FreeOrion

sidepanel: planet

- in-game gas giant. it fits.
- put the special icons at the bottom of the planet; looks IMHO worse than before as it breaks the boundary of the sidepanel; also, the planet name would have to be very long and there had to be approximately 3 planet specials to cause an overlap with the planet specials in their old position
- removed numerical resource changes, elongated bars
- put construction back on top in an own box
- I dislike the idea of reducing the width of the sidepanel; it is small already, and screen resolutions of modern pcs are getting larger every two month

This mockup represents, the planet special position excepted, my idea of the redesigned sidepanel. I won't change it further, but anyone is welcome to do so if he likes.

sidepanel: system summary
- first sketches, please give suggestions
- what should be done about the sun position? remain there? above planets? centered?

I don't consider the sidebar "done" either. But i won't address everything in this post.

I agree it should be at the top, and i think it needs a bar.
Also the health / population display in the latest mock-up should be considered the collapsed view. The both should have bars in the explanded display, health especially since it has a break-over point that indicates the population is starving.



I don't care if PP don't currently exist in the sidepanel. The player needs to know about them in the sidepanel— if changing the focus on a core world to industry is going to do some good or simply produce vapor widgets. Even on the production screen there's no way to tell without doing math in your head. Even if it was on the prod screen you can't solve the problem there.

The fact that PP is only used on an empire level does not mean it cannot be displayed in the sidebar. We have instant automagical redistribution of resources. It would be simplest if when 20% of industrial capacity would be wasted due to lack of minerals, than every planet be given only 80% of their capacity. The red line would be drawn at 80% of current industrial capacity on all planets. If the player buys additional minerals (presumably delivered at the beginning of the next turn) or changes focus to increase mineral production or decrease industrial production, the red line will be moved. Instant and obvious feedback— the whole point of having bars that shift as focus is changed, rather than a series of numbers.

I don't know what formulas are neccesary to make this happen, but the function is obvious and neccesary.



Even if the game sees them as a building, they are (as i've seen them described) a distinctive and vitally important building, which will probably be upgradable. Thus probably worthy of special treatment.

Something like:

? It needs to look distinct form the resources, lest it be confused with one of them, so probably shouldn't have a full-length same-looking bar.


There should also be a "/max" after the current value for health in the collapsed view.

Also, we might want to use an alternate health icon. I don't think of a red cross as a christian symbol, but some people are quite sensitive about that issue, apparently. A red heart would work just as well. At least the cross is on a black background now though, so there's not likely to be any trademark / protected symbol problems (which I think only apply to the cross on white backgrounds)...


There are empire-wide resource indicators at the top of the screen. They don't provide enough information yet, but they are probably more appropriate as a way to indicate the balance of PP, industry and minerals in the empire than on the sidepanel.


Their capacity of what?


I'm not really getting what you're proposing here, but it sounds like it would be really confusing due to mixing empire-wide and system production amounts. If you're drawing a line on a planet's meter bar according to empire wide resource amounts, scaled according to the bar's size (current, max, or full 100% length), then it looks like that individual planet has some shortfall, and that increasing the meter of that planet to its full length would solve the problem. But it wouldn't, since that one planet's mineral or industry production is a small fraction of the whole empire's. And if things were scaled by current or max meter values, then as the meter increased, the 80% line would also increase, which would be even more confusing, as the apparent need would increase as the supply increased.


The specific planet on which they are located probably won't affect how shipyards function... The more important thing is to indicate what systems have shipyards.

Also, the meter bars are a tad drab looking... Any chance they could be stylized or spruced up a bit...?


So does the planet image...

Why does the sidepanel edge drop down about a third of the way into the right side of the planet? It could be just left of the collapsable info boxes, since there's nothing in that space for the actual planets parts of the panel.

It might also help if the icons were a bit bigger, and less box-shaped.


There are plenty of people using 1024x768 still, particularly on laptops.


pd has decided to leave it at the top right.


Don't need to worry about too many digits of resource production... Anything above 1000 will be converted to 1.03k or somesuch.

What's the idea behind the fleet icons and numbers?

I don't think the system population number needs a max value. It's not really clear what that max number would be, as there can be uncolonized planets that could have different max populations for different races (presumtive), and even then, should they count towards the max, or only colonized planets?

I'm also not sure that there needs to be a system population number at all... It's not clear if it includes just your population, or other empires' as well... And is it really useful information?

