FreeOrion

As you might know, I really don't like those endless discussions, because they take more time than actually creating some content - so, the more we discuss the less I can contribute.

My point about the focus selection is simple: Balanced, shouldn't be treated as an additional(seperate) condition, because it is all conditions portioned in equal amounts.
If we arange the focus selection icons, in a circle it is most logical to place balanced in the center. So I came up with a way of doing so.

With hold and drop I mean, clicking on a icon - holding the mouse button down - changing to another icon(or stay in the center) and drop the mouse button.

'oder' was just a misspelling and I meant 'or', sorry for this.

Regular pie menus, don't have a center button, that's right. But I'm convinced that it can work with a center button just as good.

About the flag/empire symbol. I would prefer non-squared symbols as well and would place them a the bottom-left side of the planets - in the shadow area.

I don't like the discussions that go around in circles either, but sometimes it's neccesary. Anyway i think there are more important things currently than the exact nature of a pie menu.

Basic Display of Meter Values according to v.3 reqs.


•The arrows on the left indicate primary and secondary focus. Smaller and darker arrows would be used to indicate ballance.
•The red and green numbers (and the narrow colored bars) indicate the change forcast for the next turn. Since the change per turn is often very small, i though it might be worth while to write the number out.
• Meters values less than 20 (shown by the vertical bar) show up as dark red to indicate shortfall. In this example the planet is not producing enough to feed itself. Not all meters have such a break-even point.
• The light grey (or red) bars indicate current production.
• The dark grey bars indicate max production (under current technology, focuses, and picks)

• Bars much like this will work for Population, Health, Infrastructure, etc.


To Display Meters or resulting Production?


Now that i have a stronger understanding of how production works, i believe switching away from meter values would conceal the information needed for the player to make intelligent choices about focus. It provides much more useful and comprehensable information at a glance, which can easily be used to compare different planets.

On reflection i think it would be good to include the current resource production as well. But only one number, the current production. I'd put it to the right of the bars, and possibly remove the meter-change-numbers since the little colored bars do the job well enough.

This does take up more room than some concepts, but that's the cost of clarity. However, i do think that this information should be able to be "collapsed" into a single line, like the one that currently appears as the system summary. The game should remember for each planet if the production has been collapsed or not. I may include that in my next concept.

I like this mockup, but saying "The arrows on the left indicate primary and secondary focus. Smaller and darker arrows would be used to indicate ballance." is not satisfactory. You need (and everyone who posts a mockup needs) to show us exactly what these cases should look like:

Case 1: non-balanced Primary Focus, non-balanced Secondary Focus (that's what you already have above)
Case 2: balanced Primary Focus, non-balanced Secondary Focus
Case 3: non-balanced Primary Focus, balanced Secondary Focus
Case 4: balanced Primary Focus, balanced Secondary Focus

I think this mockup might look a litte wierd in cases 2 & 3.



Here's the 3-sentence explanation: A Meter is a scale from 0 to 100, by definition, representing the amount of development of some type of resource generation (food, research, etc.). The amount of a resource produced is (Meter value) * (some stuff). The "some stuff" part can be a lot of things, like planetary environment modifiers, or population size (i.e. workers available).

So, the user only really cares about the amount of a resource that is produced, e.g. PPs and RPs. If I know I need 5 more RPs per turn to research everything I want to research right now, I want to be able to switch one of my planets to all research, and see if it will give me the extra 5 RPs I need.

Meters are secondary, in that they only tell the user how close they are (on a scale of 0 to 100) to the maximum production of a certain resource. In my opinion, we should only display actual produced numbers, even if we use bars. The bars implicitly show the level of the underlying Meter.

I somewhat agree, in that i think a lot of mock-ups would be more valuable if the designer at least thought about various possible situations. However it's a real pain to do every possibility in Photoshop, especially when it's likely going to get shot down anyway. These, i did think about, and i think cases 2 and 3 work pretty well. I leave case 4 to your imaginations for now.

How this works is clicking anywhere on the bar or icon increases the focus from: whatever ballanced -> secondary focus -> primary focus-> back to ballanced. The focus on the other rows change as is appropriate.




I agree that these values are important, but other things, like "is my colony feeding itself, or is it starving", or "how close is my planet to producing the max research possible in FO" are useful things that aren't made clear in other version of the sidebar.

That's not what balanced focus is or how it works. Effects can give bonuses separately to specialized or balanced focus. The bonuses you get for for each resource while in balanced are not equal to one fifth of the balance you'd get in each category if specialized, or any other other simple combination of specialized bonuses. Balanced focus is a completely independent and separate focus selection from the specialized focuses.


That's fine, if you just wanted to display the possible focuses, but this has to work as a UI widget, which is the primary concern.


