I think the only reason we HAVEN'T seen cases attempt to use custom buttons is because they can't. I can think of at least one instance in my own cases that would have benefited from having a custom button in the CE's (Elizabeth's testimony in Infinities Prism which required selecting a statement from the testimony to use against another statement, for example.)

This. Custom buttons normally aren't a lot of effort (picking from an image is about the same amount of work as picking an option), but when it comes to CEs there's really no way to do it...In A Turnabout Called Justice, we use option select via the Press frames.
Then the problem is where extra buttons would go or something. The UI might get cluttered real fast.

Though I don't think it's an important thing, it's like feature-tier.

[GanonZD]

It is the responsibility of the author to make sure the UI is intuitive and not too cluttered, just like it is their responsibility to keep the story understandable. The possibilities with custom user interfaces are practically endless; it would be a real killer feature of this site, and it would allow us to compete better with PyWright.

EDIT: A side question: Allowing the author to write Javascript or custom HTML tags would obviously be a security risk. But what about CSS? Given an <a> tag, for instance, would it be risky to let the user customize the style attribute?

[Unas]

Yeah, including custom html code is out of the question for security reasons.
Custom CSS... I'd rather avoid it as well. In theory it's safe... except when some crazy Microsoft developers decide to allow javascript expressions inside CSS code and so on. And even if this extreme case is closed (this crazy feature is not implemented in IE8 and later, thankfully), any kind of security flow might be hiding the the browser's CSS handling unbeknownst to the devs.

Basically, I'm against letting the author feed any kind of code directly to the player's browser. It's the role of AAO's Javascript engine to interpret user input and translate it in browser rules.


On UI customisation : I already planned to include some support for that in V6, but never took the time to actually act on it.
Actually, if you have a look at a V6 trial file, you'll notice it contains a "ui" field : that was its initial purpose. But at this point it's always empty and ignored, I haven't even decided on how these customisations would be expressed in there.
But basically I intended to have the following kind of information :
- A basic style to adopt. Meph had developed alternate stylesheets for AAI design and so on. The user should be able to select one of these as base.
- Color theme overrides.
- Images override.
However, there was no plan as to insert new buttons and so on.



On custom conversation : Actually, also something I had plans for in V6. In the V6 trial data structure for CE statements, you might notice there is the pressing_conv, and something called optional_conv. Same, optional_conv is currently ignored, but it's meant to be another conversation linked to the statement, reached by the click of a specific button. Original idea was to allow implementation of such custom CE mechanisms.

So yeah, there are some basic plans for stuff like that, but nothing as modular as you're discussing though.

[GanonZD]

I'm going to quote myself:

On top of that, it doesn't have to be very hard to implement. It could be very low-level on the editor side, something like a simple text field where you have to input a small selection of allowed HTML tags. I don't know if that can be made to work, though.

Basic HTML support with a small range of supported tags is used all over the web, including places like StackOverflow. It can work quite well.

But yes, I agree, it is better to make an actual interface for adding buttons, should this feature ever become a reality (which does not seem very likely based on your last message).

[kwando1313]

Actually, quick question.

Would it be fine if we can rename buttons? Like from "Present" to "Use" or something like that?

[Unas]

kwando : yes, that's also part of what I intended to put in the "ui" part of trial data. Actually, I imagined something like being able to customise any button, and for each being able to define either a text or an image as label - in addition to colour and such.

[GanonZD]

Now that we're at it, can you allow us to change the font as well? We could use something prettier than the current one (I assume it comes from the real games). Also, it does not support many foreign characters.

[Enthalpy]

I'm satisfied that there's be a use for the UI feature now. (I have no idea how I forgot Turnabout Called Justice in particular.) And I was wondering what that UI field was for...

The AAO dialogue font face (PW Extended) is derived from the main games, yes. I have no opinion on allowing custom fonts.

[GanonZD]

Okay, so let me share my vision about how such a UI customization system should look:

Given any frame whatsoever, there must be an option somewhere (for instance, in the Actions menu) to customize its interface. Each interface has a background (including a number of predefined ones). Furthermore, there are a number of current buttons; their number and type depend on what kind of frame it is. In the case of a CE frame, for instance, there are "Present," "Press," "Arrow forward," and "Arrow backward." Also, there must be an option to add a number (unlimited, in principle) of extra buttons. For each button (both the original ones and the custom ones), there should be the option to remove it, move it or change its looks. There must be a number of options available, like:

• Arrow buttons (identical to the text forward button and the back and forth buttons in CEs).
• Rectangular buttons with configurable colour (normal colour and hover colour) and text, possibly with some corners rounded like the "Press" button.
• Buttons with custom images. We need to allow three different images:
  • Normal button.
  • Hover over button.
  • Hover out button.

For each button, it should be possible to choose the action it performs. There should be these options:

• Some actions specific to particular types of frames:
  • In standard frames: "Proceed to the next frame" (corresponding to the forward button).
  • In CE frames: "Proceed to the next frame," "Go back to the last frame," "Press," "Present," "Co-Council Conversation."
  • In investigation frames: "Move," "Talk," "Examine," "Present."
• Activate the ordinary actions from the "Actions" menu. Most notably, "Redirect to other frame."
• Add or remove another button from the interface (or possibly from other interfaces as well).

It should also be possible to show an image where a location can be chosen and examined or show the evidence selection menu.

I think it makes sense to require that it should be possible to create any button layout that currently appears in AAO (there are not even that many).

Thanks to the new Preset feature, it will be easy (or at least manageable) to create whole interfaces with this feature, though the frame redirection system could become quite a maze. Alternatively, one can use a third-party tool to generate the storyboard data file.

It would also make sense to allow the user to save a button layout as default for normal frames, for CEs, for investigations etc. However, the Presets feature means that this is not strictly necessary. Obviously, if the user adds custom buttons, they will still have to manage manually where they redirect. We might also allow the author to create a list of standard interfaces to insert into the storyboard, like an "Interfaces" tab on the top next to "Evidence," "Profiles" etc.

With such a system, the possibilities are essentially endless. All kinds of features that have been suggested earlier -- like deduction, logic, close-up examinations -- will be possible to implement manually by the user. And many new doors will be open to gameplay mechanics that were simply not possible before.

[TheDoctor]

Regarding that extra button you guys were discussing, maybe it could be merged with the Logic feature whenever that gets implemented?

[AceAttorneyMaster111]

Looking through the code for investigations, at first glance I see there is already code for deduction. I don't know whether there is anything for other AAI features like Logic, though...