They’re alive! Last month I shared a sizeable collection of interface mockups summarizing my vision for a playable Cogmind interface that could fit within a 45-row terminal. Those mockups are now a reality, fully implemented more or less as described, and in the time since I’ve even gone further down that path and implemented the so-called “Phase 4” UI with its greater number of modal windows.

Although I already demonstrated much of the first new modal UI layout in an earlier forum announcement, I figure I could review those features here in order to provide closure to this series, plus cover some related dev topics as well as the second modal layout.

“Semi-modal” 45-Row UI Layout

Although players are free to continue using the full 60-row layout originally designed for Cogmind, anyone who does not mind sacrificing some convenience in exchange for greater cell size can use 33% larger tiles and text by switching to a 45-row layout. In other words, anyone using size 18 fonts (the majority of players), would instead be using size 24 under the new layout.

One of the biggest compromises in this mode is the smaller map view, but it’s still reasonably large (at least 50×35), large enough to at least see out the extent of normal sight and attack ranges, and for information beyond that all the QoL recently developed for map zooming comes in handy, even when not zoomed.

Here is a sample screenshot of the 1080p 45-row terminal layout in the early game, before the inventory even switches to its modal form:

Inventory/Parts

The other compromise is interacting with a modal inventory for much of a run, but I’ve also put a lot of work into designing QoL features to make it as seamless as possible.

Easy access to information and feedback is important, so of course the INVENTORY access button directly reports its current usage and capacity, pieces of info which would normally be found at the top of the inventory window itself.

One of the most important forms of inventory interaction for mouse users, drag-dropping, is also preserved by automatically opening the inventory while dragging a part, then automatically closing it again after release, in case you want to put the item in your inventory.

In fact, quite a few operations will automatically toggle the inventory like that wherever it makes sense--the part management keyboard interface (‘p’), the ‘d’rop shortcut, part swapping, item tagging…

Of course the regular old swap menu also works just fine, even when the inventory is modal, meaning opening the inventory is often not even necessary.

 

One of the most controversial aspects of the 45-row interface is likely how it treats part type headers. As I wrote about during the mockup descriptions, we can save space, and delay inventory modality, by temporarily removing the headers themselves from the parts list. That was going to be an optional feature disabled by default, but for now I’ve instead decided to have it do that automatically, and be opt-out instead.

The headers are only replaced by the sidebar method for as long as the inventory conversion to modal form is delayed (so about two evolutions in the mid-game), after which they’re restored to normal again since there’s plenty of room.

Secondary Windows

As per the mockups, many of Cogmind’s secondary windows that were originally designed for at least 50 rows had to be squished down to 45, including machine hacking, the status window, and item/robot info.

The most obviously different of the group is item info, which saved enough lines by moving its art off to the side.

The other biggest new feature which took a while to build and finalize but will likely be seen by almost no one (:P) is the [M]ore button as applied to robot resistances. Such a button was already added to Beta 13 to support the occasional longer item/effect descriptions, but was given new purpose for the very rare possibility that a robot might have too many total lines in its info window, in which case one way to cut it down to size is to put excess resistances in a popup window.

The world map view was yet another one of the secondary windows originally designed for a height of 50, but fortunately removing some of its interior padding was enough to shrink that to 45. At the same time, I also took this opportunity to do something else that I’ve wanted to do for years: speed it up! Although I first designed the map in 2016 with this fun vision of a map animating the route you took to get to your current location, while not too problematic in Cogmind’s early years, the continued addition of new areas and potential for lengthier routes could make it a bit of a slot to view the full map in the late game, so I’ve rebuilt it to appear in its entirety almost instantly :D

This world map change will benefit everyone, regardless of UI layout. In fact a number of tweaks and fixes made throughout the layout development project have carried over to the regular interface as well.

Game Menu

A good half of the work involved in creating a 45-row version of the interface involved adjustments to the game menu and its various subwindows. It was a lot. The content was, after all, mostly designed to fit within the map area, which had presumed minimum dimensions of 50×50. At least we didn’t have to worry about the width (whew--very glad Cogmind was designed for 4:3), but again with the height…

Pages with a 50-row layout now needed 35-row layouts as well.

Overall the biggest impacts were to the Advanced commands page, which had always been pushing up against the limit to begin with, and all the records interfaces.

The problem with the Achievements/Gallery/Lore records, and actually much of the “game menu” in all, was spaghetti code. Most of Cogmind is fairly well organized code, but not the game menu and its pages--it’s all in just two files to which I kept adding and adding and adding and sharing variables and it’s just messy all around. I used this opportunity to clean it up a bit, especially the records code which share a lot of the same functionality anyway but instead of using common functions there was just copy-pasted code everywhere.

Design-wise, at least the records weren’t trying to fit into the map view area, and they turned out fairly well, if slightly cramped compared to before.

Amidst the refactoring, in another of those “I should do this while I’m here” moments that benefits all layouts, I finally darkened the background when a modal popup is active in the game menu. Doing so always made sense, of course, but it wasn’t vital and it never felt worth dedicating the time before.

After building this new UI layout, last week I streamed the first run to make use of it, explaining all the major features as we went…

“Modal” 45-Row UI Layout

The first 45-row layout I developed is essentially “semi-modal,” because all windows are visible as usual until only later when just the inventory is hidden as necessary. The true modal interface hides multiple windows, and does it immediately from the start, but in doing so allows for a map view which is almost as large as what Cogmind was designed for (50×50).

All three options are available in a new setting at the top of the Options menu.

How do we reclaim our missing map height? By making the top-side consoles all but disappear, of course! The info displayed up there does not warrant constant attention anyway, consisting of transient logging info and some menus for accessing control of allies and intel. Anything that might be of potential importance can be displayed temporarily, and any menus can be called up as needed. The result is a much taller map view: 50×44.

The top row buttons serve more or less the same functions, such as toggling the message log to its full height, or switching the center console mode, though in this case the toggle must also open the Allies/Intel windows to make them visible and interactive when necessary.

The Extended Log and Combat Log modes simply determine what the space below is used for when messages are being displayed.

