Author Topic: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.15.0-dev+73b131a (combined launcher/installer)  (Read 422742 times)

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Offline jr2

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
Hmmmmmm... all settings saved to .ini, right?  If so you could do: settings.ini, autosave.ini, undo.ini and undo.bak

On program load,
1) undo.ini gets copied to undo.bak
2) then settings.ini gets copied to undo.ini
3) changes made to settings are immediately written to autosave.ini
4) upon clicking "save", autosave.ini gets copied to settings.ini
5) if instead you click "undo", undo.ini gets loaded (and gets copied to settings.ini if you then click "save")
6) clicking "restore" loads undo.bak, whereupon it can be saved.

Probably an overcomplicated way of doing things, just an idea I had.  :warp:

 

Offline Yasuo

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
I'm now at a point where I have to start working on the new UI. (...) I've made a quick mockup. I'm not quite happy with the result but it's a starting point. (...) At this point, I'm open to any changes since it's still in a very early stage.
Hi ngld,

thank you for hard work! I've taken the liberty to modify your mockup a bit.

What I always wanted is the ability to rate the mods I've played (nothing online, just for me so I know which ones I want to revisit) and to mark the mods I have completed (currently I am using a separate txt file), so I've incorporated several versions of rating icons. You might notice that stars are so well-established for rating that circles and boxes look like progress indicators or something while stars are clear. The checkboxes on the sidebar of the rightmost mod are for update status (replacing the triangle in 0.14.3) and completion status.
Also tried to unclutter the UI a bit and add a bigger tile for the last played mod that the user is most likely to return to (no big tile if the last played mod was marked completed (= played through) by the user). Brightened the tooltip to separate it from the background. Perhaps it should be either round or sharp corners, not both mixed. Regarding the settings: applying directly without confirmation is becoming the standard so perhaps you could remove the main save button and only keep the one for the global flags, since these settings are more complex and need more deliberation.

What do you think?

Btw: any chance of getting AUR updates again? With the help of the comments there, it was an easy fix, but if you don't have the time, perhaps somebody else can maintain it?

[attachment deleted to save space]
« Last Edit: March 17, 2021, 10:03:04 pm by Yasuo »

 

Offline ngld

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
You know that 'save' button you have to hit to save your settings changes and if you don't they don't get applied. Please make that button visible on the settings screen without scrolling down. ****ed me up good
I'll definitely fix that. I'm trying to have the dialogs always use the complete available height which means you'll likely see less scrollbars overall. If a dialog requires scrolling, it'll hit the bottom of the window which will hopefully make it more obvious.

What I always wanted is the ability to rate the mods I've played (nothing online, just for me so I know which ones I want to revisit) and to mark the mods I have completed (currently I am using a separate txt file), so I've incorporated several versions of rating icons. You might notice that stars are so well-established for rating that circles and boxes look like progress indicators or something while stars are clear. The checkboxes on the sidebar of the rightmost mod are for update status (replacing the triangle in 0.14.3) and completion status.
One of the planned features for the Knossos rewrite are user tags which give users the ability to assign tags to installed mods. If you have bought games on GOG, you can check their implementation for an example how this could look. IMO that's a more powerful system since you could put mods into several categories (backlog, completed, todo, replay after next update, ...) instead of just having a single completed yes/no checkbox.
Rating mods could be a useful but definitely not a high-priority. Making sure that Knossos can install, launch and upload mods is more important. I'll put local mod ratings on the wishlist for now.

Also tried to unclutter the UI a bit and add a bigger tile for the last played mod that the user is most likely to return to (no big tile if the last played mod was marked completed (= played through) by the user).
I don't really like the uncluttered UI. The version number is displayed in the title bar to make it easier to spot in screenshots (since that part is usually part of screenshots but parts in the bottom area aren't always captured.
Moving the active tasks to the bottom makes them less visible which doesn't quite solve the problem I added that UI element in the first place.
Regarding the bigger tile: We don't have larger tile images which means we'd have to stretch the existing tiles which would look bad (as your example clearly shows) so that's not an option.

Brightened the tooltip to separate it from the background.
That's actually a good idea.

Perhaps it should be either round or sharp corners, not both mixed.
The only sharp corners right now are the mod tiles which are sharp because they're part of a grid and rounded corners don't really work with grids IMO.

