FreeOrion

I've just made some changes to the code to allow the predicted progress of fleets along their move path to be shown. That is, fleets can take several turns to traverse a starlane, and the spots along the lane at which they'll be for several turns can be shown in some way (along with, ETA if desirable).

Currently, such end-of-turn "nodes" appear as a slight kink in the timing of the move path stipple. The lines are, IMO, rather ugly, and could be greatly improved.

Note that there are two kinds of fleet move lines:
-General fleet move lines for fleets that are moving or have been ordered to move. These are currently coloured white.
-Projected fleet move lines for fleets that currently selected. These show the path a fleet would take if the player ordered it to the system the player's cursor is currently hovering over. These are currently coloured with the player's empire colour to distinguish them from general fleet lines.

There was some previous discussion about showing fleet move lines: here, but I'd like, from graphics types, an updated and nicified way to show a fleet's expected movement in the next turn, its overall path, the nodes at which it will end turns along its path, etc.

We might also later be able to interact with fleet move lines to order the fleet to change its move path. It could be possible to drag a fleet move path node over to another system, and thereby edit a fleet's multi-waypoint move path. (This will require being able to enqueue multiple fleet move orders, which isn't yet possible, though).

Any suggestions?

How about something like this:



- circles: fleet end of turn position
- dots: evenly distributed to fill the gaps between the large dots (as seen in utilae's mockup)
- direction of movement shown by highlighting individual dots

The circles currently don't look too fancy, however they have the advantage that they don't need to be rotated (in contrast to triangles, for instance).

Position marker attempts:

The scrolling dots are probably not practical for long-range move lines, as it might take 10 seconds to trace the whole path if you had 5 or so starlane jumps to make. (Though there could be a train of them instead, like the scrolling dashes now...) They also don't really convey any useful information, but sort of look like they are meant to. And, there were also some suggestions to use similar dots to show supply routes.

Actually, this is what I meant to suggest, but I was to lazy to paint several moving dots. See the new mockup.

Imagine a ship late in the game that is so fast that it passes through a starlane without stopping. In this case the small dots show which route the ship took.
The small dots should be a divisor of the ship speed; this way, they're even between turn stops and their distance is a measure of ship speed.

That's true; we could use a different shape to avoid confusion:



Something that has always bothered me is the intensity of star lanes;
I'd appreciate if the user were able to set their opacity manually. (Here, the left one's opacity is at 50%)

Of course, it would also possible to stay very close to the current system.



- white lines replaced by simple arrows that move toward the target
- fleet outlines show future positions


(arrow image)

Opinions?

I didn't mean to suggest removing all indicators of a fleet's path other than the turn end points. Rather, I was noting that the location of the dots and their spacing doesn't convey any useful info.

Rather than dots, a continuous / solid line or arrow might work, probably thinning or thickening in one direction or the other, and partially transparent could be used. If the thickening or thinning was consistent, it would help clarify the path a move line was taking if it went through a system during a turn.

Some messing about with ideas:



There might be problems with this if more than one fleet's dots overlap. It also seems redundant to mark speed this way when you can just see the distance between the turn stops directly.


I imagine that a colour option for starlanes could be added, similar to other UI elements. Hadn't occured to me to do so, though.


Seems reasonable. Hopefully we'll eventually have some art-based fleet icons though, so we'd probably use faded or differently-coloured versions... or we'd need special alternate versions for this purpose.

I've summed up and slightly modified Geoff's and my suggestions so that we may now compare and decide which movement indicator is most suitable for free orion (the m. indicator currently in use is missing):

Comments:
C: projected fleet positions are connected by lines that fade out with distance, but never below ~20% opacity
D: arrows move from start to destination
E: arrows are static, highlights move from start to destination; fleet position markers like in D as an option

My favourites are C and E; C could be used to select a destination and E to show that a fleet is moving.
Which ones do you like?

E or D might have trouble if we, as I hope, switch to using art as the fleet icons, instead of the current code-generated arrow dealies. I suppose you could keep the chevrons, but they might look odd with a curvy-shaped empire fleet icon of some sort.

C might make it hard to tell which way the fleet was moving if the icon didn't have as clear a front as the current symbol.

I'd choose D. The rest are too cluttered.

What I thought would be maybe worth a try is, that when you select a fleet...
1. it's paths (current and projected) get somehow a visible focus versus all the other paths (e.g. other paths may be faded out a little, become thinner etc.)
2. the Fleet symbol (or a copy of it with less opacity, a version with some glow, or just some glowing point) would follow the path very quickly from start to end (not being confined to the dots or the markers). This animation would be repeated in a constant time interval. This animation could also start if you just mouse over a fleet symbol without selecting it for example.

I'm not sure whether this stuff has been brought up before, so I just thought I post my 2 cents in here.

I like it; should definitely be considered if fleet movement indicators are changed.

Since we've got so many active art contributors right now, I'd like to bump this thread.

After thinking about this a little, it is good to provide more information on a flight path, but about any conceivable more informative method could clutter up the galaxy pretty quickly. So i'd make "General fleet lines" rather simple, i.e. not try to convey much more information than what we're currently doing.
The fleet lines for the selected fleet, (or even the one that's being moused over) should provide more info.



I think the moving bars like we currently have work. Moving triangles, dots, and ">"s could also work, but i'm not convinced they are an improvement.
I would like to see the speed of the scrolling correlated to the speed of the ship.
But the main thing the player will want to know is, "where will my ship be in N turns?" I think this design makes the answer abundantly clear.




I agree.

Some kind of galaxy-map graphics IMHO should maintain a constant pixel size... or at least expand no larger than is needed for easy visibility, and shrink no further than they can be minimally identified. Ships and starlanes currently violate this. At max zoom in, both are excessively big, to the point where it can be hard to tell where a ship is. At max zoom out, both are too tiny too be reliably seen. (see "B")



Starlanes would IMHO look better, and be much more readable if they maintained a constant width of 3 pixels (see "A" and "C")... or if we had to fiddle with the size a bit... ranged between 2 pix wide minimum and 6 pix wide max. The gradient effect would of-course not be used at these sizes.

70% opacity looks pretty good for the lanes. For the "unowned" lanes a 77/255 grey looks about right.


EDIT:
The reason i bring up the width of starlanes and the scaling factor of ships is because it's relevant to how we display these lines.
And the travel-time markers are another item should have a constant screen-size, probably smaller than my example... it's a quick mockup.

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I'd also like to replace the arrowy fleet icons with art, which could be made fixed-sized simultaneously. I'm envisioning something that looks like a ship, but a more abstract "fleet" icon of some sort could be made that looks nicer than the current fleet icons. Edit: 24x24 icons would probably work. May as well add a few other sizes when making them though, just in case... /Edit

Otherwise, I agree with most or all of your suggestions, and have probably made several of them myself at some point (in concept, if not specifics).

On further thought, i think the fleet icon will need to be resized somewhat... At minimum zoom stars may be less than 8 pixels apart. I don't want to be stuck with an icon that small at all zoom sizes.
I'd also like to see (at least at larger sizes) a distinction between some of the different kinds of ships: i.e. perhaps unarmed ships, colony ships and warships would have different icons. When more than one is present the icon of the largest type might be used.