Re: [Wesnoth-dev] What to do with the Advanced Tab

[Richard Kettering]

On Aug 1, 2005, at 10:33 AM, John McNabb wrote:

I disagree.  I see no reason to remove advanced preferences.  The fact that 

they are different from other preferences and perhaps more difficult to use 

should be no surprise, since they are "advanced" after all.  I would be ok with 

improvements, but I don't see a need to eliminate the tab.

Likewise - it is very useful to a number of "non-hacker" campaign developers, who probably have no idea how to set such a preference otherwise.  I'd preface this by saying that I have never, myself, used the advanced preference tab, but I understand full well how useful it is.

The litmus test is if I, as what ought to be an example of a very proficient computer user (not saying anything about high level skills that I would not place in the "user" domain), have no idea how to do something like that off the top of my head, then it likely will take someone a good few hours of searching around before they figure out how on earth to do that.  I'm not joking - at least a full half hour of looking over the wiki, trying to find the right command, then maybe an hour or two trying to figure out how on earth to use the command line to enter it in  (I'm assuming we're talking about options that could be set by either editing the preferences file, or options that can be appended to the program launch from the command line).

Heck, the only reason I know how to launch the program from the command line is because I asked Sithrandel personally about it - the program will _NOT_ launch "normally" from the command line on a mac - your working directory has to be in a special place in the wesnoth directory structure.  (My definition of normal being to simply call the executable file)

And what will happen, in that time that the person might spend looking for a command, is that they quite possibly will give up.

It's nice that we're all hackers here, but the good majority of our content creators (to say nothing of our users), have no idea how to do half the things we do.  We suggest doing things like compiling their own copy of wesnoth, and we might as well be suggesting they start speaking Cantonese.  We can do what we do only because we have years of rather unusual experience doing things they can't.

I think that Dave was thinking very wise things when he added that tab.

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That said, the interface could be improved with a simple addition of descriptions strings - strings which explain what the feature does.

Keep in mind - adding in strings to describe the things could easily be done for a later version of the stable wesnoth 1.0 "branch".