Regarding the settings: applying directly without confirmation is becoming the standard so perhaps you could remove the main save button and only keep the one for the global flags, since these settings are more complex and need more deliberation.
The current settings screen has a save button due to the way it's implemented. Saving after every change would require a lot of work to detect the various changes and would be pretty slow. I'll try to fix that in the rewrite but I can't promise anything right now.

Btw: any chance of getting AUR updates again? With the help of the comments there, it was an easy fix, but if you don't have the time, perhaps somebody else can maintain it?
I'll take a look tonight. My main issue is that I'm not using Arch nearly as often as I used to so testing has become a bit harder. If anyone wants to take over and can give the package the love it deserves, I'd be happy to hand it over.
« Last Edit: March 19, 2021, 03:43:54 pm by ngld »

  
Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
Btw: any chance of getting AUR updates again? With the help of the comments there, it was an easy fix, but if you don't have the time, perhaps somebody else can maintain it?
I'll take a look tonight. My main issue is that I'm not using Arch nearly as often as I used to so testing has become a bit harder. If anyone wants to take over and can give the package the love it deserves, I'd be happy to hand it over.

It's been some time since I last installed knossos from AUR, but I should have a working PKGBUILD lying around. If you make me a maintainer I could put it up. Another issue with knossos on Arch is that it breaks with every new minor version of python3, though, because it's installed only in the old version's library path.

A proper fix to that would probably be a hook that reinstalls knossos on every python update, but I would view that an excessive amount of work considering nuKnossos is (if I understand correctly) not a python application, and will no longer need it.

Nevertheless, if you'd like me to put up my PKGBUILD, I can do so.

 

Offline ngld

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
If you PM me your username on the AUR, I'll give you maintainer access (apparently you can just add co-maintainers now through the web UI).

[...] considering nuKnossos is (if I understand correctly) not a python application, and will no longer need it.
That's correct. NuKnossos is a C++ application with a few bundled libraries which should make it much easier to distribute.

 

Offline 0rph3u5

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
You know that 'save' button you have to hit to save your settings changes and if you don't they don't get applied. Please make that button visible on the settings screen without scrolling down. ****ed me up good
I'll definitely fix that. I'm trying to have the dialogs always use the complete available height which means you'll likely see less scrollbars overall. If a dialog requires scrolling, it'll hit the bottom of the window which will hopefully make it more obvious.

Will that also adress the button placement when you are editing the Dependencies of a Package in the Development-tab? (see attachment) - I've deleted a core package one-too-many time when all I wanted was to remove the MediaVPs dependency (sometimes you just want to get rid of the associated trouble with their updates)...

[attachment deleted to save space]
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==================

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Offline ngld

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
Yes, clarifying that screen (as well as fixing the mismatched buttons and the weird offset in the tab rows at the top) is definitely on my TODO list. The first release of NuKnossos won't have a functional dev tab, though, since the dev tab will probably take a significant amount of time and I want to make sure that mod installs work before I worry about uploading.

 

Offline Yasuo

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
@ngld @themaddin
Thank you very much for the AUR update!

@ngld
User tags sounds good - being able to tag favorite mods for replaying or to create a tag for any number of stars would make a separate rating system obsolete. Tags could have user-assigned colors that would be displayed on the mod tiles so the user does not have to click on each mod to see the tags.

Some adjustments
- version number relocated
- one type of corners
- tags
- centered play/explore/build/ as well as screenshot/filter/settings
- active tasks more visible (if you still prefer it at the top, I'd recommend an animated busy icon instead of the text)



[attachment deleted to save space]

 

Offline Trivial Psychic

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
After being a stubborn wxLauncher user for years, and being constantly told that I am handicapping myself by remaining with that launcher, I've finally decided to migrate to Knossos, but my first impressions are leaving a sour taste in my mouth.  I can't launch FSO.  I've got the latest build selected and it IS in the bin folder, but as soon as I select a downloaded mod and select Play, I get a split-second message in the space next to the search button saying "starting FSO...", but nothing happens.  I check in windows' processes, and there's no fso build running.

I am at a loss.  Am I S.O.L.?
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Offline Iain Baker

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
After being a stubborn wxLauncher user for years, and being constantly told that I am handicapping myself by remaining with that launcher, I've finally decided to migrate to Knossos, but my first impressions are leaving a sour taste in my mouth.  I can't launch FSO.  I've got the latest build selected and it IS in the bin folder, but as soon as I select a downloaded mod and select Play, I get a split-second message in the space next to the search button saying "starting FSO...", but nothing happens.  I check in windows' processes, and there's no fso build running.

