Talk:Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas/Controls

Button Images

I'm against using images for the buttons. If the font size and the button size are incompatible, it looks ugly. Even if you get it right in the default style, users may want to increase the font size and then it looks ugly again. It's also non-machine readable.

Unicode has glyphs which can be used for many of the buttons. We can even add colors, shading, and borders using CSS.

Ⓐ Ⓑ Ⓧ Ⓨ

That yellow one looks better with a yellow background, even if it's not completely inside the circle.

D-Pad controls:

▶▼◀▲

Black & White:

◉◎

Triggers and Bumpers:

RT LB

All of these will scale with the page's font size.

A possible objection is that <span style="background-color: rgb(255,255,0); font-weight: bold; font-size: larger;">&#x24CE;</span> is a pain to type. But that's what templates are for. Sympleko 05:06, 5 July 2006 (PDT)

Although it isn't done at the moment, the button template could be changed to alter the image height/width to 1em, therefore scaling it to the text height. Images are better than text in this case, as text display/glyph availability is variable, and images are rendered much more reliably cross-platform. They also look nicer, and won't change between fonts. --DrBob (Talk) 09:07, 5 July 2006 (PDT)

That's true; I guess, not all browsers can render all unicode characters, and what they use to do so is up to them, not us. Then I guess what I want is prettier images.  :-) Sympleko 11:14, 5 July 2006 (PDT)

They don't look good in IE on WinXP (at least without installing additional fonts): http://drv.nu/stuff/images/strategywiki_unicodebuttons_ie.png -- DrV

They've been decided against; don't worry. :-) --DrBob (Talk) 15:44, 13 July 2006 (CDT)

I am shocked--shocked!--to hear that IE on Win doesn't follow standards. :-) Oh, well. It looked good to me on Safari. Sympleko 06:02, 19 July 2006 (CDT)

Format

There are a couple of different formats used on this page to map buttons to actions.

The "On foot" subsection of the PS2 section is like this:

Square Button:

• Jump
• Climb up walls (they must be equal to your actual jumping height)
• Zoom in with sniper rifle/camera
• Block while fighting

The "In Vehicle" subsection of the PS2 Section is like this:

• L1 = Change Radio Station/Nitros/Vehicle Weapon

while the Xbox section is like this:

• X Button - Jump/Climb/Block

There ought to be one style for the whole page.

What about a table?

X	Jump/Climb/Block
Y	Enter Vehicle/Activate Mini Game/Secondary Attack

or

X	Jump
	Climb up walls (they must be equal to your actual jumping height)
	Zoom in with sniper rifle/camera
	Block while fighting
Y	Enter vehicle
	Activate minigame
	Secondary attack

It seems like that would be compact and would look a lot better when the button images come around. Sympleko 06:18, 19 July 2006 (CDT)

I agree, do it! If you feel like getting fancy enough, you can add colors and things too.--DukeRuckley 07:57, 19 July 2006 (CDT)

I'm against tables. They're hell to markup, and there aren't enough benefits: lists and headings would work just as well, as there are only two variables (e.g. two columns on a table, or a heading and list). Around the rest of the wiki, the standard is to say (for example) * '''X-button''': Jump, fly, or do the tango. --DrBob (Talk) 11:27, 19 July 2006 (CDT)

What about in the case of GTA where you can have multiple columns relating to a button? 1st column is the button, 2nd - walking, 3rd - driving, 4 - flying (plane), 5- flying (helicopter), 6 - biking, 7 - swimming, 8-menu, etc. Tables may be difficult to markup but they look nicer in the end. And once the basic table is laid out, its easy to edit from there.--DukeRuckley 11:47, 19 July 2006 (CDT)

I definitely don't like the idea of multi-column tables. It might make the page too wide for one thing, and it might be harder to read. My guess is that people want to know all the controls for the "mode" that they're currently in. In the table you describe, to know how to maneuver when biking they have to read the first and sixth columns together, skipping over the material they will want to read, just not at the moment. This may require horizontal scrolling even. I think control modes should be handled with sectioning, as in the Xbox (and PS2, though less completely so) section of the current page.

I usually am willing to sacrifice writeability for better readability, since presumably more people will read the page then write its markup. But the small table examples I cooked up were pretty vexing, and I confess by the time I got finished I wasn't sure they were such a good idea after all. Editing a table in MediaWiki markup is not so simple when you start to have cells spanning rows or columns.

I can live with conforming to DrBob's standard * '''Button''': actions in a bullet list. I just wanted to throw tables out there. Sympleko 12:16, 19 July 2006 (CDT)

In all honesty, I was more or less playing Devil's Advocate with my previous comment (DrBob persuaded me pretty well before). In the case of buttons (and other things as simple as that) it makes more sense to just seperate it by using bullets. In other cases (see Secret of Mana/Magic) tables are probably a better idea. Unfortunately tables are ugly when readers have a low resolution on there computer (I might be biased because I can't stand anything on low resolutions, tables or not).

I still feel that sacrificing writeability for readability is better, but in some cases (such as this) it can be unnecessary.--DukeRuckley 12:30, 19 July 2006 (CDT)