I've little interest in catering to people so paranoid of religion that they are offended by a red plus sign— however the red cross is a symbol of healing, while the heart is a symbol of "health." Therefore a heart is more appropriate.


OK, my math didn't actually do what i wanted. As i've mentioned, formulas are not my thing. I'll try to describe the functioning in painful detail and allow others to derive formulas.

The Empire of Aiee control 3 planets. It is projected to have 80 minerals at it's disposal next turn. However, industry points are projected to reach 100. There is a mineral shortfall of 20.

° Planet Nii has a projected 60 IP (industrial points). The red bar is drawn at the 40 IP point— the point at which if industry on this planet was lowered, there would no longer be a shortfall of minerals. The right third of the projected IP bar is colored a warning color.

° Planet Ukk will have 39 IP. The red bar is at 19 IP on it's display. The right half of the projected IP bar is colored a warning color.

° The new colony Mininuevo will have only 1 IP. The red bar is just past 0 IP. The whole projected IP bar is colored a warning color.

If production was lowered by 20 IP on either developed planet, or 20 minerals could be aquired on the galactic market, the red bar would instantly move to the end off the projected IP bar on all planets. —The point at which mineral supply and industrial production are equal.

Really the "red" bar should match the color of minerals, but to avoid confusion with "bad" on the IP bar, minerals shouldn't be red. I have other reasons for changing many of the category colors— mostly the disconnect between the use of color on the techscreen and in production icons. These should match to be usedful for other applications, such as building icons.



Production is used at an empire level, but it is created at a planetary level. It's only at the planetary level that an excess of industrial focus can be corrected. Therefore it's at the planetary level that the player needs to be made aware of the problem. Of course, i think it should also appear in the bar at the top in numerical form.
The fact that you are confused by my explanation in no way indicates that you would find the proposed interface confusing in actual use.



If i did agree with you, this is not the time. The basic content and how to convey it is currently under discussion, not the polishing. You build a house, and afterwards paint it.


Silent is right. Normal sidebar content should not break out of the sidebar. Think of it as keeping the sidebar thin.


No, pd (and i) prefer something like this.


It would pretty obviously refer to your population. Do you wonder if the production numbers are yours or a combined total for all empires in the system? However i don't feel strongly that population needs to be there.

I could argue that there's also a separate empire need, which is the sum of the PP needs of all projects on the queue, which might be less than the industry or available minerals (and thus the available PP), but in practice I don't think this is a really an issue, as presumably most of the time players will use all available PP by enqueuing more projects than they can simultaneously fund.


Why do you want to indicate the surplus of industry, rather than the shortfall of minerals? Presumably players will want to achieve better balance between resource production amounts by increasing the lesser-produced resource and thus increasing available PP, not by reducing the overproduced resource.


I assume that the creation you're referring to is the user action of adjusting focus to promote more minerals and industry resource production. Algorithmically, production is "created" at an empire level, after pooling industry and minerals, not before... However the non-UI distinction seems irrelivant.


Regardless of where the UI widget that makes more minerals or industry is located, production remains an empire-wide problem, not a local planet problem. It just doesn't make sense, conceptually or practically, to indicate empire-level shortfalls on individual planets. Marking a planet's meter bars with an indicator suggests that the problem is local to that meter, ie. that that planet is producing imbalanced resources and that this is a problem, which is misleading. Also, separately marking each planet suggests that the total problem is the sum of the problems for each planet, which it is not, and that every planet needs to be fixed to solve the all the separate problems. Perhaps a knowledgable user would know, but it would be confusing for many.

Indicators for the empire can display the shortfall of or excess minerals compared to industry (or vice versa) for the empire. This can be seen while the sidepanel is open, so used in the decision making process for setting planet focus.

Also:

As in this example, the marking of empire defecits on every planet leads to situations where a planet's production is much less than the shortfall that needs to be indicated. There's not enough bar to indicate the shortfall, making the indication method effectively useless on this planet. Also, there is likely nothing the planet can significantly do to reduce the shortfall, making the information useless even if it was available right there. Further, if the imbalance was quite large, then many planets would have this situation, and none of them would have enough bar to actually show the whole defecit, making the information even harder to get.