You might recognize the temporary message log style from POLYBOT-7, which is where I ripped it from :)

The automated full-detail combat log messages (the ones that even in the 60-row layout could appear over the map as combat plays out) are hidden by default in 45-row layouts, even if the detail level is set to Full, since given the narrower map view they can easily obscure nearby action.

There is a new config option to force it anyway, for those so inclined, but as usual, as long as it’s currently your turn, in combat log mode you can always scroll the combat log backward to review the details of recent combat. (However, in the Modal 45-row layout there is currently no way for the mouse to initiate this scroll--it’s keyboard-only…)

I’ll be streaming a run in this layout as well, once the build is ready…

Extra Credit

With playtesting having only just begun, I’m sure these layouts could use some more polish here and there, but they seem in a really good place already. Looking further ahead, there’s also the chance that other related features might be added as well, things I’ve held off on so far in the interest of actually releasing this to players and getting back to the content expansion I was working on before.

Tutorial

One such feature I was on the fence about throughout layout planning, and to a lesser extent throughout all of Cogmind development, is a more intrusive vector for tutorial info. I much prefer to maintain Cogmind’s theme of immersion as best possible, and that has always meant avoiding an in-your-face type tutorial with dedicated popups or some similar effect. A sound cue and flashy log messages, that’s it.

In particular this Modal 45-row interface has me more worried about teaching new players, especially if it’s to be a default layout, because log messages automatically disappear after a little while. Yes the log can be opened in full to view them as normal, but players would need to be proactive about it. A log-based tutorial was already easy enough to miss bits of before, and people did :P

To somewhat address that issue I doubled the duration of specifically tutorial messages in the Modal layout, so they remain visible longer even as other messages disappear.

Another problem which had me again thinking about alternatives is the handful of tutorial messages that appear when the log area is not visible at all in the modal layout, such as while hacking! (since in that case the machine hacking interface now extends all the way to the top of the screen) One might suggest putting these immersion-breaking messages right in the hacking interface itself, but if we’re going to go that far we may as well take the dedicated popup route :/

I’m letting this topic simmer for now, and ultimately the decision would be affected by whatever our default layout ends up being.

Screenshot Mode

Although not particular to modal layouts, and a feature I’ve been considering for years, the need for some form of “screenshot mode” clearly becomes more acute with the introduction of new UI layouts.

One of the original principles of Cogmind UI design was the desire to have all or almost all important information necessary for decision-making visible at all times on the main interface--stats, parts and their condition, inventory and item states, the map, the log, basically everything.

I like that by extension this means a single screenshot could be a comprehensive or at least very good indicator of a run’s overall state, either as a record or something to share with others. For that reason I’ve often considered facilitating a way to include one’s entire inventory contents in a single screenshot, since some builds might possess about 10~15 items that aren’t currently visible in the screenshot (some people have taken to sharing Cogmind’s stat dumps to provide that info, and more, in lieu of a screenshot, but screenshots tend to be easier to digest overall; other folks have literally stitched together their own screenshots to include a complete inventory…).

And now depending on one’s UI layout we might have not only zero inventory items visible in a screenshot, but also even a missing message log and list of allies etc. In that light, I guess the chance that I finally add such a feature will only grow going forward… I’ll be keeping an eye on the sharing scene among frequent players using these layouts.

I don’t have any mockups of “screenshot mode” for you now, but the idea is simply that some of the map area could be used to display the additional info.

A New Default

When the next Cogmind version releases, new and old players alike will be faced with a new UI layout. But which one?

The setting can be changed in the Options menu, but it needs a default, and even returning players who have a config file will be initialized to that layout. This will at least be a good way to get everyone to realize the new layout options exist (if they somehow miss the repeated news :P).

I really like the original layout (obviously), specifically designed to immerse with maximum information, at the cost of cell size perhaps requiring a large display. That might work for a relatively specific target audience, but Cogmind has many more players these days, players who come from a variety of backgrounds and with different setups, and they’d like to enjoy the gameplay, too, so some accommodation is necessary. One of the other layouts then, with larger fonts from the get to…

My original assumption was that the default would be the middle option--partially modal with most windows and info still visible, just the significantly larger text (yay for most people on laptops) and smaller map view (but still large enough). Leaning even more heavily in a modal direction for new players loses some of the overall atmosphere, plus hiding information can be bad. However, that may not be the case with what gets immediately hidden in Cogmind--the top-side windows aren’t essential for new players, and necessary messages are still shown and accessible… so maybe hiding windows is okay in order to let everyone see even more of the map at once? The message log being permanently visible doesn’t seem to imply that everyone will read it anyway--plenty of people miss important messages :P

The modal inventory has the largest impact on gameplay, and it doesn’t even take effect until part way through the game, at which point there is supporting QoL, and applies to both 45-row layouts anyway, so that doesn’t work in favor of either.

Results on a default: Inconclusive xD

This is the end of our multi-part series about building Cogmind’s fully upscaled semi-modal interface layout:

• History and Theory
  
• Holy Mockups
• Dynamic Terminal Swapping
  
• Simpler Lightweight Fonts
• Completion and Demos

So we’ve developed the theories, we’ve got mockups, we’ve got the necessary architecture… surely it’s time to start building the new UI layout, yeah? Not so fast!

It’s true we could start now, but on the horizon I could already see the increasing usefulness of another supporting feature, and decided it was a good opportunity to finally automate Cogmind’s font scaling.

Cogmind has always included many fonts available at many different sizes, all of these stored as bitmaps for pixel-perfect crispness. Each requires its own image file, and in the past I have always manually upscaled them to ensure availability at the appropriate higher resolutions, which means even more files.

Well with the advent of map zooming, which itself needs 2x upscale versions of all fonts within each set, and this whole UI upscale project, which unlocks an average 33% font size increase for everyone, we’re going to need quite a few more upscaled bitmap font files and going forward it doesn’t really make much sense to keep doing this manually.

REX, Again Again

Okay if anyone’s keeping count this will be the fourth time I’ve revisited the engine for a major update since starting map zoom and UI scaling work xD

Hi, REX.