I am at a loss.  Am I S.O.L.?

I had this on and off for a few years, and I couldn't figure out what was causing it. In the end it turned out to be my thrustmaster HOTAS causing the problem. It has a switch for PS3 or PC mode. Turns out if you accidently knock the switch to PS3 mode Knossos won't launch campaigns. Switching it back to PC mode fixed the problem immediately. So it appears that controllers (and possibly other hardware) can cause issues, so perhaps try using different hardware and see what happens. Hope this helps :-)
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Offline Trivial Psychic

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
Thanks for responding, and while I DO have a Thrustmaster 1600, the only switch I can find changes it between right and left handed mode.

Update:
*Headslap*

For some reason, my FSO build within the specific mod, was set to a FRED build.  I don't know how THAT happenned, also I hadn't specified my Thrustmaster stick but I doubt that had anything to do with it.  Anyway, it's working smoothly now as far as I can tell.

Sorry about my outburst earlier.
« Last Edit: March 28, 2021, 11:50:18 am by Trivial Psychic »
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Offline D-420

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
Something, seems to be rather odd.
I've gotten this whole thing installed, told it where my FS2 install is and everything, but, rather suddenly, uh, every single mod I've tried to install, and basegame FS2 have all disappeared from the menu. Supposedly it's still downloading things, (though 'loading installed mods' hasn't moved from 0 the whole time,) but, as it seems to refuse to knowledge that ST:R, the mediaVPs, Blue Planet exist, I can't really check that.

They're not just not in the home menu, they're not in the explore menu; searching turns up nothing. I'm, not really sure what to do.
Just, let it run until it stops downloading?


Edit: Yes, apparently. They're all back now.
« Last Edit: March 28, 2021, 06:35:13 pm by D-420 »
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Offline jr2

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
Thanks for responding, and while I DO have a Thrustmaster 1600, the only switch I can find changes it between right and left handed mode.

Update:
*Headslap*

For some reason, my FSO build within the specific mod, was set to a FRED build.  I don't know how THAT happenned, also I hadn't specified my Thrustmaster stick but I doubt that had anything to do with it.  Anyway, it's working smoothly now as far as I can tell.

Sorry about my outburst earlier.

This (FRED build selected) should come back with a more useful error for the user IMHO.  As well as any hardware issues.  Maybe print the last 10 lines from the log to an error message with a button to open the entire log file if nothing else.  Otherwise the user is left clueless and frustrated. 

 

Offline ngld

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
This (FRED build selected) should come back with a more useful error for the user IMHO.  As well as any hardware issues.  Maybe print the last 10 lines from the log to an error message with a button to open the entire log file if nothing else.  Otherwise the user is left clueless and frustrated. 
Knossos should always display an error when FSO launching doesn't result in FSO running for at least a few seconds. However, for whatever reason there is a bug that causes FSO launching to fail without any message. The most common reason seems to be not having any joystick selected (selecting a specific joystick or just "No joystick" and saving the settings seems to fix the issue). I have no idea what the cause is and my only guess is that it's caused by an uncaught exception somewhere but heck if I know where. It's one of the many reasons I'm rewriting Knossos from scratch. I can't reproduce this bug, noone else has any clue why this happens and I can't reproduce it.  :banghead:


@ngld
User tags sounds good - being able to tag favorite mods for replaying or to create a tag for any number of stars would make a separate rating system obsolete. Tags could have user-assigned colors that would be displayed on the mod tiles so the user does not have to click on each mod to see the tags.

Some adjustments
- version number relocated
- one type of corners
- tags
- centered play/explore/build/ as well as screenshot/filter/settings
- active tasks more visible (if you still prefer it at the top, I'd recommend an animated busy icon instead of the text)

I really like what you've done with the version numbers and tiles. Regarding the tasks: Would it make sense to turn it into an icon and add it to the icon bar? It'd be a darker shade by default but become bright like the other icons once at least one task is running. I could also add a badge to show the amount of currently running tasks.
I'll have to test how annoying the new position of the tabs (Play/Explore/Build) is since spreading them out means you have to move your cursor further to reach the ones further right (most of the important stuff is on the left).