That said, the lack of any numerical indication of the max meter values that a new focus setting would produce makes it difficult for players to know how precisely to correct the problem (ie. what changes would be enough but not too much). This motivates my suggestions for a view of the resources panel on the sidepanel that shows current and max resource production as numbers, instead of or in conjuction with the meter-bars, as well as numerical expected changes in production with focus settings. This would allow the player to compare the expected max meter change on the sidepanel with the empire shortfall or surplus and make well-informed decisions.


There's some trouble with trying to correspond resources to tech categories by colour, in that both industry and minerals fall under the production tech category. Also, the food icon is wheat, which would look rather weird with the seemingly-natural growth tech category colour of green.


What is "normal sidebar content"...? All the stuff on the right in the boxes is player empire data... population, resource production, even the planet name arguably. The planet environment, size and the specials are properties of the planet itself... It makes sense to put together the info about what you've colonized, and separate from the what your colony has done and is doing there. More reasonable icons to put on the right side of the sidebar would be empire-status indicators for the planet. By that, I mean there might be an icon for the capitol planet of the empire, or planets with shipyards, if it's not clear enough from showing them in the buildings list.


Except it doesn't keep the sidebar any thinner, because the large, presently empty, space will be there regardless of whether specials are put there.


Ah, I hadn't seen that, or had forgotten it.


Ok, that it's your population is probably a reasonable assumption. But it's not clear what the max population number would refer to, re: total system population if you colonized all planets, or just planets you've already colonized.

Because excess minerals are stockpiled rather than wasted.


A good point, but not the problem you make it out to be. It is impossible to avoid all confusion for a player that does not read the help or manual. However even if the player doesn't read any documentation, the relationship between the "red line" and a particular planet's production will soon become evident. When he fixes the problem on one planet, he will quickly discover that the problem is gone on every planet. When he changes the production focus, the bars indicating industrial excess change inches from the mouse. If the problem was only indicated in the top bar (in a distant part of the screen) the effect of his change is not so evident. Information needs to be placed (as much as possible) near where that information can be used. It should not be necessary to look back and forth between distant parts of the screen to gauge if the change you are trying to make is sufficient. Nor should it be necessary to look at the total amount of industrial excess, and keep a running tally of changes to minerals/industry until it equals that total.


The information is not useless. The player knows that even a partial focus (via balanced) on industry is pointless on Mininuevo. He also knows that the problem is too big to be corrected on Mininuevo alone. The balance should only be "quite large" if the player has been mismanaging his production for some time. In normal gameplay the mineral shortfall should normally be proportionately small, and correctable with changes to a fraction of your planets.


All important numerical values will be available in tooltips, if needed by the player.
However a spread-sheet view (or the worthless compromise in which the bars are squished into uslessness by 3 numbers per bar) is in an inherently harder-to use interface, and not congruent with a game that values fun over realism, and simplicity over complexity. My plan clearly presents the information the player needs 99% of the time. In the rare circumstances that he needs or wants lots of raw numbers, it can be found in the top bar and in tooltips.



It's not trouble for me. Construction can be given a color that is half-way between Minerals and Industry. The food icon can be something that is naturally green. It doesn't hold up well at small sizes anyway.
It's very counterproductive to maintain two unrelated color-coding systems for the same or similar concepts in different parts of the game. I haven't focused much time on this because the total number of tech categories is unknown.


The stuff (excluding planets) that we currently have in the sidebar. I've already said that shipyards might be indicated outside the sidebar. I'm not trying to lay down an inflexible law for all future contingencies.


I am ambivalent about keeping the system's max population value in the display.


EDIT: One way to erase the problem of running out of minerals is to make it a viable strategy. I.E. to turn excess industrial production into money, a la Moo1.

I've updated the mockups:

Uncollapsed:


Collapsed:


I might not check back before next year, please do comment nonetheless.

I like this mockup.

What are those vertical lines running through all the bars near their left ends?
Does anyone object to using up arrows/down arrows instead of the eye-on-tv icon for expand/collapse?
What if there are 10 specials on a planet? It's probably not too likely, but the design should be able to accomodate extreme cases.
In general, building effects will be much more complicated than "Meter +X". They will usually be something like "Meter +X for all planets with focus F within distance D", or even more complicated. It may be best to either add room for a largish block of text under each building that can fit its full effects description, or remove the effects description altogether. I favor removing the effects description altogether, and indicating the effects with mouseover. After playing the game a few times, you'll know all the effects anyway.
If there are 10 buildings instead of the four below, will all 10 be visible in the expanded view, or will the expanded vire show the first few and have a scroll bar? I favor the former.
Also, if there are 10 buildings, what will appear in the collapsed view? The first four?