I thought this would be a quick project, but it actually took several days to finally finish this feature because I ended up rewriting a lot of the engine’s font handling code, encountering a few challenging (hair-ripping) bugs along the way. The original system had made a lot of assumptions which would no longer hold true, and I wanted more features on top of the autoscaling as well, like only generating upscaled fonts once they’re actually needed (yay for faster startup), and having all font sets reusing the same source file share a single reference image in memory rather than having multiple copies of the same bitmap. Individually nothing too complex, just a lot of changes necessary to the original architecture to make these features possible.

Once again back in the good old REX testing environment, I set to testing two new syntax options for the font set configuration file:

• “NewFontName [SourceFontName*2]” would create an entire new font set by upscaling an existing one, in this case by a factor of 2. (A font “set” means a collection of text, tiles, zoomed text and so forth, all categorized under a single name and selected as an option by the user.)
• “<source_image_name*3>” is a sample of syntax usable in any single field for a bitmap font source image, instead taking another image and upscaling it by the specified factor.

This same format is used by anything else built on the engine, so both Cogmind and REXPaint can benefit from this, the latter of which I hope to also release a new version before long!

Cogmind Applications

Cogmind’s last public release, Beta 12, includes a total of 118 bitmaps font images, and that was before all the map zooming and Beta 13 work, so without this autoscaling feature that number would balloon significantly.

As of writing, Beta 13 has currently dropped that file count to 80, this despite the zooming, nine brand new font types, and supporting even more large options derived from smaller ones.

I had to spend a while going back through all those files to confirm which were original files and which were upscaled--in most cases there were records, but I had to be sure, and did find a few outliers to which I made further manual modifications to their upscaled versions, or sourced from multiple different sets. Those required special treatment, but otherwise it was really nice to cut down on the clutter.

As of the current Beta 13 prerelease, the current max font size included with Cogmind is 48, needed for 5K displays, but with the new upscaled UI the max needed for that resolution will be 64! Definitely about time to get automated scaling…

New font sizes aside, this also saves time when new tiles are added and need to be inserted throughout the images, since tiles themselves are also part of the font bitmaps. Tiles aren’t added very often, but a new batch is indeed being released gradually over the next several versions.

Since I was working with fonts anyway, I also took advantage of this opportunity to add brand new options! In classic terminal roguelike style, some people like to switch their display font after a while in order to freshen up the whole experience, so in addition to others who simply want more options from which to select their favorite for readability or stylistic preferences, that’s another good reason to make sure there is a good variety of styles available.

The main two new typefaces are Tamsyn and Cherry, available at several sizes.

 

While I was at it, I also made other font-related improvements, like having Cogmind’s options menu list fonts from largest to smallest to be able to more easily adjust style via the menu without changing map size. The original approach based purely on how they’re listed in the config file didn’t make sense, and I’m not sure why I left it that way for so long.

Pixel Corruption

Shortly after releasing a build with autoscaled fonts to patrons, a wild bug appeared! Apparently some people were seeing artifacts on the display…

At first we weren’t sure what it was, since it was only affecting a few people, and recent SDL DLL optimizations aimed at improving rendering speed had also been introduced as well. But bugs aren’t all that elusive if they only affect some people and a discernible, repeatable pattern emerges, which happens to be the case here. That these artifacts only appeared for players using very high resolutions suggested it might be an issue with font scaling, since all of the high-resolution fonts are upscales.

So I set up a bunch of tests to confirm, and eventually found that some large fonts ended up with these artifacts when scaled, and in all cases had a scaling multiplier of at least 3. How weird!

Anyway it’s now even more clear this has gotta be something with the scaling process, right, for which I had actually just plugged in SDL_gfx, a common companion library for doing this sort of thing. Cue stepping through its zoomSurface() function, specifically zoomSurfaceRGBA(), and while comparing how it handled a 2x vs a 3x scale operation, I noticed that there seems to be… a bug in the library?

I’m kinda surprised since this library has been in relatively wide use for over two decades, and even continues to be used alongside subsequent SDL versions, but that code remains the same. Maybe most people tend to use it with smoothing/antialiasing turned on (I had it off because I want crisp), or are using less tightly packed tilesets (or even separate files for their images), all of which may help conceal such an issue from discovery? Or maybe there’s something else at play.

I replaced that whole optimized method with my own brute force scaling solution and *poof* the problem indeed disappeared. It’s only rarely called anyway--as mentioned before fonts are only scaled when they’re first needed, not before or ever again afterward, so we don’t need to worry about performance. (And anyone who actually does need to worry about performance should probably avoid doing this in software mode in the first place :P --that’s probably where all the other potential bug finders went off to…)

This is the fourth in a multi-part series about building Cogmind’s fully upscaled semi-modal interface layout:

• History and Theory
  
• Holy Mockups
• Dynamic Terminal Swapping
  
• Simpler Lightweight Fonts
• Completion and Demos
  

I was really happy to have come up with workable concept for a modal inventory, as well as producing a mass of mockups with proven solutions for all the potential hurdles on the road to dropping 15 rows from Cogmind’s interface. Or so I thought.

Suddenly at the end of that process, a review of remaining UI systems revealed an unexpected show-stopper: ending animations.

Cogmind has a lot of different endings (currently nine, with more to come), and all of them feature full-screen ASCII animations. While some of these are flexible enough to fit dynamically within any terminal dimensions, a good many were designed to assume a height of 60 rows. The only way to fit those into 45 rows would be a complete redesign…

I put a lot of time into the existing animations, and they make good use of their space, so one would hope there must be another way…

Terminal Swapping

What if… the terminal was still 60 rows during ending animations?

After all, there’s no strong need for the endings to be limited to only 45 rows--you’re essentially watching these animations for the overall visual effect rather than needing to interpret every little detail for gameplay purposes. As described at the beginning of this series, the reason for shrinking the base terminal dimensions is to enable larger fonts across the board, but the intent there is to facilitate reading and interpreting details, which we don’t need in this case.