"I'm convinced" isn't valid argument. I've given some specific conceptual and usability problems with your design, and not liking long discussions doesn't make them go away. If you don't want to deal with all the issues that the discussion brings up, perhaps you should wait until the relevant part of the discussion is completed, and then contribute based on the results?


At the bottom of the planet image was my suggested location for icons for specials attached to the planet. There's no particular reason they have to go there, but if you want to put the empire symbol there, then where can the specials icons go instead?


The problem is that meter values are really quite irrelivant to the player. What matters is amounts of resources being produced, and how focus settings or other effects change them, and how they grow. It's quite confusing to see two planets with apparently equal meter values, but no clear indication of how many resources this corresponds to.

If meter values were the best thing to show, then bars would work and the constant ceiling factor would be a relevant advantage to using them. But we really need the resource production amounts to be visible, which trumps the convenience of a fixed bound on the meter values.

Showing resource production when moused over, and meter value on the bar isn't good either, because it presents a misleading visual comparison between planets.


The visual representation as bars would be better for comparing different focus settings on the same planet, but they are not useful for comparisions between different planets, since the actual resource production of a planet is also dependent on population.


This would help somewhat, though it would still be a bit confusing to have the various bars on different planets have no real relationship to the actual resource production numbers next to them.

If it were done, I'd stick the actual resource production number on the left, immediately next to the icon for the resource, with the bar to the right, since the resource amount is still the most important thing, and the bar is providing visual comparison of focus settings, which are less significant. Also, the bar takes up a lot more space, and the number fits in with relatively less displacement of the other indicator compared to the other way around. Also, the left side of the bar is always there, though the right side moves, so you'd often have an empty bar with a number far off to its right for no apparent reason, were the number to the right of the bar.


A collapseable view for a variety of things on planets was an aspect of my previous mockups. Presumably there will be ground troop info, social / espionage / influence and/or factional information that could be displayed.

Presumably the collapsed resources view would just show the production of each resource as five numbers, left to right. They could be coloured their resource's colour to eliminate the need for icons.

It might be better to have an engine-wide collapse and open setting for this though, to eliminate the need to keep track of all the open/closed statuses, and to consolidate the open/close function into a single toggle button. I do mean might though... I can see it being useful to expand all the sub-panels for a single planet, and no other planets...


Yes and no...

For the food, not feeding yourself doesn't necessarily imply starving, as there is the empire pool.

For the research, I assume we'll rarely or never actually reach the limit on meters of 100. If this does occur, it'd only be at the very late game. Much more often your max research will be well below 100, due to limited available bonuses from effects (from techs, buildings, specials, etc).

I don't remember exactly why we put a 100 limit on meters so prominently into the design... It might have been drek's idea, and/or based around the idea that meters would be what the player cares about, so that having the limit would be as useful as you now point it out to be for display purposes. But my more recent realization after playing with v0.3 is that the really important thing is the resource production amounts, not the meters, as above.


What do you mean by "whatever balanced"? Where are primary and secondary in the loop? Is there a way to set primary focus without setting secondary focus to the same resource first? How do I set primary and secondary focus to the same resource, or both to balanced?

Even if that all works sort of as I expect, it might be complicated and confusing to use. Assuming I start all balanced, if I want to set farming to primary focus and mining to secondary focus, a natural thing to do would be to click once on mining, then click twice on farming. This wouldn't work however, as the first click on mining would set secondary focus to mining, and then the first click on farming would set secondary focus to farming. After clicking again on farming to set it to primary, I'd have to go back and click mining again.

If balanced is not balanced, what is it then? Maybe another term would be more approciate?

I find this confusing.

Same for the turns left for building projects. They can change every turn? How are you supposed to plan ahead for some turns? I thought the basic principle is KISS, but as it is now, you need a degree in engineering to understand how fO works.

The techscreen is an impertinence as well, by the way.


It does.


I guess I will do so in future, if I ever intend doing work on the UI for this project. But then don't ask for opinions from artists, if you are so deadocked and don't even consider them. My proposed system would work pretty well. You underestimate the players abilties and actually make it way harder for him than it is necessary.

I think now that we have several proposals that will probably all work well for focus selection, we might actually decide. Proposed were:

(a) hexagon selection, two hexagons (maybe one large for primary focus, one small for secondary focus), in the middle the current setting for focus

(b) pentagon selectors with balanced focus in the middle

(c) arrows on the left of a resource list, big and small arrow, several arrows for balanced

My personal favourite remains (a), although I find (b) close to equal.

I really like Eleazars new resource production mockup. I think it would be fine to show meters, as long as a current resource production is also avaiable. The comparison of meters between planets should actually be quite helpful to see how far a planet is developed, and the comparison of the current output to see how much resources are actually produced.