Would it make sense to add themes as an option? Most of this is only CSS after all, so it wouldn't be hard to add themes through CSS files which would allow users (or TCs?) to tweak the way Knossos looks.

EDIT: I forgot to add that some of the info you put on your mockup is kinda hard to obtain. The last played mod and time spent are easy to figure out since Knossos can easily track both. Progress, current campaign, current mission and difficulty would require parsing pilot files. The difficulty is pretty easy to retrieve for modern JSON pilot files but much harder for older pilots. Campaign saves are still stored in a binary format. I'd have to figure out how that changed between FSO versions and how hard it is to parse but it's probably not worth the effort.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2021, 10:25:42 am by ngld »

 

Offline Iain Baker

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
It's one of the many reasons I'm rewriting Knossos from scratch. I can't reproduce this bug, noone else has any clue why this happens and I can't reproduce it:banghead:




I could send you my old slightly broken thrustmaster with the PC - PS3 switch, that could probably replicate it.
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Offline jr2

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
It's one of the many reasons I'm rewriting Knossos from scratch. I can't reproduce this bug, noone else has any clue why this happens and I can't reproduce it:banghead:




I could send you my old slightly broken thrustmaster with the PC - PS3 switch, that could probably replicate it.

I wonder if you could do something similar via software such as vJoy and / or xPadder?  IDK how all that works though, probably not that easy.

 

Offline Yasuo

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
I really like what you've done with the version numbers and tiles.
Thank you!

Regarding the tasks: Would it make sense to turn it into an icon and add it to the icon bar? It'd be a darker shade by default but become bright like the other icons once at least one task is running. I could also add a badge to show the amount of currently running tasks.
If it is not too difficult, I would use a animated icon, like in internet browsers. Users are used to having to wait when they see something like this. If it is a bad idea to close Knossos while background tasks are active, you could catch the window close event and display a warning that it is not advisable to close now.

I'll have to test how annoying the new position of the tabs (Play/Explore/Build) is since spreading them out means you have to move your cursor further to reach the ones further right (most of the important stuff is on the left).
The clickable area could be maximized so there are no gaps inbetween. For development/heavy use, assigning shortcuts like ASD or Del/End/PgDwn (energy management keys) would reduce mouse movement.

Would it make sense to add themes as an option? Most of this is only CSS after all, so it wouldn't be hard to add themes through CSS files which would allow users (or TCs?) to tweak the way Knossos looks.
There might be some people wanting to customize everything - interesting idea to offer TCs the option to go the extra mile. From my point of view, there's not much need for customization as long as the default is using a dark theme. Just being clean and functional with a touch of scifi might be good enough.

EDIT: I forgot to add that some of the info you put on your mockup is kinda hard to obtain. The last played mod and time spent are easy to figure out since Knossos can easily track both. Progress, current campaign, current mission and difficulty would require parsing pilot files. The difficulty is pretty easy to retrieve for modern JSON pilot files but much harder for older pilots. Campaign saves are still stored in a binary format. I'd have to figure out how that changed between FSO versions and how hard it is to parse but it's probably not worth the effort.
That's okay, I was just putting in stuff that crossed my mind.

New mockup
- circular progress indicator (tooltip could show details)
- reduced active mod height
- reduced info
- resized Play/Explore/Build
- new font



[attachment deleted to save space]
« Last Edit: April 06, 2021, 06:07:15 pm by Yasuo »

 

Offline Mito [PL]

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
Hot damn, it's really fantastic to see Knossos being worked on again. You're a godsend, ngld. So I figured I would sneak in a couple of my thoughts on the subject because I also have some ideas and feedback.

Firstly, about the Nebula moderators (or as I would prefer to call it, the Caretaker role): in my opinion, there should be at least two of such active users in the community, obviously trustworthy, with some level of access to all mods for housekeeping reasons. Updating old mods to higher dependancy versions based on player feedback (after determining that it's properly playable, of course) would be the obvious task to do, but I can also think of resolving duplicates (there are two "Rogues!" mods in Knossos at this point in time, for example), assigning tags, helping people manage their mods in general, or maybe removing things that are widely not accepted (that is, responding to possible troll action). There are a couple other things but that'd depend on what features nuKnossos would have.


Secondly, the interface. From my perspective as a player, a big part of the interface telling me what mod I played recently is completely unnecessary, as when I sit at my computer, I know pretty well what I want to play :P And well, difficulty and campaign progress are player file specific, so getting that right might be quite difficult to do.