So the theory is we use a 45-row terminal for normal play, but once we need to do an ending animation simply switch over to a 60-row terminal to display that, then switch back when done.

This reminds me of games that switch to a different display mode specifically for cut scenes, especially common (and noticeable) in early video games, and then later it became a big deal when those sorts of things could be done “in engine,” which is the norm nowadays. Cogmind has always been consistent about its display, but in this case I could ideally continue to make use of all the work that’s already gone into the animations.

Now come the important questions: Is the engine architecture capable of such a feature, and what other roadblocks might be in the way?

Technically the idea immediately showed some promise based on the fact that Cogmind already uses what I call “terminal swapping,” but only between frames and behind the scenes, specifically for special screenshotting purposes.

The main usage is for map output, or creating a composite PNG containing the entire current known map. This is useful for sharing interesting layouts with other players, or asking for advice about where to explore.

I also used it to produce an image marking the launch of Cogmind’s achievements, for which I wanted the background to be a matrix of many achievement icons.

Both of these use cases required generating an image larger than the screen, so a normal screenshot wouldn’t do.

Already armed with a built-in way to take a “screenshot” of the terminal contents (bypassing the screen itself entirely), if we build a larger terminal than the screen we can just as easily run the “screenshot” process on that to produce an even larger image.

With just a small bit of isolated code it’s pretty easy to temporarily replace the engine’s terminal with one of a different desired size, write to that, generate the image, then restore the original terminal as if nothing happened. We’re not actually rendering to the screen itself so resolution doesn’t matter, we don’t need to change the video mode, none of this is ever displayed, nor does any outside interaction occur.

This was a promising starting point, at least providing a theoretical approach for our ending animation management.

REX, Again

The above initial examples of basic terminal swapping are pretty much entirely Cogmind-side. As it’s happening between frames for the sole purpose of creating an image using the normal system, the engine doesn’t need to know or care about what’s going on. All that was needed was a simple function allowing the root terminal to be swapped out for another one.

Taking the next step and swapping the terminal with a new one that would exist for a longer duration, and even involve some level of player interaction, would be a much more complicated process, meaning it’s once again time to revisit the engine to expand its core capabilities, like I did not too long ago with the quads and octs powering the map zooming system.

Also once again, as an engine feature it makes more sense to head back to the simpler engine testing environment to build and debug it, rather than using Cogmind itself.

I was pleased, and surprised, to find that terminal swapping of an extended nature really wasn’t an incredibly complex operation with many repercussions. As far as the engine was concerned, it only required changing a handful of core variables, although beyond that I had to resolve some cursor-related issues, like crashiness related to its screen position and hover data, and the software cursor dirty rect status.

It took about a day to implement terminal swapping and work out all the kinks.

The next stage in building this feature would be to import it into Cogmind while changing as few variables as possible. It doesn’t have to be specifically for endings, and we don’t even need to start by actually changing the terminal dimensions--simply swapping from the default 60-row terminal to another 60-row terminal and back would be sufficient to weed out any issues with regard input or other basic functionality. One step closer to a real use case scenario. That went fine as well!

When and Where

Having passed a simpler test, it was time for the real thing, but exactly where is the best opportunity for a swap to take place? Swapping is a pretty significant cutoff, after all, forming a clear barrier between what is before and after, and there shouldn’t really be much talking between the two sides, at least not on an interface level.

As stated at the beginning, the goal here was to allow animated endings to use 60 rows instead of 45. Given the simplicity of terminal swapping at the engine level, it seems easy enough…

As so many things are, up close it no longer looked so easy.

I originally imagined just having the animation segment of the ending in a different terminal, and tried that for a bit, but the endings (there are so many xD) are a relatively complex collection of classes and processes since they mix and match different components, and it was really hard to untangle what needed to be untangled. Even before considering swapping needs, it turns out that in many cases the process involves multiple windows in varying states of visibility and overlap. While swapping right before an animation would be possible, it would likely be pretty tough to both implement and debug.

Then a new idea popped up: How about instead of focusing so tightly on the animations we move one level higher and handle the entire game over process in its own separate terminal interface? This would include the standard game over screen (losses as well), stats, and restart menu etc. This is a much cleaner break, far easier to pull off without worrying about any serious complications.

The only drawback is that said stats screen would then be in the 60-row terminal interface using the original font size. In other words, back to the smaller font. Still, this might be fine since it’s 1) just text, 2) not a lot of text, 3) only in that one spot, although if we wanted to we could perhaps use the new zoom text font size to display it. Doing so would require reducing the number of listed stats in order to fit in the available space, at least if trying to keep the vertical design. They’re only a tiny subset of those found in the massive scoresheet data, anyway, but I don’t like the idea of further slimming down the already short representative list, so it’s either accept a smaller font size for that particular screen, or eventually go as far as a more significant redesign that makes more use of horizontal space. I tried a few mockups but didn’t like any of them, so nothing will probably change with that at first.

While working on this whole terminal swapping business I also happened to discover that if you manage to close the game window during an ending animation (including the loss animation), it would not overlay the separate program close animation that I added some versions back. This is not an uncommon occurrence, inadvertently uncovering obscure bugs in old, or in some cases very old, parts of the source that were simply never encountered or noticed before. Always a good opportunity to stay alert and fix things :)

One final note: For an article about new tech to support ending animations, there is a curious absence of samples demonstrating the primary use case, but I figured I’d leave those out ;)

This is the third in a multi-part series about building Cogmind’s fully upscaled semi-modal interface layout:

• History and Theory
  
• Holy Mockups
• Dynamic Terminal Swapping
• Simpler Lightweight Fonts
• Completion and Demos

Last time was all about exploring a high-level direction for Cogmind’s shift towards supporting an increased size for interface fonts and tiles by reducing the amount of space available to display information, beginning especially with the map view. Now it’s time to make concrete plans to determine what we can actually fit into a 45-row terminal. Concrete interface plans means… mockups! Lots and lots of mockups.