And about construction time, that'll often change depending on the empire's production changing, so I guess the progress bar does have some advantages.

I agree with you, pd, that the tech screen right now doesn't look very beautiful. Eleazar recently made a good suggestion to improve that, and maybe we can discuss about that after we've dealt with the side-panel.

For this discussion visually edit my mockup per recent discussion to exclude the numerical change-in-meter-value and include a numerical display of RP or PP for each bar. It's not clear that geoff is taking into account edits that i have admited should be made.


Do you see meter values in my mock-up? The distinction needs to be made now, since you criticism only makes sense if i was displaying the numerical values for the meter. My bars visually displays the relationship between 4 meter values, which is coincidentially the same relationship that exists between 3 relavant numbers for production, with the addition of the ceiling. In other words, without the ceiling, there would be no way to tell if these bars are showing displaying the meter, or the actual RP/PP. My mock-up also shows quite clearly the effects of focus settings.


Do you imagine that there is only one way that a person will want to compare planets? The bars show at a glance how well a planet has met it's current potential, and how far, and in what ways it has been specialized. The bars do not provide at a glance comparison of actual RP or PP values, but neither does any other proposed sidebar. "Numbers Only" proposals make it quite difficult to make at a glance comparisons of any aspect between planet.


Computers are good at keeping track of stuff like 1000s of open/closed statuses, that shouldn't be a problem.
It's hard to say without knowing in detail all the info that will need to go in the sidebar, but i believe having several independently collapsable portions for each planet may be best. It's more likely that you'll me most concerned with the same aspects of a particular planet from turn to turn. In one system, on planet X the social meters will have my attention, while on planet Y, the production will need watching. To be able to expand the portions i'm interested in and leave the rest collapsed, makes it much easier to keep my place from turn to turn, without the need of excessively frequent expanding/collapsing.

I do see the benefit of also having the option to collapse or expand all.



I believe what i'm proposing here is pretty obvious . In a nutshell: click on an arrow to make it bigger, unless it's the biggest size, in which case it will shrink.
Look at the example on the left. If the player clicks on minerals, the primary focus disappears, and everything becomes balanced. Or if you had clicked on science, it would become the secondary focus. Click on science a second time, and it becomes primary, while minerals are demoted to secondary.

It's true if you click on things in the wrong order as you've described, you will sometimes be forced to into 1 additional click to get what you want, however the motion cost is low, feedback is obvious and instantaneous. So in this case the simplicity of interface outweighs the cost of an occasional mistake. I believe the maximum number of clicks required to get from any state to any other is 3. However if that's too burdensome, a right click or key-modified click on any bar could set both focuses to balanced. It's certainly far simpler than setting the resource bars in Moo1.

We need numbers. You need to be able to make a change to the meters of a planet and see exactly how many RPs, or PPs, or whatever will be lost or gained. See my recent post about this.

Specifically, the level of a Meter gives the user no indication of the actual output of a given resource. It only tells the user how close they are to the theoretical maximum of output for that resource (the point at which meter=100). On a large planet with optimal food bonuses, that may result in 500 food, and on a small planet with lousy food-production it may result in 50 food (these are made-up numbers, but you get the idea).

While it is useful to have a sense for the Meters, and thus I think the bars are useful, Meters are secondary to actual resource output. Resource output is what a user can actually use to build things, research things, etc.

Note that there is in fact a mockup that should all the relevant numbers, and here it is:

I saw your post. Did you see mine?


I understand the importance of actual output. While i agree that the RP/PP needs to be numerically listed, i'm not confident about what else should be there. Thus i haven't done another mock-up with numbers. With bars like mine, i don't see the need for the max production to be written out on the main screen. The bar provides the general idea of how close production is to the potential max, which should usually be enough.


Also i'm not sure all information has been considered in the meter value's favor. These are simple positive or negative numbers. If the game never tells you that the max food meter is at "75", then the information that a building/special/etc increases max food production by 5 isn't very meaningful. In addition, meter like population, health, infrastructure will be on a simple 0 to 100 scale. It seems a little awkward to have very similar bars, with very different numbers.

I don't yet have a way to present all the information meaningfully. But i don't think all the relavant details have been sufficiently considered by anyone yet.

New mockup:



- detailed population info
- resource information can be collapsed (button in top-right corner)
- primary and secondary focus are selected with a simple drop-down list, easy to implement, easy to use
- construction and health icons
- BP/RP values, max/change bars from eleazar
- research faded out to show that its maximum has been reached
- suggestions for special (geoff) and flag positions
- buildings under construction faded out + progress bar (could also in be put into a collapsible box)

Feel free to comment.

- idea to discuss: put health and construction below the other resource icons

I like this a whole lot. I like the drop-down lists in particular. KISS.

