Make story message boxes closeable with enter

[wl-zocker]

In the tutorials and campaigns, there are message boxes which give instrucitons/tell the story. They can only be closed by clicking on OK. When there are several message boxes in a row, it is cumbersome to have to move the mouse pointer to every button.

It would therefore be great when these message boxes could be closed by a hotkey, e.g. enter or space.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

I agree this would be nice. I keep forgetting enter doesn't work on the dialogs. :p

I was certain there was an ancient feature request on this, but all I could find was bug 536388. For the campaign dialogs it is a lot clearer which dialog would respond to the hotkey (being only one), and I think players would expect it based on experience from other games.

[SirVer (sirver)]

It was on purpose that these could not be closed with a hot key. In the early days they were and users often closed them accidentally the moment they opened though they just wanted to activate the build help.

This applies to all hotkeys really. I think another solution is needed for the nuisance factor here. What do other games do?

> Am 23.10.2015 um 19:33 schrieb GunChleoc <email address hidden>:
>
> ** Tags added: lowhangingfruit
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to
> widelands.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1460725
>
> Title:
> Make story message boxes closeable with enter
>
> Status in widelands:
> New
>
> Bug description:
> In the tutorials and campaigns, there are message boxes which give
> instrucitons/tell the story. They can only be closed by clicking on
> OK. When there are several message boxes in a row, it is cumbersome to
> have to move the mouse pointer to every button.
>
> It would therefore be great when these message boxes could be closed
> by a hotkey, e.g. enter or space.
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/widelands/+bug/1460725/+subscriptions

[Nasenbaer (nasenbaer)]

Setting to opinion.
I agree with SirVer that a hotkey brings more downsides than upsides. Further it would be nice to have a "choose either side A or side B" dialog - at least in such a dialog, a hotkey wouldn't be a good idea.

[wl-zocker (wl-zocker)]

Currently, most (all?) dialogs only have the OK button, and Enter is not used for anything in the game. We could disallow using a hotkey for dialog windows with different options (I do not dare to ask for things like Tab + Enter).

What exactly are the downsides? The only arguement brought so far is inadvertant closing, but I think I never press Enter (neither on purpose nor by accident) while playing Widelands, so I think this arguement is somewhat weak.

[SirVer (sirver)]

Enter is also not very intuitive then. As you said it is not used for anything yet - especially it does not close any windows. How would you advertise this feature to the players?

[wl-zocker (wl-zocker)]

Many other programs (including OSs) allow closing message boxes with Enter. I am pretty sure I tried it when I had just started playing Widelands, and I still sometimes hit Enter to close such a message box (which does not work). So, I think this feature does not really need advertising, players will find out (probably even expect) this behavior. Just to be sure, we could add a sentence to the first tutorial (either in the very beginning or in the message box which says: " All windows in Widelands can be closed that way [by right-clicking], except the ones with instructions, like this one.").

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

We could generally link "OK" to Enter and "Back" or "Cancel" to Escape throughout Widelands, including the fullscreen menus.

I have been fiddling with a branch to make our hotkeys configurable, and this would be a general hotkey used everywhere.

[SirVer (sirver)]

+1 for #7.

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

I just tested this and closing these windows with Enter was implemented at some point, so I'll set this to Fix Committed.

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

Fixed in build20-rc1