During my earlier Year 10 of the Cogmind post I shared a collage of the initial set of mockups put together in late November, so today we’ll be referencing a bunch of those individually to examine what needs to happen in order to construct this new UI layout.

We’re now working under the assumption that almost everyone is using a widescreen aspect ratio display. Over a decade ago I didn’t go that far, instead supporting 4:3 by default and allowing for dynamic windows to fill any remaining width. The change doesn’t mean 4:3 players won’t be able to play, of course, there would simply be some letterboxing on the top and bottom (there aren’t yet any plans to make the full game height dynamic, although it wouldn’t be impossible to make it so at some point, just as width is dynamic now).

Before we continue, know that all mockups are designed in size 12, and all of them can be opened to their full size for closer inspection if desired. Also their content may sometimes include items and hint at mechanics that don’t actually exist--we’re just doing layouts, those details aren’t important ;)

It’s mockup time!

Main UI

Cogmind’s main UI is where the player spends the vast majority of their time, and the original goal of its design was to ensure that it provides immediate visual access to anything an experienced player needs without opening any other windows. Dropping from a 60-row to 45-row terminal is going to force us to bend that requirement, so it’s just a question of what to remove.

If you recall from Part 1 I showed a diagram highlighting the absolutely essential parts of the main UI, and the stored inventory is the only subsection of the right-side HUD that is not included in that highlighted area.

Modal Inventory

While a visible inventory can be quite helpful, it’s not what I’d consider absolutely necessary.

Now I wouldn’t have said that many years ago in early Cogmind development, but in the years since then we’ve gotten a lot of inventory-related QoL features that reduce reliance on the inventory window in the first place, for example the slot-specific type-wise swapping menu, or part auto-replacement which makes some common inventory management possible without even looking at the inventory at all, much less directly interact with it.

Altogether this suggests that our number one target for info reduction is to turn the inventory into some sort of modal window as found in pretty much every other roguelike.

It just so happens that the inventory alone saves us 14 lines of height, which is a mere 1 line below what we need :D

The other recovered line comes from removing a previously empty line from the top area, as marked by my notes on the mockup. With the data in that area becoming even denser, the order of the two bottom lines is swapped and the less important optional ones (if visible at all) are darkened to regain some of the desired visual separation.

The inventory is accessible via a button at the bottom of the parts list (and if it works out, simply moving the cursor over that button will also show the inventory and allow interaction that way, no click required).

Pure keyboard players would be able to toggle the inventory window with the ‘i’ key, newly relieved of its functionality as described during the map zoom polishing stage. It will also likely automatically appear/disappear when using related “modal part commands” (the ‘p’ menu).

Aside: I’m currently writing about some of these new UI layout interactions in hypothetical terms, since these are plans rather than actually implemented at this stage, so there may be unforeseen roadblocks or alternatives necessary with respect to specific functionality depending on how everything works out in practice.

Another concept for supporting this new modal inventory is an indicator that pops up in the bottom-right corner of the map showing the name of the item and pointing to the inventory button any time an action adds an item to the inventory (such as picking one up) when it is hidden. These indicators could stack if there’s more than one in a short period, and disappear after a duration. Optional and adjustable, of course.

Dynamic Parts Window

Now it may be that experienced players well-versed in Cogmind’s inventory-related QoL features and familiar with parts, mechanics, and strategies won’t have much trouble managing a modal inventory if necessary. It does, however, interfere a bit with the natural flow of Cogmind’s highly accessible drag-drop interface, a fact which combined with hiding the inventory’s existence by default is not as great for new players.

Does the inventory have to always be hidden? The answer is a resounding NO! Also yay!

While Cogmind can eventually acquire up to 26 item slots to fill, that number starts at only 7, meaning we have 19 lines which start out unused. Recall that the inventory requires 14 lines, and you can see where this is going…

For however long the parts list is capable of appearing in a shorter format and still show everything it needs to (vital, after all), the inventory can just be visible as normal! On starting a new run, with the inventory visible there are still 5 lines of extra space for slots going forward, meaning the inventory does not need to enter a modal state until Cogmind’s third evolution, or entering -7/Factory.

Technically we could also have the parts list shrink again and unhide the inventory if your total slot count is once again reduced below the threshold, for example due to host switching in Polymind, or for, uh, other reasons some of you know ;)

While thinking about all the ways to save space, I also came up with an even more extreme version of this “dynamic parts list,” one that would be optional and definitely off by default. It also wouldn’t even be implemented right away as part of the first iteration, but since we’re talking about mockups we might as well look at it--mockups are practically free :P

Removing the headers and corresponding separators between slot types from the parts list gives us back another 4 lines, equivalent to 2 more evolutions, meaning under this layout style the inventory would not become modal until entering -5/Factory, or half way to the surface.

It’s harder to parse at a glance, but does save space and the essentials are still there, with categories instead reflected with light or dark bars along the side, and I guess they’d need to double as cycle buttons for mouse users who use those (as they normally appear along the separator line).

And with that our main UI is essentially taken care of! The changes I’ve described so far in support of a 45-row interface are enough to keep our main UI highly playable, which was what I was mostly worried about to begin with, being the main UI and all. I was pretty pleased with the [hypothetical] results this should produce, and it’s the main UI so that means we’re mostly done, yeah?! Well, no it turns out there are actually quite a few other things that need to be modified as well xD

Info Windows

There is a range of secondary info windows we’ll need to take a look at, some of which have always been especially crowded, so they could present some new challenges. This category includes item/robot/machine/status info and the machine hacking windows.

What really links all these as part of the same group is that they share the same dimensions and open in the same area: over the map. Based on the original assumption of a minimum 50×50 map view, they were all thus designed for a height of 50 rows. Now what happens when not only the map view is no longer large enough to contain them, but even assuming we no longer limit them to that area, the 45-row interface as a whole isn’t even big enough xD

The most worrisome of the group is item info. In many cases it’s fine with space to spare, but a portion of items have always pushed up against the height limit. Scrolling for stats is something I never want to require on principle, so we have to make do with what space we have.

