Daggerfall Workshop Forums

Can someone PLEASE make the book and notebook scrolling actually smooth?

Its super confusing the way it skips thru now, it kills the eyes and you always loose the part where you ended reading.
Reading a book is so painful. Scrolling thru notebook the same.

This change is a QOL change and should go into the base DFU btw.

Lets make it a bit 2021 guys. And actually usable.

Thank you!

A quick summary of journal and book scrolling, and feasibility of change:

Journal - This scrolls per text entry, meaning one click of scroll wheel displaces text by an amount equal to entry height. As entries are of a variable length, it's difficult to track scrolling as each click will scroll by a variable amount. I agree with you this is hard to follow. This entry-wise scrolling is hardcoded and would need a refactor of the journal UI.

Books - This UI has already undergone a refactor as part of localization support. In classic, one click of the scroll wheel will displace text by an amount equal to one page height. In DFU, each click of the scroll wheel displaces text by exactly 24 pixels (3 lines of text). I disagree with you this is confusing and hard to follow. A 3-line scroll is quite standard and is small enough a displacement to easily follow with the eye. It's the default scroll setting in Windows, for example. That said, it's a fairly easy change in this case as books are already using a pixel-wise scroll.

The other interface issue this raises is that while scrolling by 1px at a time is definitely smooth, it's also cumbersome. In the example of books, it would take a total of 24x scroll clicks just to scroll the same 3 lines. I'm not going to code that on purpose. There needs to be a better solution.

One way to mitigate both cases is to smoothly displace the text into new position while keeping the same scroll factor. For example, one click of scroll wheel in books still displaces by 3 lines, but the scroll is animated smoothly into new position rather than displacing all at once. In the example of Windows again, most apps use this method when scrolling 3 lines. I feel this would work well for books, but maybe still not feel good for journal. I'd have to see it in action to know for sure.

I'm happy to look into this, although I'll admit that books would be the first to pilot such a change. The journal is a bigger job due to it being such an old UI from almost the start of the project.

Thanks for the reply Interkarma,

I had a solution on my mind while reading your reply, thinking on how to word it properly but you already stated it here:

One way to mitigate both cases is to smoothly displace the text into new position while keeping the same scroll factor. For example, one click of scroll wheel in books still displaces by 3 lines, but the scroll is animated smoothly into new position rather than displacing all at once.

Thats the kind of solution which Im quite sure would be a improvement. And I think it might work for notebook as well. But I understand that if notebook changes are harder to implement, the 1st test would be made on the books and notebook maybe later.

Thanks a lot for acknowledgement of this, fingers crossed for it to play out nicely

Thanks for the reply Interkarma,

I had a solution on my mind while reading your reply, thinking on how to word it properly but you already stated it here:

One way to mitigate both cases is to smoothly displace the text into new position while keeping the same scroll factor. For example, one click of scroll wheel in books still displaces by 3 lines, but the scroll is animated smoothly into new position rather than displacing all at once.

Thats the kind of solution which Im quite sure would be a improvement. And I think it might work for notebook as well. But I understand that if notebook changes are harder to implement, the 1st test would be made on the books and notebook maybe later.

Thanks a lot for acknowledgement of this, fingers crossed for it to play out nicely

there is a big thread going on about the book UI
viewtopic.php?t=1388
maybe they manage to find a solution for your problem as well

Personally I managed to get used to how it is in vamila game

Hi, thats old thread. And too much text (which does not IMO relate to the topic mentioned here if Im not mistaken ) Here its few lines to cut to the case, one reply and proposed solution with agreement

Well, one can get used to many things... but it does not mean those things are good. And this scrolling is IMO one of those. During the time, player cease to see these issues as thats the nature of human psyche.

Its on a good route towards improvement now

I'm going to move this one to bug reports. While it's not strictly a bug, it's handy to keep in my TODO pile.

I'd like to tackle the book reader in next few releases, then we can consider what has to happen with journal to make it scroll smoothly.

Interkarma wrote: ↑Thu Jan 28, 2021 9:53 pm A 3-line scroll is quite standard and is small enough a displacement to easily follow with the eye. It's the default scroll setting in Windows, for example.

I would suggest adding the option for the user in the interface settings of the launch window. For example, having the "text line scrolling" option (or something more appropriate) be set to 3 as a default, but allowing it to be set to a different value at the user's discretion. With such an option in place, I would personally use a setting of 1, because it makes it easier for my eyes to follow, but it would also make it easier to implement, because it wouldn't require adding any sort of smoothing animation to the text.