F.Huber wrote:Ok, first the good news: the options window looks much better now (ie. as it should).
OK, that certainly is good news!
But there are still a few problems/questions:
1) the options of type 'spin' are simple text fields (eg. HashSize or SearchDepth in ChestUCI), so you have to enter any values manually and can't choose them by up/down-arrows.
I glanced through the MS control styles, but I could not find such a style. Of course I could put together the required controls myself. This would lead to a quite excessive number of controls, though, as each spin would then require four: the text-edit, two push-buttons, and a text to print next to it. Win95 seems to be limited to only 256 controls per dialog, max.
I doubted a bit the usefulness of such increment/decrement buttons anyway: for the engines I looked at most of the default values where in the hundreds, so incrementing in steps of 1 would not really get anywhere... So for a first try I thought we could do without. The lack of a browse button for file names seemed much more annoying.
2) as you already mentioned the 'combo' types don't popup the list, but you can select the entries with the down/up-arrow keys (BTW, the width of these combo boxes is too small, try eg. scrolling through the 'SearchMode' list in ChestUCI)
This definitely still has to be fixed, but as it also occurs in Win2k at least I can test it myself. Perhap this is also as simple as adding another style specifyer that determines how overlapping controls cover each other.
(Although space is in general a problem, when the list opens it can also use the space of the button to open it, and the problem is not that bad.)
3) and finally I don't really understand (and like) your strange ordering system of these options!
IMO it would be better to fill one complete column (20 or 25 entries) of options, and only for more options start with the next (2nd) column.
As it is now, it's quite confusing: one left, one right, the next again left, then right ...
What you say would not work, because some of the options require a much larger width than others, and extend over two columns. The system is based on the observation that check or combo options to enable a spin or string in general are sent by the engine directly before it, and the desire to have this check/combo then appear left of the spin, or left above the text-edit (as it won't fit on the same line).
If several options share a common initial word they are put in a group box. If not, it i assumed they are independent optons, and for spins they are displayed at two per line (right to left), while for checks they are stacked over two columns (right column first).
The layout as it is produced for ChestUCI does not look particularly illogical to me. There do not seem to be any options that belong together and now appear far apart. A number of "Show" options is close together, as is a number of "Auto" options. I notice you use a non-compliant option for hash size, so that it appears in the specific Engine Settings dialog, rather than reacting to the global GUI setting for hash size.
I am less happy about the result for Glaurung 2.2, but this is not so much because of the ordering, but mainly because the options use unreasonably long names which do not fit the alotted space (which is already quite large when the option name is short). This mainly occurs because Glaurung puts qualifiers in parentheses behind the options (e.g. "(non-PV nodes)"). Perhaps I should also group options based on such stuff in parentheses. But for Glaurung this would not work because it alternates the PV and non-PV versions, rather than grouping them. But this is just illogical option ordering on the part of Glaurung, so it is questionable if I should even attempt to fix it.
