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"

• audit all panics

• tune text color, size, padding

• click cycle diagram to edit duration

• toggle rewind mode

• 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!

• navigator

  • show options on map
  • stop jumping text size

General ezgui stuff

• optionally limit canvas scrolling/zooming to some map bounds
• when dragging, dont give mouse movement to UI elements
• start context menu when left click releases and we're not dragging
• can we change labels in modal or top menu? show/hide
• label sections of modal menus
• distinguish hints from status of modal menus, for hiding purposes
• move context menus out of ezgui
  • simplify/remove UserInput.
  • maybe separate impls for context, wizard, modal menu make sense.

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
  • http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/HYBRID_TRAFFIC/images/3d-topdown.jpg
• 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

Performance

• it's a pity we have to redo DrawCar work for all those parked cars every tick
• 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
• more speculative performance ideas
  • specialized shaders for common shapes like circles?
  • try https://docs.rs/dymod/0.1.0/dymod/ to link in a release-mode ezgui crate?

Depicting traffic unzoomed

• strange things to depict
  • cars partly straddling roads
  • some lanes backed up, others moving
  • peds (lots of them in one position maybe!)
  • intersections (simultaneous turns, some blocked, others not)
  • peds waiting for bus
• general ideas
  • darked colors (contrast map bg and road)
  • show min/max bounds (exact max is hard, but could calculate best-case easily)
  • percentage of capacity instead of an exact, moving length
• criteria
  • at low zoom, easily pinpoint where things are moving and stuck
  • include all agents

Mission Edit Mode

• neighborhood
  • display some instructions in the modal thing ("move a point by grabbing it")
  • warp to neighborhood center and zoom out when loading one (or even hovering in the menu?)
  • display all and click to edit
    • draw text in map-space, or be able to scale it
  • renaming
• scenario
  • visualize should just be the default thing
  • summarize in the modal menu, dont display the ugly text
  • almost feels like a list of 3 'command' types, each of which can be visualized:
    • seed cars
    • spawn agents
    • spawn agents from border
  • kind of need to CRUD this list
  • time input is very unclear, put help text in there
  • combine the spawn and border spawn... choose neighborhood OR border
    • choose in a menu list, or click on the map
      • draw the border nodes loudly
  • visualize better
    • draw separate arrows src/dst, on each side of text
      • draw text at a fixed size, not in screenspace, specify the font size.
      • associate font size with Text, probably
    • highlight a region, draw counts to/from it in some meaningful way
    • timer slider (except timeslices arent neatly in hour blocks, though they maybe should be)
    • a table (with color-coded entries) is actually perfect