FreeOrion

Hi and welcome back, it's abut time already. Is everyone still around?

Much thanks to everyone for getting 0.2 done, now is time to organise for 0.3. Artwise this version is different from two previous ones that we get more serious with graphics. 0.3 UI will define the look and feel of the game, technology graphics are very important part of the game, and everything should be as polished for us to go public. Also we should get UI finished for everything that is possible - I want to minimize the work to be done with it when we get to later versions. Here's short listing what we are going to need to do:

-New UI skin/Theme
Current one is plain, something with more feel needed, though I want to keep it simple and with lots of transparency. I would love to see something like OsX goes scifi - suggestions? Notice that UI is not easily moddable trough separate file - it needs written in code and be compiled before testing. As for different theme per race goes, my idea was that sidebar would have different backgroundpic for each race, and possibly some color variations in ui, but nothing radical like in Starcraft.

-Adjusting the galaxymap, sidepanel & planetview UI's for 0.3 needs
buttons for research screen, sorting the planetbar, new focus buttons, lots of little things here and there see drek's post here (viewtopic.php?t=829).

-Different map-modes.

-Stars - To Coding team: How soon can we start testing these? (note that these should run on graph-card trough openGL). Discussion how to do these here viewtopic.php?t=830&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
(different map-modes are discussed in that thread as well)

-3D rotating planets for sidepanel. Ogre ( http://www.ogre3d.org/ ) came out in discussion as good candidate for 3d engine to use in battles, should it be integrated to do the 3d-planet rotation? PD, would you like to do texturing, with help of drek?

-Technology/research window design and details
UI suggestion for this?
How techonology pics should be shown- rotating animation, stills? How big resolution, I would keep them relatively small, like ~250x500, as there are going to be plenty of them that we dont have to do them with huge amount of detail. How about the screen that is shown when you discover the tech? this is where picture of your scientist needs to be shown, when we get to do the races.


- Listings for all planets and fleets. My idea was moo2 like fullscreen wiew with long list of planets that can be sorted by various buttons. Other ideas for this?

- Advisor, tooltips, tutorial, statistic screen, turnprocessing backgroundpictures(under discussion), battlevisualisations - I would think these as quite low priority/polishing phase, we'll see how we have time for these things.

Little things like fogs, flags and finetuning here and there. Mainly 0.3 should look perfect UI-wise, what we do here should be something we will stay with for rest of the project, expect for neccessary things to add.

Issues missing?

How to work things out.
-I will work with UI, suggest a theme and there will be a thread to post your suggestions and discuss issues conserning galaxymap/planetview UI
viewtopic.php?t=867

-Techscreen UI and technology graphics will have own thread for their discussion. viewtopic.php?t=866 For technology graphics, once development team starts submitting them we will first discuss them together for ideas and feel we want and then when feeling ready, one who decides to work on some tech-picture should announce it. I have quite high standards for what will be accepted trough to the final game, so texture well, remember good bumpmaps and work on your lightning. We also have to discuss if we want to have general quidelines for technologygraphics - for example in lighning so that we will look unified, does anyone have experience on this?
I cant say for exact resolution and format yet, but these will be announced as things get more clear.
Obiwan, I hope you'll like to work mainly with these + those cityscapes we discussed earlier - have to define those better as well

-Stars, me with quidance of BreadMan's look on stars here: viewtopic.php?t=830&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=30

-Fogs, pd?
-Flags, we got some of those submitted earlier, have to dig them up. Anyway, we are going to need UI to choose and show them, + better ui to choose empire color.

-- I open and link those threads I mentioned, moment please -- consider this as living document.

_________________
Difference between a man and a gentleman is that a man does what he wants, a gentleman does what he should. - Albert Camus

i'm not sure, whether we need the engine for this. tzlaine did do this already with opengl and is only waiting for the textures. i've already started texturing, but couldn't continue, because i'm pretty busy right now. i hope i can find some time in the next days.

i haven't forgotten ;) just need to find some free time.


stills for now, we can do animations later if we have the time and cpu power ;) maybe we could discuss, if we wanna use real time models for this too. if so, animation(even interactive with zooming and free rotating) would be easy.
i like the way of moo2, where a scientist is presenting your new techs.


there isn't much experience needed ;)
of course we need an uniform look. i imagine using a skylight(gi) a key light and maybe a backlight. this is a pretty simple but effective lighting setup.

Ah ok, didn't knew this, sounds good.

_________________
Difference between a man and a gentleman is that a man does what he wants, a gentleman does what he should. - Albert Camus

I also think orge3d was considered to be too bloated for our needs.

Maybe minimalistic design of 0.2 is good enough?

yes, i like it too. at least the GUI-design miu & pd have shown in the mock-up screen (0.2 turned out to look a bit different). considering that we are going to present a lot of infos & numbers, the slick design seems appropriate (& it´s kinda stylish).

I am willing to pick up any slack. I am still in the design and drawing stages of the new website shell.

I can do a volume of 3d modelling. And I would rather be assigned something than hav my choice.

_________________
"The one perfect impossibility is perfection."

it's a bit too minimalitic and needs to be impoved/extended.

at the moment we only have the colorfull starmap with the sidepanel and small fleet windows, and it is enough for this. but we are going to make a ship design screen, a tech screen, a spy- and diplomacy screen and so on. filling an entire screen with the current ui will look kinda boring.

Personally i like the minimalist style. Less is more.

_________________
The COW Project : You have a spy in your midst.

Who told you that?

I like pd's mockup very much.

_________________
Press any key to continue or any other key to cancel.
Can COWs fly?

Personally I think a new UI can be made that would look better than what we have but still fit the simple/minimalist criterion. We should be able to create something that looks great and enhances the feel of the game without reducing usability or cluttering it.

What's the specs on these textures? Just one map or more? What size?

noelte wrote:


Can someone provide a link to the mock-up referenced above....?

take a look at those. i made them in hurry. notice the polar distortions, which are required for sperical mapping. basicly the maps should be in a 2:1 ratio for best results. i used 800x400 here, which might be a little too much but i wouldn't use less then 400x200. if you have questions about the distortions or something just write a pm.


click

i'm a bit confused, i haven't added anything new to the ui.
only used a fleet window and cut around.

Don't know if this is an problem or not, but some older video cards have problems with textures that aren't squares.

Also, texture sizes tend to be in powers of 2, for speed reasons. (with modern cards probably isn't an issue....don't know.)

From the stoneage maybe. I think that you're talking about a fraction of a percent of the potential FreeOrion players. Any machine from the Pentium era certainly won't suffer from this issue.



This would be relevant for a 3D FPS game where speed is everything and there's a lot of detail in a scene. I really doubt this is relevant to FreeOrion.

There's two types of programming efficiency. One makes software run quicker, the other gets it developed quicker. There's a balance to be struck between the two and in this case those two points are so... moot that they should simply be ignored.