abstreet/docs/TODO_ux.md

TODO - GUI and UX

Fix existing stuff

• try showing traffic signals by little boxes at the end of lanes

  • red circle means right turn on red OK, red right arrow means nope, green means normal turns ok, green arrow means protected left, crosswalk hand or stick figure

• if a lane could feasibly have multiple turn options but doesnt, print "ONLY"

• color roads as solid black when zoomed out, and make intersections similar (except for stop sign / signal)

• audit all panics

• tune text color, size, padding

• sort the top menus

• click cycle diagram to edit duration

• revamp stop sign editor

• toggle rewind mode

  • sim stuff feels like a modal menu that's kinda omniprescent, but gets hidden sometimes

• yellow or flashing red/yellow for yields

• text box entry: highlight char looks like replace mode; draw it btwn chars

• traffic signal cycles go offscreen sometimes!

• mouseover shouldnt even be possible in lot of modes, like when a menu is active

General ezgui stuff

• optionally limit canvas scrolling/zooming to some map bounds
• top menu doesnt know when we have a more urgent input thing going!
• cant use G for geom debug mode and contextual polygon debug
• X on all menus
• when dragging, dont give mouse movement to UI elements
• start context menu when left click releases and we're not dragging
• dont draw context menu off-screen
• can we change labels in modal or top menu? show/hide
• stacked modal menus
  • should quit key for modal menus match key that started it?
  • launch floodfill from context menu while following an agent... shouldnt be allowed
  • can coexist: show score, search, hide
  • some abstraction to just declare set_mode, give the extra width and height besides the menu, and get back a screenpt to start drawing at
• bold hotkey letters

New features

• swap direction of one-way
• convert between one- and two-way if there's enough space
• collapse smaller roads/neighborhoods and just show aggregate stats about them (in/out flow, moving/blocked within)
• undo support for edits

Better rendering

• depict residential bldg occupany size somehow
• render overlapping peds reasonably
• draw moving / blocked colors (gradually more red as they wait longer)
• render cars with textures?
• rooftops
  • https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/top-view-city-street-asphalt-transport-people-walking-down-sidewalk-intersecting-road-pedestrian-81034411.jpg
  • https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/top-view-city-seamless-pattern-streets-roads-houses-cars-68652655.jpg
• general inspiration
  • https://gifer.com/en/2svr
  • https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05078/images/fig6.gif
• color tuning
  • neutral (white or offwhite) color and make noncritical info close to that. http://davidjohnstone.net/pages/lch-lab-colour-gradient-picker, chroma < 50

Switch to OpenGL (for speed)

• speed
  • show FPS or some kind of measure of lag
  • sleep better in the event loop
    • first make UserInput borrow state and not need to consume
• quality
  • need padding around text
  • text entry needs to draw the cursor differently
• more speculative performance ideas
  • experiment with batching and not passing colors
  • specialized shaders for common shapes like circles?
  • try https://docs.rs/dymod/0.1.0/dymod/ to link in a release-mode ezgui crate?

Performance

• it's a pity we have to redo DrawCar work for all those parked cars every tick
• areas like lakes are incredibly detailed