Display info when clicking agents

[colinfrisch]

What's the problem this feature will solve?
Build an easy way to display in the front end some info about the agent (health, status, position, etc.) when the agent is clicked on the simulation

Additional context
It would be a very useful feature to have for simulations where agents carry a lot of information, which define their behavior, either to easily follow a precise agent throughout a simulation to study behavior or simply for debugging.

Special mention to @Sahil-Chhoker : given that you're currently working with GSoC to encapsulate visual styling through your AgentPortrayalStyle module, would it make sense to extend this class (or add a related interface) to include metadata or callbacks for click events?

That would also be particularly handy for mesa-llm to display the reasoning and the current discussions of an agent.

[Sahil-Chhoker]

This is actually possible in altair, if you pass a tooltip as to what to show. I haven't tried it but after a little tinkering I think you will be able to get the desired results. I think I can make it a little easier if I work on the altair backend.

I don't plan to add this as a feature in matplotlib, because I researched quite a bit on it for my proposal and there is no elegant way to achieve this in matplotlib.

Well this gives us a reason to use different backends.

[colinfrisch]

Alright, that's great, thanks ! Is this something that you plan to implement during GSoC ? If not I'll try to dig into it a little.

[Sahil-Chhoker]

I don't know, if I get some spare time after the api refactoring, I think I can take a look at this. Meanwhile go ahead and try something for yourself.

[quaquel]

It would indeed be a great feature. However, as indicated by @Sahil-Chhoker, it's very difficult to implement using matplotlib while being trivial with Altair.