Cataclysm-dda: Hide or skip crafting submenus if no options available

[Leland]

Game version:
b87c6d2

Minor UX thing: would be a nice simplification to hide or skip over crafting submenus if the user has no recipes in it yet.

[mrkybe]

From a new player perspective, it definitely spoils some stuff.

From a game design perspective, it tells the player that there's something to strive towards, something they haven't found yet.

IIRC there was some study that found that having movies "spoiled" for you actually made people enjoy them more. My opinion is that the game-design perspective wins out here.

[Leland]

Ah, that's interesting. I wasn't recommending this from a spoiler perspective.

My thinking is that having completely empty submenus just impedes a player from actually using the crafting interface: tabbing over to an empty submenu is a wasted movement. From a UX perspective, that's about as bad as it gets.

An alternative that keeps your "something to strive towards" recommendation _and_ resolves the UX issue would be greying out empty submenus, and skipping them when tabbing through the list.

[kevingranade]

Style it to indicate it's unavailable and havevtabbing skip over it?

[mrkybe]

That sounds like the best of both worlds. There's no reason for empty menus to be selectable anyway.

[PatrikStridvall]

I have made pull request #23333 that implements what @kevingranade suggested.