Are tool tips necessary or even desirable?

[bilbous]

I have a lot of trouble with the tool tips in the game GUI, and it makes me wonder if this is the right way to go. I know that the inventory system has been completely revamped in the next version so this may not be a problem in the future, however my biggest problems with the tool tips come in the spell book screen where I can get maybe 5 icons identified out of 10-12 in my possession at any one time. Some of the glyphs rarely give trouble and others always do. What I am thinking is that perhaps labels at the bottom of the frame, just above the border might be more reliable and easier to use. I do not know if there are many glyphs with long names but even if there are it should not be hard to have a uniquely identifying abbreviation for each.

Does anyone else have any thoughts about this?

[Zan]

The glyph thing is a bug according to me. Some glyphs only show their names when you hold your pointer over the number in the top left corner of the icon.

Either way, like you said .. new inventory coming in so we'll just have to wait and see.

[ThomPhoenix]

The inventory rewrite has nothing to do with tooltips, so if it's an issue now, it's an issue in the next release.

[bilbous]

Well Glad to hear I'm not the only one, Perhaps I'll look in the art files and see what I can do with the label idea. At the very least I can use them locally to make things a bit easier for myself. Should they be easy to locate in my file system?

Looks like I won't be able to do this due to the use of direct draw interface being not open source friendly. See this thread if you have any suggestions.