Showing Tips for Players

Main Menu Tool Tips for Settings

Development of this feature was led by Obsttorte in 2021, with considerable feedback about tooltip message content.

Appearance

The Main Menu/Settings interface displays various half-pages on the right side of the screen, leaving the left side with just the TDM background slideshow. Against this, TDM can show informative text (informally, "tool tips") about particular settings. For a given setting, defined by a short prompt on the left side of a row, mouse-hovering over the selectable choice field on the right side of the row will show a unique, relevant tool tip. Not all items have tool tips, and numeric sliders generally do not.

When first introduced, there was a main menu setting "Show Menu Tooltips". But given how given how unintrusive these tooltips were, it was decided to just leave them on and free up a settngs row for a more important item. As of 2.14, there is still a DarkMod.cfg setting "tdm_show_menu_tooltips" to disable them.

I18N Aspects

As of 2.14, the great majority (but not quite all) of setting prompts and tooltips are represented by #str_ids, and present in multiple languages.