jonatkins/ingress-intel-total-conversion — pull request #250 by integ3r (2013-05-07 23:27:31+00:00)
Title: IITC Dialog Overhaul: RPG-style dialog management for Ingress

**I understand that this is a large change, and will take a lot of dialogue (no pun intended) to get right. My goal was usability and aesthetics, and I'm definitely open to any questions or recommendations you have. There *are* very minor plugin incompatibilities that have arisen. I'm still working them out.**

### The problem

IITC dialogs are all modal. This is a problem.

Modal dialogs, while important for displaying critical information, take up the entire screen. This is bad! Why should anything take over the entire Intel Map and prevent interaction?

### RPG UI design done right

What if there's eventually a way to view inventory in the Intel Map? That shouldn't take over the entire screen.

As an example, let's look at the Morrowind menus, an example of RPG-style UI design done right.

![morrowind1](https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/369111/474410/b1ec12b4-b768-11e2-9417-9e79fc0011f4.png)

Modal dialogs exist, but are used *only* for situations where the user must shift focus to continue. All other dialogs are rearrangeable and collapsable. Why not apply the same concept to IITC?

### Iterations

I went through a few iterations of this, starting with enabling dragging for all dialogs.

![iitc1](https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/369111/474426/259fca3e-b769-11e2-9467-aaa18722bed3.png)

Pretty ugly. With a few kinks worked out, it started looking better.

![iitc2](https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/369111/474435/9014a042-b769-11e2-9060-28166ceb779b.png)

Adding a subtle window title bar:

![iitc3](https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/369111/474439/c4fc0840-b769-11e2-8d4f-6907348ceee7.png)

A friend recommended that the font "[Roboto](http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Roboto)" might make all types of dialogs look better. I agreed.

![iitc4](https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/369111/474446/1c070108-b76a-11e2-9cbe-235f2c5a8cd7.png)

![iitc4_detail](https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/369111/474447/2f60a204-b76a-11e2-9c7f-a84d6bb8ad79.png)

Finally, I added window collapsing and proper buttons.

![iitc_5](https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/369111/474558/d0fa47a8-b76c-11e2-97a1-d7c998b70a6d.png)

Modal dialogs still work, too (although the passcode system doesn't use them):

![iitc5_modal](https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/369111/474450/59611944-b76a-11e2-96ce-bb9fa3c294a7.png)

Finally, I changed the passcode redemption code to take advantage of the new dialogs.

![iitc_passcode](https://f.cloud.github.com/assets/369111/474455/8ad426e2-b76a-11e2-8676-ce7e7ba07c62.png)