Before anything, in my opinion a way to make the interface a bit more straightforward is to allow the users to hide modding resources in a similar way to how FSO builds are handled currently in Knossos. This has been a source of unnecessary clutter lately. I also think that the Explore tab (maybe Home too, depends) needs a little bit of categorising: modding resources could be fully hidden in Home tab but could get a separate category at the tail end of Explore. Total conversions should definitely get their own category too. As for the rest of Freespace content, I'm not too sure how to specifically categorise it... discuss?

Another useful thing would obviously be sorting mods. For now I can think that current sorting methods are definitely fine, but I would suggest adding "download size (minimum packages)" and "download size (all packages)" to Explore tab sorting, I think it might be of use for people who at the point in time have no decent Internet connection but still want to download something new. Happens to me a lot.

In my opinion, Knossos would benefit from a piece of interface that would act as a news outlet, so to say. I think it could be just a minimal several line long text box near the top that would report new events happening on Nebula (and possibly in the community forum), for example think of something like this:

[Update] Blue Planet Complete v1.2.3 now available!
[Update] Uncharted Territory v1.5.0 now available!
[Release] Dragon's Roar has been released!
[Forum] Screencap contest 04/2021: winner announced!

And it would be absolutely fantastic if it would have been linked to a similar active news box here in the forum. For me that could completely replace the "Last played" part of the interface, but I also thought that it's possible to have both.


How about splitting the current Home tab into two, a Home tab and Library tab? The Home tab could host, for example: the entire "Last played" interface, a "suggested" list/box under it, displaying the tiles of several previously played mods or something, and then a more exhaustive list of news underneath. The Library tab would then just take over the current functionality of current Home tab, that is browsing through all installed mods.

The reason why I'm pushing the idea of an immediately visible news box is for attracting and keeping the attention of players. Seeing a bunch of news about updates, releases and activities happening every couple days around here pretty strongly tells newcomers one important thing: Things Are Constantly Happening Here. This game is the furthest away from "dead" since its release. There's a lot of content, and activity is constantly buzzing. And it doesn't come from the optional and rare visit to the forums, or the Discord - as soon as you launch the game, you get to know that there's lots of activity around it.


As for rating mods, I believe that was discussed back in the day and ended with a "no" both for technical and, well, interpersonal reasons. I think it's pretty understandable that it's hard to give someone a bad score without it feeling hurtful. I personally would be one for some short reviews/comments instead (obviously moderated by the Caretakers), possibly combined with star ratings if the users rating it would explain why they picked this specific score.


Besides this, I have a couple more ideas forming but for now let me just suggest a tiny detail: in Yasuo's suggested layout, the "up-to-date" box looks interactive, and I presume it isn't. How about changing it to just a green tick, without the box?
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Offline ngld

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
I could send you my old slightly broken thrustmaster with the PC - PS3 switch, that could probably replicate it.
Thanks for the offer but I'm hoping that NuKnossos won't share the same issue (since it works completely differently). I'll get back to you if the issue reappears.

If it is not too difficult, I would use a animated icon, like in internet browsers. Users are used to having to wait when they see something like this. If it is a bad idea to close Knossos while background tasks are active, you could catch the window close event and display a warning that it is not advisable to close now.
An animated icon sounds like a good solution. I might remove it later if it proves too annoying but that seems unlikely. If you try to close Knossos while background tasks are still running, you'll get the same message you get now (with the addition of an option to cancel running tasks which isn't possible right now).

There might be some people wanting to customize everything - interesting idea to offer TCs the option to go the extra mile. From my point of view, there's not much need for customization as long as the default is using a dark theme. Just being clean and functional with a touch of scifi might be good enough.
The idea with TCs comes from way back before Knossos even was a thing. A few TCs wanted a nice installer and IIRC there even was a modified version of wxLauncher for Diaspora? Not sure, it's been too long.
Anyway, properly handling TCs in the UI is still a complicated problem for me because we don't want to make users believe that they need FS2 to play any TCs but on the other hand we want to tell them that there are so many more mods beyond just TCs which they can play once they buy FS2 (which is incredibly cheap considering what you get with FSO, mods, etc.).
But that's a problem for later. Knossos has to work first before I can spend time debating details like this.