Potentially helpful here is a feature I already conceived and implemented months prior to even considering a new UI layout: The possibility of a button to open additional mechanical details unique to an item. Item and effect descriptions normally hold this info, especially relevant to utilities, but there were always a handful of weapons (which mostly fill their window with stats) that also have abilities and there isn’t much room to explain those.

This will be especially useful going forward as we get more and more unique items. But for our new layout it’s not enough! Nor is it even suitable since this is only for exception parts rather than the norm. Regardless of this functionality, what used to require up to 50 lines now only has 45. In the end the answer is pretty obvious:

Item art occupies a height of 10 in the item info window, so let’s just move that aside and there’s plenty of space.

Examining the other mockups in this category…

 

 

Escape Menu

The multipage Escape menu, or game menu, is a bit problematic.

It was designed around a 50-row map view, allowing us to display individual page info over the map while also displaying all the commands directly in their relevant main UI windows. I wouldn’t want to redesign it all to change this behavior, and not only because that would be a lot of work, but it was done this way because I very much like the immersive feel provided by that level of integration with the main UI. So we’ll have to find alternative solutions for whatever problems arise… and they’ll definitely arise considering the available space was reduced from 50 rows to 35, a 30% loss xD

The game menu and basic commands page (1) is fine, since that’s kept simple to avoid overwhelming new players with more than they need to know right away.

On the other hand, there’s no way the advanced commands (2) would ever fit. They fully-utilize the map view space, and I had to keep some of the more esoteric ones off the list in the first place, relegating them to the full in-manual list since there simply wasn’t enough room, meaning what is shown with 50 lines is already a somewhat slimmed down version. I tried to see if a two-column approach would be possible in order to fit the minimum required set, but the width is insufficient.

The answer is, finally, subpages. Advanced commands in the map area will just have to be given another page accessed by Left/Right or buttons at the bottom.

Seen above, with our dynamic parts list height the loss of rows also affects the space available to show its commands, but a number of those were either not really used or already covered in the basic commands, so I slimmed that one down just enough to fit.

In-game manual access (3) is pretty dynamic already since it’s just a list of topics and blocks of text, so no issues there.

The options menu (4) is already divided into to columns, both of which mercifully fit into even a 35-row area (well, 33 because we need the menu bar as well). We can attribute this favorable result to the fact that unlike the command list it’s an interactive window, and keyboard players need access, too, so we have lowercase options on the left and uppercase on the right (26 each, plus some lines for headers and category spacing).

What doesn’t fit due to the resize is the option descriptions, which normally display in an area below the options list when hovering the cursor over one. That can be simply be moved to another temporary popup window and we’re done with this page.

The news page (5) is quite simple. No worries there.

Credits (6) doesn’t have a ton of info on it, but definitely gets more squeezed than I prefer, removing a lot of the extra spacing that was available before. In the interest of finishing Cogmind some time this century, I’ll accept it ;)

The Records (7) page itself is just a menu to access more windows so no problem there, but the windows it opens are problematic. Lore Collection, Gallery Collection, and Achievements were all built to the same specification, 55 rows, so we’re going to need to hack away at least 10 of those from each…

For comparison here is the original Achievements mockup used to build the one currently in Cogmind, designed for a 160×60 terminal:

To squeeze everything into 45 rows we need to reduce the number of achievements shown at once, merge and align the menus on the left, and, most importantly, find another way to display the secondary windows below the main one. This latter part is especially important, because all three of our interactive records interfaces use that same format, so whatever happens here needs to work for all of them.

It turns out there’s just enough width to move those things off to the right side, and then the new height comes out to be almost exactly what we need.

I prefer the original layout--spacier, better delineation of areas, but it’s gotta fit within our new restrictions, and thankfully it does without any more hacking.

Lore Collection is the easiest of the three, since like the manual it’s composed of just a topic list and corresponding text blocks. This means we can reduce the height without any real consequences in terms of functionality, and it’s fairly easy to do.

The Gallery Collection gets a bit cramped, removing almost all the extra spacing that was available in its original iteration, and also losing the extra lines devoted to providing extra information for those alpha supporters and others who have their name associated with a particular item (the original purpose of the gallery). I’ll have to figure out a new way to provide that info.

It’s cramped, but it still works. Unlike with Achievements I didn’t want to further reduce the number of object visible at once, since it’s already just nine…

World Map

The world map UI was also built to fit within the map view area, requiring a minimum of 50 rows. We can easily give it the full vertical space, so 45 lines, but that still isn’t enough for its current layout.

It just so happens I wanted to redesign it anyway, since as linked there the original focus was on animating the complete route, which may have not been too bad many years ago, but Cogmind’s world has expanded greatly and routes can get quite long now (which means it takes a while to fully trace). Furthermore, the architecture is such that it actually has to animate the whole thing in order to draw it at all, and it can only be sped up so much, so yeah, something needs to be done here.

It turns out that the original style still works fine, and I rather like it because it provides a very condensed format for reflecting all types of movements, transitions, and maps. Simply by removing the one extra line of padding between each depth we end up with a 41-row interface, which will fit! Like some of the other changes before, it’s a bit cramped but works fine.

I will still have to rebuild it to enable snappy opening, but at least the design is familiar and effective.

A Huge Problem

It was only after drawing all the mockups and taking a ton of notes that I was going through to make sure I hadn’t missed anything when I realized there is a huge problem: the intro/ending animations. Especially the latter. There are a lot of them, they’re pretty involved, and all were designed specifically for a terminal of 60 rows. Wider is fine, but they can’t be adjusted for something shorter. Oh no.

For that I came up with a crazy solution that I’ll be covering next time, in yet another engine-related detour…

This is the second in a multi-part series about building Cogmind’s fully upscaled semi-modal interface layout:

• History and Theory
  
• Holy Mockups!
• Dynamic Terminal Swapping
• Simpler Lightweight Fonts
• Completion and Demos

A long time in coming, but here we go! This marks the beginning of what will be the most significant undertaking in Cogmind’s UI development history: making everything bigger. Not just the map, for which zooming was recently implemented as a toggleable option, but all the text as well.

