Custom Sort - Gender, Tile Size

[bbik]

Part One: Including gender (and frozen?) in the Alternate Custom Sort

 

I've known for a while that the Alternate Custom Sort (/customsort/2) doesn't show genders -- it annoys me every time I have a new (male) dragon that needs placing, because I first have to check where the cut-off between the genders is, and then go sort the new one.

 

I just realized that both of the other Custom Sorts (Default - /customsort, and Legacy - /customsort/old) do show gender, however. Granted, everything has its own separate column with those two sorts, but if Alternate can still include the name, it seems like it should be able to include the gender, too.

 

For the sake of saving space, I would suggest just using the symbol, and placing it in parentheses after the name. Like so:

 

 

It's not the neatest, most legible of options, as opposed to the columns for the other two, but at least the information is there. And that seems like that should be the far more important point, for something like this.

 

 

Part Two: Adding another, even more compact, sort option

 

The alternate sort is great. It vastly reduces the amount of scrolling needed to move dragons from one end of the scroll to the other, as compared to the default sort. Legacy is another option for big jumps like that, but it either still involves scrolling to find the correct number, or involves two steps, to place the dragon at an arbitrary number, and then relocate it more accurately after that.

 

However, looking at the incubator choices, we already have an even more compact option available. The alternate sort and the large tiles appear to use the same (size) images. There are also images for the small tiles, however.

 

So how about adding another custom sort option using the small tiles? And perhaps slightly smaller text, too, as needed. That way even more dragons can fit on a single line, reducing the required scrolling even further -- especially for larger scrolls.

Still think there could be a way to do this, but since it was, from the start, only a side thought, and is entirely distracting things from the main idea, we'll strike it for now.

Edited November 29, 2009 by bbik

[TJ09]

The compact tiles would be useless since you've still got the text below the tiles.

[Lythiaren]

The gender signs also take up a lot of vertical screen real estate.

 

Why not have the system automatically overlay gender symbols and white snowflakes in the corners?

[bbik]

Text making tiles useless: That was mostly why I suggested smaller text as well... But I guess smaller text would add more space all on its own. Though, how much work would that be in the end? I definitely wasn't thinking style sheets (which I'm guessing is the reason the text is the size it is?) and all that when I posted that, since the second half was just something I thought of while typing the first half.

 

Vertical real estate: Actually, I didn't add any extra space in that image at all. Just pasted in the gender/frozen signs. On a scroll with nothing but short names, perhaps it would make a difference, but it looks like if even one name runs over to the third line, that space is there throughout. Which means that there's space for the symbols, as well, either beside/below the two-liners, or beside the three-liners.

 

Though, I do like the overlay idea too, and it would work just as well, unless there's some technical reason against it that I don't know.

[Sif]

The gender signs also take up a lot of vertical screen real estate.

 

Why not have the system automatically overlay gender symbols and white snowflakes in the corners?

Snowflakes probably wouldn't be necessary, given the limited number of non-frozen hatchlings that you can have, but having the gender signs(of even just a M/F) would be pretty useful, without taking up space.

 

And if that was to be integrated into an incubator, then when getting rid of duplicate tiles, one could overlay both the male and female, rather like on the WANTED tiles in my signature... male for one side, female for the other.

 

Then again, that would very likely be a TON of coding work, so it might be a ton of work for something that is only slightly more convenient. >>;

 

I'm fine enough as is. I don't have massive numbers of each gender dragon, and even if I was, say, adding a gold, I could always open my scroll in a different tab.

[00n0b0dy]

I think the size is fine as is, but I'd love to be able to see the gender. I normally pick gender neutral names, but I'd like to sort my scroll male-female if I could keep track of the genders of nearly 300 dragons. Any sort of indicator would be nice

[bbik]

Any other thoughts on a gender indicator? Be it after the name, or superimposed, or whatever else? It would still be incredibly useful for anyone who pays any attention to gender sorting.

[olympe]

I'd rather do the whole custom sort thing differently. You get several options - like breed, gender, age, stage, whatever, and you choose in which order the options are taken. If you have breed first and gender second, you'll get all dragons sorted according to their breeds, and within the respective breeds, the genders are separated. If you do it the other way round (gender first, breed second), you'll get all your females sorted after their breeds and below that all the males according to their breeds.

 

I hope I managed to explain it somehow.

[Xasora]

I really like the idea of showing male/female signs in custom sort. I *really* like having my dragons sorted by breed and also by gender, but it's too much of a pain to figure that out manually, so the only ones I have sorted by gender, are the races that have separate alts. Or those that have distinctive names.

[bluebell_rose]

You could always do this until a better option is given. Sort by legacy sort to get the dragons in the approximate location, then use alternate sort or default drag and drop sort to fine tune it

[Amur_Rama]

*Resurrecting this thread instead of making a new one.

 

Is it possible to make a scroll nest-sort? I happen to like the "Sort by" function, over the custom and legacy sort, that's an inconvenient amount of scrolling to place dragons once you have over fifty, but the "Sort by" function is exceptionally limited in what it can do.

 

A priority could be assigned by hand to each a sort option, which allow for much more precise customization for users, without having to overhaul the whole system behind-the-scenes.

 

To give you an example of what I mean by nesting sort. I used to play in another game called Virtual Pups, it was years ago (and I do not know if the option is still there). But, I was able to sort my breeding kennel out by prioritizing what attributes I wanted to line of dogs to be sorted by. I had the option to sort my dogs by breed (Doberman pinschers, Mini Pins & Keeshonden), then by name, and then by gender. In effect my kennel (which basically looked similar to the scroll here), was subdivided on one page, with each breed being treated as a multi-sorted "table" of it's own.

 

The current default sort of DC does not differentiate between more than one item at once. So you can only have one thing at once. Either all your females are separated from males, but you have the breeds scattered through them, or you've divided them by breed but have to read through to reach the female you want (instead of knowing that the top four [or forty]) dragons will always be female.

 

Perhaps, at the very least, the values in the automatic sort options can be changed, by whatever priority the man-in-charge wants. But then you could sort by breed, age, gender all at once instead of only being able to get one. (I note that you can tell it to sort everything by age, but there's the checkbox to always automatically put eggs/hatchlings on top, why bother having that as an option of you're sorting by age anyway? Since that's redundant, perhaps the automatics weren't absolutes, just set that way. Just in case anyone's wondering what started this train of thought.)