Work continues on implementing a functional prototype of the new Home design. The current status is that it is possible to select and start a game, and load saved games. The Multiplayer browser and package management UIs are still missing.
As expected, the planned ideas didn’t feel quite right when I got to try them out in practice. For instance, I was envisioning that when one selects a game (say, “Doom II”), a list of saved games would expand below it. The rationale was that it would save space to not show all the savegames all the time. However, in practice it was extremely distracting that the game items would keep moving up and down in the list due to saves being shown and hidden above them. I ended up just keeping the save lists visible all the time.
Next I will focus on the multiplayer browser. The basic idea is to use widgets similar to the ones used in game selection, but of course show information relevant to multiplayer. When it comes to the package manager, it will be based on the existing (preliminary) Packages dialog, with a couple of additions and improvements.