Suggestion: Play Screen - Collapsible Menu Headers

On the unified playscreen, there’s three main areas:

  • Scenes
  • Private Messages
  • Channels

Current behavior: Active scenes appear in the Scenes area. Recent PMs and Channels appear in their areas, and ‘inactive’ ones get cycled off, accessible by clicking a dropdown error to ‘Show All’. You can move PMs to inactive by ‘Hiding’ them from the Chat Menu, but this also mutes the PM, and if that person replies, you won’t know unless you’re on client or hit ‘Show All’.

Suggestion: Add a toggle to collapse each these areas and have their notifications roll up to the area header until expanded to their normal view (not ‘Show All’).

Rationale: On mobile, screen space is at a premium and the more that is devoted to the menu, the less is available for reading and responding. This would be a per-area function similar to the ‘Show/Hide Play Controls’ button so players can decide which areas they want collapsed and which they want handy to them.

2 Likes

Thanks for the suggestion! Unfortunately, that’s not something I plan to implement.

The Ares play screen is not really designed for mobile browsers. You can view wiki pages and such through the web portal, but the “live” play experience is very poor. This goes far beyond the screen design to more fundamental technical limitations in the way updates and notifications work within mobile browsers. You see those same limitations at play with something like Slack and Discord in mobile web. It’s just… bad.

Hopefully someday I will be able to create an Ares mobile app that actually lets you play painlessly on mobile. I would rather spend my limited bandwidth on that rather than polishing an inherently mobile-unfriendly experience.