Gyrfalcon wrote:Is there a good reason items in the queue are treated differently other than legacy from pre-queue code?
There is still some legacy code hanging around, but, as Arioch says, the hard part here is finding UI behaviors that we like.
One thing we've talked about is using a drag/drop semantic (sortof like the one in the ship designer screen), to reorder items in the queue. If we go that route, then I think, perhaps, we could try simplifying things so that the choose production item behavior was just "left click to add to queue" -- and the large current production box was simply the top of the queue. People would often need to use drag/drop behaviors to rearrange or delete queued items as they saw fit, but, I think the boxes involved are big enough that this might not be too confusing/awkward. (A right-click to delete semantic, like the one we have now, would still probably be useful, but, in theory, simply dragging items out of the production area would be about as easy a way of achieving the same effect.)
It seems like a pretty promising idea to me right now -- but, I'm not convinced it's ideal. But however exactly the buttons for the choose production items work, I think we probably do want drag-drop reordering. Once that's in it should be easy to experiment a little with the details.
edit: As I keep thinking about this, the main problem I see with "left click to add to queue" is that the queue is limited to 5 items. So, what do you do when the queue is full? In the current UI, we just grey-out the "add to queue button", which seems to work pretty well. But, in a simplified UI, we'd probably need to grey-out the whole production item, or, alternatively, truncate the queue to make room for the new production. Not sure I like either idea.