Hot damn, it's really fantastic to see Knossos being worked on again. You're a godsend, ngld. So I figured I would sneak in a couple of my thoughts on the subject because I also have some ideas and feedback.
It's nice to be back again. :)

Firstly, about the Nebula moderators (or as I would prefer to call it, the Caretaker role): in my opinion, there should be at least two of such active users in the community, obviously trustworthy, with some level of access to all mods for housekeeping reasons. Updating old mods to higher dependancy versions based on player feedback (after determining that it's properly playable, of course) would be the obvious task to do, but I can also think of resolving duplicates (there are two "Rogues!" mods in Knossos at this point in time, for example), assigning tags, helping people manage their mods in general, or maybe removing things that are widely not accepted (that is, responding to possible troll action). There are a couple other things but that'd depend on what features nuKnossos would have.
I mostly agree. Depending on how things go we might end up having caretakers (for public mods) and moderators (which can also access private mods to resolve disputes if necessary or remove obvious abuse i.e. if someone starts uploading stuff that has nothing to do with FSO as a private mod).
Something that's been hard for me to decide is who should fulfill this role. First of all, we'd need volunteers who are trusted to handle the job. At first the logical solution seemed to be to ask forum or Discord mods but I'm not sure if they'd even want to do this. I think we'll need a public discussion to decide this. We'll see.

Secondly, the interface. From my perspective as a player, a big part of the interface telling me what mod I played recently is completely unnecessary, as when I sit at my computer, I know pretty well what I want to play :P And well, difficulty and campaign progress are player file specific, so getting that right might be quite difficult to do.
The idea reminded me of the way Steam shows your recent games as the default home screen. Showing the most recently played mod in some capacity might be useful since you're most likely to play that mod again unless you've finished it already.

Before anything, in my opinion a way to make the interface a bit more straightforward is to allow the users to hide modding resources in a similar way to how FSO builds are handled currently in Knossos. This has been a source of unnecessary clutter lately. I also think that the Explore tab (maybe Home too, depends) needs a little bit of categorising: modding resources could be fully hidden in Home tab but could get a separate category at the tail end of Explore. Total conversions should definitely get their own category too. As for the rest of Freespace content, I'm not too sure how to specifically categorise it... discuss?
My current plan is to use tags for this instead of rigid categories. Certain tags would be hidden by default (engine, mod resource, test mod, ...) but the user would be able to add or remove tags from that list to tweak which mods they see (or don't want to see). This could also handle other edge cases like Novachen's translations.
I'm not sure how grouping mods under certain headers would work since I want to keep this system fairly simple (filtering mods by tag is still fairly easy to implement) but this could work if you knew that only a few mods would show up under each heading (most people don't scroll to the end and would end up missing later groups if too many mods end up in one of the earlier groups). This might not be an issue with things like mod resources since those are most useful for people explicitly looking for them. In any case, I feel like a good filtering interface would work better than grouping mods under headers.

Another useful thing would obviously be sorting mods. For now I can think that current sorting methods are definitely fine, but I would suggest adding "download size (minimum packages)" and "download size (all packages)" to Explore tab sorting, I think it might be of use for people who at the point in time have no decent Internet connection but still want to download something new. Happens to me a lot.
Calculating those download sizes might be an interesting challenge since those should include dependencies (but ideally only dependencies that you don't have installed already). Other sorting methods I've thought of are most recently played, most recently updated

In my opinion, Knossos would benefit from a piece of interface that would act as a news outlet, so to say. I think it could be just a minimal several line long text box near the top that would report new events happening on Nebula (and possibly in the community forum), for example think of something like this:

[Update] Blue Planet Complete v1.2.3 now available!
[Update] Uncharted Territory v1.5.0 now available!
[Release] Dragon's Roar has been released!
[Forum] Screencap contest 04/2021: winner announced!

And it would be absolutely fantastic if it would have been linked to a similar active news box here in the forum. For me that could completely replace the "Last played" part of the interface, but I also thought that it's possible to have both.
This idea has been thrown around for old Knossos as well and was actually planned but never became a reality because it's not easy to implement and I was running out of free time by the time the other parts for Knossos were done. The update / release events themselves are fairly easy to implement. The hardest part for that is where they should appear on the UI but I think this fits nicely with your idea of the new Home tab in the next section.
The issue with the forum integration is that it either has to be very simple (i.e. just a list of recent highlights) or something someone has to maintain.