This will be fun since I do love me some interface work, as evidenced by the massive number of optional QoL features I’ve introduced over the years, but despite pouring many hours into accessibility and streamlined gameplay before, this particular feature took the longest to get to.

Back in Cogmind’s early years I gave strong consideration to implementing it then--put together some mockups, discussed options with the community, and so on, but the time wasn’t right. Back then I couldn’t nail down what would be the most extreme (but still acceptable) options. We didn’t yet know what reasonable limits to put on such a feature, as in what’s the absolute furthest it could go without compromising other parts of the game design. It had to wait.

Being the way a player interacts with all of a game’s content, UI is naturally central to the experience, thus one of the most fundamental aspects a game’s design needs to address is matching up that design with its corresponding system requirements, including the display device!

To take an extreme example, there are obviously different considerations when developing for mobile vs desktop, and the results of the different decisions made to optimize a design for the target platform is also why ports between various platforms don’t always come out the same, whether technically or in terms of feel.

Not surprisingly, starting in the 2010s there began a trend towards developing games in order to ultimately target as many different platforms as possible (desktop and consoles being the most common crossovers), and it was very interesting to see player reactions to this trend, especially PC players lamenting how games were changing to ensure they could accommodate consoles as well. A necessary evil if you want to maximize profits, I guess :P

Finding middle ground so that more people can enjoy a form of entertainment is in some ways also a noble goal, although this naturally waters down the experience at the same time. The more strict your requirements, the more you can make assumptions about the target player’s experience, and in turn optimize a design for what you know to be true. Basically if done right, the end result will be better, for that particular group of players.

And that’s the backdrop for how Cogmind came to be born in its original form over a decade ago, wanting to have a large enough terminal grid to be able to simultaneously show a huge amount of info at once--Cogmind’s terminal dimensions are easily the largest of any roguelike, and also better support very large and active maps--Cogmind has the largest maps of any subterranean roguelike, and also by far the most active maps, with lots of entities milling about doing their own thing, some more or less important than others, but all worth of being aware of for various reasons.

The scope could not be so ambitious without what I decided at the time: This design will lean really heavily into having a large screen to play on. “Large” meaning physically large, resolution being irrelevant since we’re talking about a traditional terminal here, all that info simply appearing bigger when the screen is bigger, the display always being divided into at least a 160×60 grid. (By comparison, the classics use 80×25, and some later roguelikes use something in between, so Cogmind has nearly five times as much display area as the original roguelikes, or several times what is found in some other later roguelikes.)

Fast forward more than 10 years, and a much greater portion of people now play games on laptops, not to mention a greater variety of players have begun discovering and becoming interested in Cogmind, so the demand for alternative interface options is clearly growing ever larger.

Even if not the original target audience, I always wanted to accommodate more people when possible, and although my intention was to wait until somewhere around 1.0 to experiment with the possibilities, it’s also becoming clear that there’s no idea when Cogmind 1.0 will actually happen :P

Fortunately at this point we also have a very clear idea of Cogmind’s development needs, how players interact with the game, and pretty much all the UI considerations and limitations that we’d need to take into account to design the “most extreme” alternative interface layouts that could still work.

So it’s time to do that.

UI Requirements

Cogmind’s original UI concept had two basic requirements: a sufficiently large map view area, and a persistently visible list of all parts.

Parts List

Unlike pretty much every other roguelike in which the player has a mostly persistent set of equipment, Cogmind’s parts list involves items that are subject to frequent tweaking and toggling, or at least warrant much closer turn-by-turn observation due to damage and/or status changes. The list also includes up to 26 different slots at once, whereas other roguelikes generally have half that, at most.

As such, being able to see and interact with this list in its entirety at all times is quite important, so it was given its own area on the interface. That will always be there.

Map View

Seeing the map, where most of the action happens, is also kinda important, too. But how much of it do we want to see at once? How large does this view need to be?

Cogmind was not designed to require widescreen support. In fact, the UI layout we have was originally built to fit snugly in 4:3 aspect ratio, only expanding horizontally to fill more space as available.

Therefore although it can be expanded to show more area, under that layout the minimum map view area allowed was set to 50×50 (in terminal dimensions this is actually 100×50, because map cells are square rather than rectangular, each occupying two terminal cells).

The number 50 is incredibly central to Cogmind’s design, because almost no weapons or active intel should have a range that can exceed the area a player can see by default. Cogmind being a game focused on ranged combat, repeatedly getting attacked from out of view would not be great, nor is having data on enemies roaming around you in multiple directions, known but out of view. These and other drawbacks of a small view area don’t make for an optimal play experience.

Assuming map view dimensions of 50×50, placing Cogmind at the center means the player can see out to a distance of approximately 25 or more in any direction. So ranges should for the most part be kept within that value.

Another reason to have a decently large map view in the first place is, again, the sheer size of maps to explore, and the potentially high level of local activity out there. A view area as large as 50×50 can still only see a mere 1/16th of the area comprising primary maps--more for some smaller maps, and even less for larger ones.

Like some roguelike classics, in TGGW it’s quite nice that you can see the entire map at once without any scrolling whatsoever, though it was clearly designed for such from the outset, with correspondingly short attack and sight ranges, and a smaller amount of concentrated content per floor, making each floor experience short and sweet.

Cogmind needs space for the scope it aims to fill, and a UI to match that, or at least facilitate exploring it instead of having to scroll a million times to form a mental picture, or constantly checking different directions to be aware of potentially impactful developments out there.

Basically from a gameplay standpoint roguelikes are best built with an optimal interface designed with optimal play in mind.

But now let’s switch gears and see what we can do in terms of making everything larger by breaking that design while attempting to mitigate the downsides :D

Alternative UI Layouts, an Evolution

Back in late November over on Patreon (and made available to everyone a little later) I put together a diagram and basic explanation for a hypothetical route Cogmind’s interface could take on the way to something that would expand the potential number of players for which it’s suitable.

Here I’ll be diving into that diagram again to give a more organized summary with some extra details.