It is misleadingly named, perhaps. You could think of it as the setting where equal effort is put towards producing each resource. That is, one fifth of your population works to produce each resource. This doesn't mean you produce the same amount of each resource however, as you may be more effecient at producing some resources than others, due to the planet you're on, techs you have, building effects, etc. That said, it might be renamed if a clearly better one was found...


The turns left are accurate if your funding level stays the same. But delays can happen, since you pay for production each turn, not once up front. Just as in reality, short term plans with high priority are more reliable than long term low priority plans. You can be pretty sure that a production item at the top of the queue with full funding will get finished at the predicted time, but the 5th or so item that only gets partial funding is not likely to be as accurate.


It's not a matter of the player's abilities, and I don't think your widget would have been unusable. However, it would be unnecessarily error prone, and would work in an unusual and thus confusing way. The conceptual reason for putting balanced in the middle is partly partly based on faulty assumptions, and isn't enough to compensate for the potential problems, for me anway.

How does my version of the ring menu make it harder to use?


True...

[/quote]"Numbers Only" proposals make it quite difficult to make at a glance comparisons of any aspect between planet.[/quote]
The bars don't really help much with comparing between planets either, as how specialized / unoptimized one planet is compared to another isn't a very useful comparison to make, in contrast with actual max and current production values.

Pehaps we can have both bar meter indicators and numerical values displays available for current and max meters? By this, I mean the ability to toggle between two different views in the same space. One would have just production amounts, and show the meters as bars, the other would have just numbers, showing max and current meter values and changes to these values.


Hmm... agreed.


How would one set both primary and secondary to the same specialized focus (eg. farming)? As described, clicking on an icon changes it:

(not focused) -> (2nd focus) -> (1st focus) -> (not focused)

with no way to get both focuses to the same resource. You'd presumably need to insert (1st and 2nd focus) after (1st focus):

(not focused) -> (2nd focus) -> (1st focus) -> (1st and 2nd focus) -> (not focused)

(Not that I like it either way...)


It's a simple display, but not a simple to use interface. Simple to use would be if you can change either of primary or secondary immediately to anything you want, without any additional actions, nor having to think about the order of clicks before hand, nor having to go back and fix the other setting you changed inadvertently in the process.


This makes it somewhat difficult to compare two different planets' max potential production values, if they are at different levels of development. Planet A has 25 production, which is about a quarter of its max, and planet B has 54 which is about two thirds of its max. I've got to do some estimation from the bars to get the ratios, then do some multiplication and compare... With the numbers, I'd just compare the two planets max production values. So again, perhaps both options should be available?


My plan is to have effects descriptions say something along the lines of "increases food production by X per 10 population on planets with X focus". Essentially, I want there to be no need for the player to know anything about meters, since the concept is unnecessary and confusing for them if mentioned.


Isn't having similar bars with different numbers a reason not to use bar displays of meter values for the resources? Assuming the production matters, not the meter value, and we display the production as a number, different planets will have wildly different numbers adjacent to the same-sized meters.

Also, as with resource meters, while the absolute limit is 100, the practical limit is usually much lower for these other meters, particularly at the start of the game when bonuses available sum to much less than 100.

Acceptable and functionally the same as a ring menu. They shouldn't have "prim" and "sec" in english text on them though. Perhaps a text label next to them, or a number on them?


Health isn't really related to the resource production values. It can probably be put into its own (to be in future collapsable) sub-panel, which will later also include other similar information, such as race info or migration status and settings. It could also be attached visually to the population numbers, to which it is most relevant.

Construction could perhaps use a meter, or at least a max value and perhaps change. It is very relevant to resources production, so should stay in the same panel, likely hidden when collapsed. Above or below doesn't really matter, though that space at the top right seems good enough, unless something else needs to go there.

Any thought on what would be shown when the resources panel is collapsed? Nothing, or just resource current production amounts, or...?

Edit: whoops, two posts instead of one... ah well, the first was long enough.

Huh? It makes no sense to say, "My primary focus is farming, and my secondary focus is farming." I'll admit the the v.3 reqs can be read to allow both focuses to be on the same resource, but i doubt that was the intention.


Agreed.
The Infrastructure meter belongs with Production. (i'd put it on top since it influences the production)
Health belongs with Population and other future social meters.


Err, it sounds like your solution is much more confusing that what you attempt to fix.

"+5 to max food production" is much simpler even if you have to understand the meters. I suspect the intention of uniform meters was to make it easy for the player to understand, not to hid

"increases food production by X per 10 population on planets with X focus" is not simple, and doesn't let you know what's going to happen with other populations or foci. Nor is it easy to remember. The description would be absurdly long if it tried to explain what "orbital garden" will do in every situation.