How about splitting the current Home tab into two, a Home tab and Library tab? The Home tab could host, for example: the entire "Last played" interface, a "suggested" list/box under it, displaying the tiles of several previously played mods or something, and then a more exhaustive list of news underneath. The Library tab would then just take over the current functionality of current Home tab, that is browsing through all installed mods.

The reason why I'm pushing the idea of an immediately visible news box is for attracting and keeping the attention of players. Seeing a bunch of news about updates, releases and activities happening every couple days around here pretty strongly tells newcomers one important thing: Things Are Constantly Happening Here. This game is the furthest away from "dead" since its release. There's a lot of content, and activity is constantly buzzing. And it doesn't come from the optional and rare visit to the forums, or the Discord - as soon as you launch the game, you get to know that there's lots of activity around it.
I fully agree on the idea of the news box. As I mentioned before, the main issue with that with old Knossos was that there wasn't an obvious place for it in the UI and that it wasn't trivial to implement.
Knossos is something a lot of players will see and showing them what's happening around here might help encourage some players to be more active in the forum or Discord (might be wishful thinking but it's worth a try).

I'm not sure about suggesting mods because that's a whole can of worms that I don't want to deal with right now. I think it'll inevitably lead to people complaining that some mods are recommended more often than others or that some mods might not be recommended at all. To avoid that the algorithm would have to be fair and that sounds like a lot of effort that I'd rather spend on core features (like mod installation) instead.

As for rating mods, I believe that was discussed back in the day and ended with a "no" both for technical and, well, interpersonal reasons. I think it's pretty understandable that it's hard to give someone a bad score without it feeling hurtful. I personally would be one for some short reviews/comments instead (obviously moderated by the Caretakers), possibly combined with star ratings if the users rating it would explain why they picked this specific score.
I definitely want to add an easy way to leave comments and feedback. Something like "Hey, you just finished this campaign / mod. Do you want to leave a comment for the author?". I'm not sure if that comment should stay on Nebula / Knossos or if it should be posted to the forum (release thread?) and/or Discord.

Besides this, I have a couple more ideas forming but for now let me just suggest a tiny detail: in Yasuo's suggested layout, the "up-to-date" box looks interactive, and I presume it isn't. How about changing it to just a green tick, without the box?
Not sure, I'll probably end up using one of the icons from an icon collection that's already used in Knossos, though, to stay consistent with the other icons. It'd also be easier than adding a new icon set just for that.

Thanks for the detailed feedback! There are a lot of things that should be discussed with a greater audience and I've been wondering if I should post a new thread for NuKnossos since I doubt that many people read long threads like this one. However, I feel like it's better to hold off on any kind of big announcement until we have an alpha with basic functionality.

Thankfully, we're getting closer. NuKnossos can already import mods from an old Knossos installation, launch mods and render most of the Details page and some settings that used to be on the FSO Settings screen. I still have to finish the new screens, make sure saving works as expected and finally mod installation, update, etc. and global FSO settings.

Here are some screenshots of the current UI. There's a lot of polishing left to do and I haven't applied any of the feedback from Yasuo, yet. However,this shoudl give you an impression of what is already there and what isn't.



I've moved the mod title and version selector out of the banner image which IMO looks a lot better. There are alos a few new tabs.


The dependencies tab adds an easy way to change dependencies. The flags tab just has a list of FSO flags like the one in old Knossos. However, since this is just a tab on the details page, you only have one scrollbar which should make it less confusing than the current dialog and the save button most likely won't be necessary which means you can't forget to click it.

 

Offline mjn.mixael

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Re: PUBLIC BETA: Knossos 0.14.3 (combined launcher/installer)
Noticed all the github updates; looks like new knossos is coming along nicely.

I approve these UI changes. The old color buttons were getting a little long in the tooth... and I really like Play Explore Build. :yes: I also really love the idea of mod page tabs with further details. That's a great touch that I'd love to be slightly extended.

Further tabs I'd love to see for mod pages are...
-Staff list, which could include staff that don't have a Nebula account (So kind of a mix between knossos mod owners and mod dev credits). It should also highlight the mod owner so we know who to contact if a mod has issues. I'm thinking specifically of the large number of older mods that myself or PIe uploaded.
-Changelog for versions. Unsure if this should be just a text field for devs to write in or if Knossos should have a specific place for devs to enter changes when increasing versions.
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