Phase 1

The first phase is Cogmind’s current UI layout since mid-2013 when I started the commercial version (the 7DRL version was slightly different, always using 4:3). I’m using 76×50 for the map dimensions since that is the default map view width for 1080p users, which comprise the majority of players. As you can see, both the base sight range and good sensor/attack ranges are safely within the map view (these images are all drawn to scale!).

Phase 2

Before I started considering an immediate move to an across-the-board increase in cell size, I experimented with just zooming the map. Early experiments were promising enough to convince me to just do it--plow through the implementation and see what it feels like in practice (I wrote a series on that).

One argument for prioritizing map zoom over figuring out how to enlarge the rest of the UI (if even possible) could be that such an approach might just be satisfactory for some players who say they’d prefer “a larger interface.”

Most play time is spent looking at the map, after all, and although this would not impact text in the rest of the interface, humans are better at recognizing familiar letters at smaller sizes than, say, game-specific monochrome sprites on a map. While Cogmind’s tiles were designed to be fairly recognizable via general shape, that’s still not comparable to our existing familiarity with letters (on that note, this is also why Cogmind ASCII mode can be more easily enjoyed on smaller screens than tiles).

That said, for everyone else who still can’t handle the smaller text, a zoomable map would only serve to further highlight the disparity between tile size and text size. Not only that, but as you can see from the Phase 2 diagram above, playing with the map zoomed pushes even base attack/sight/intel ranges somewhat out of view, much less enhanced the ranges. We’re going to need some powerful QoL features to make that playable in a serious capacity! (Update 240211: Some time after finishing this article I put together another piece detailing all that, with numerous demos.)

In that light, I decided it wouldn’t be a great idea to release just a Phase 2 UI with map zooming. I think for a lot of people it would feel more like a band-aid than a complete solution, and the latter is what I’d rather provide, especially as this will define a portion of peoples’ first impressions of a “new and improved” UI.

Phase 3

Phases 1 and 2 combined are basically the same old Cogmind interface, just with the ability to zoom the map (and supporting QoL features in that case). Phase 3 is a significant departure from the norm and requires a lot more work to realize.

The differences start at the lowest level, converting what has always been a 60-row terminal console to one that only requires 45 rows. This allows for an up to 33% increase in font size from what everyone is using now. For example if you have a 1080p resolution, 60 rows translates to a font size of 18 (=1080/60), where 45 rows would instead translate to a font size of 24 (=1080/45). So anyone currently using a size 18 font would see their maximum increased to 24, a 33% boost.

The increase in font size results in a 44% reduction in total space to display info, and a 54% decrease in visible map area, which is a lot, but the latter is at least less severe than that caused by Phase 2 map zooming, which drops visible map area by 75%! The main difference is that Phase 2 zooming can be toggled in real time, whereas this info loss to accommodate a 45-row architecture by default is not capable of seeing full ranges as originally designed.

That said, as long as the QoL features built around map zooming work out well enough, they can also be of help in the Phase 3 UI, which technically already handles most ranges fairly well, and keeps the base sight range fully within its boundaries.

Overall I believe if given a choice between using a Phase 1/2 interface or Phase 3, the latter is probably a preferable default (except for among a good portion of current/frequent players who are quite used to having easy and efficient access to all the info provided by the regular interface).

And once players are using this Phase 3 layout, map zooming will likely become less useful overall (docked before it’s even been introduced xD). For one it would shrink the map view even more ridiculously, while turning size 24 tiles in our 1080p example above into 48px tiles, which is kinda huge :P

That’s probably overkill for most needs, though I can see zooming occasionally coming in handy for some people who still prefer the regular UI layout. In any case we’ll have stats on preferences in the future, and it’ll be very interesting to see how usage of various modes, and map zooming, plays out. (I can say that so far among the patrons who have access to test builds with zooming/Phase 2 enabled, almost no one is making serious use of the feature, but that’s not saying a whole lot because they were frequent players used to the playing without zooming to begin with.)

One welcome side effect of the font size increase is that 1080p players, who as noted form the majority, will be using size 24, which is a 2x upscale of the base tile size, in other words the original size for which the tile designs were optimized! Both myself and Kacper (the tileset artist who created most of them) are very happy about this :) (2160p players will also have access to such a multiple as one of their options)

So the next job in this process is to figure out how to squeeze Cogmind’s normal 60-row interface into only 45. Say goodbye to 15 rows from… somewhere :P

This will require a fair number of window and content adjustments, but it’s doable, with the biggest change being a semi-modal inventory. I’ll cover that part of the design in my next article, along with mockups and a more detailed look at just what we need to change.

One potential drawback of our map view returning to its original “pre-widescreen” width of 50 is that it goes against the flow of Cogmind’s on-map QoL design work. Because pretty much everyone has a horizontal rectangular map view wider than the area originally required by design, over the years we’ve benefited from some new interface elements that appear directly over the sides and/or corners of the map--alert messages, full combat log, special mode UIs, audio log, achievement popups… These will now be closer to Cogmind and potentially crowd the view under some circumstances, so we’ll have to see how they fare and whether some kinds of new adjustments are required.

Anyway, after being pleasantly surprised by the map zooming feature of Phase 2, I look forward to seeing how Phase 3 turns out :D

Phase 4

Phase 3 is definitely being worked on now, with plans to release it in early 2024. There is no timeline for Phase 4, and whether or not it could even happen depends on the outcome of Phase 3, but purely in theoretical terms it seems like a natural progression from Phase 3 that isn’t completely out of the question.

In the interest of reclaiming more of our map view, I like the concept of making the top-side windows modal as well, and see it as a reasonable possibility, if requiring yet more compromises to convenience and gameplay efficiency.

At the same time, doing this would have some nice advantages over Phase 3, like almost fully restoring our original 50×50 map view, and also alleviating some of aforementioned corner/side pressure caused by other on-map UI elements.

This is the first in a multi-part series about building Cogmind’s fully upscaled semi-modal interface layout:

• History and Theory
• Holy Mockups!
  
• Dynamic Terminal Swapping
• Simpler Lightweight Fonts
• Completion and Demos