I'm not sure if this belongs here or in some other planet or system detail view, but having the actual effects of all buildings on the planet would be useful. Note that many buildings will affect a given planet, and the buildings need not be on the planet to affect it. For instance, if a planet A is affected by a building on another planet B, it might be nice to see the building icon and the result of the effect. So if a building 10 units away has the effect "Industry +2 to all planets with primary focus Industry within 20 distance units", we should show the building icon, and "Industry +2" somewhere associated with planet A. Again, I don't know if the place for this is the SidePanel or somewhere else.

Just my impression: I think is going to need to much space. If you have 5+ planets you will easyly run in situation of having to scroll around. Which is bad imo. I really believe those meters don't have to be show here. Maybe it enough to show it on planet view or show a meter on mouse over. Same to special at one per row mode. or is that already adress by collapsed/Uncollapsed!? In addition the switch should something like an triangle with corner down. And maybe one switch for all is enough!?

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

A final update before I go on holiday:

Uncollapsed:


- specials are indicated with an aterisk at the end of the planet name
- planet tooltip reveals which specials are present at the planet
- added grey outlines behind resources to make them stand out more
- buildings in rows, suggestion for tooltip (which can contain a lot more information)
- collapse arrows
- [Edit] cleanup, resource tooltip
- [Edit] the only thing I still don't like is that contruction is crammed into the top-right corner. I'd like to change that. Also, the focus selection buttons can be reduced in size. Then, we even might be able to reduce the sidepanel width a little.

Collapsed:


- arrows (should be upside down, my mistake)
- only the number of buildings is shown, tooltip reveals names of buildings (greyed out: under construction)
- basic resource tooltip

ToDo:
- boxes behind pop+health, construction
- drop-down boxes for foci



Eleazar introduced these (maybe he can explain better); I believe they're supposed to indicate the demand of a certain resource, e. g. if food drops below this line, the planet will starve.



I've implemented these suggestions.



I agree, but maybe we can have that for each resource individually; moving the mouse over food, the tooltip would display:
(see mockup above)


Yes, this is adressed by the option to collapse the boxes. Also, please take a look at the rest of this thread for alternatives that imho don't look very appealing.


I'd really prefer to have individual switches so that the player can decide which information he likes to be shown.

I don't really like the boxes around / behind the numbers and icons. It doesn't add any information, and makes things look busier... Is there a reason / theory for them?

Why not show max resource or meter values when a panel is collapsed? There's enough room to add the extra numbers... Though I suppose, particularly for the collapsed view, keeping the number of numbers shown to a minimum would be good. This would suggest removing the max population number as well.


It's not just buildings that have effects...


Specials are important enough to need to be shown all the time. If there were no planet images, then the argument that specials icons below the planet "breaks the boundary of the sidepanel..." would make sense, but there are planets there already breaking it. There is also space there for any number of specials. And as before, it makes sense conceptually to have them under the image that conveys environement and size information.

I should be doing different things...
Freed up some space... see for yourself.




They can be added to the tooltip, too. If the lists gets too long, we can move the information to a planet window later on, i. e. if we have one.

On the specials' positions issue: I don't see the need to discuss this further. It is more a matter of taste than anything. Both options are okay, I prefer the one in my mockup, but if people think differently, I don't mind that either.

Having construction at the bottom with the separator does deal with my previous objection of it appearing too much like the resource meters. I'm not completely happy with it though, as it still looks a bit too resource-like. I thought of sticking it above the focus selectors, but that moves them down too far, whereas they should be at the top for easy access. So... I guess it's ok as it is...

Is there another way to put in the expand/collapse buttons that doesn't take up a whole vertical column of space? They seem to inetrfere with the layout in a few places... particularly the buildings list. It shouldn't be an overly-small or hard-to-click widget, though... Any ideas?


For some meters, a value of 20 is the breakeven point. For food, if a planet has a meter of 20, it produces enough food to feed itself fully. Less than this, and there are growth penalties. For health, a value of 20 results in 0 growth. More than 20 allows positive growth, and less than 20 causes population loss.

The value of 20 has no particular importance for most meters though, as these have no threshold values, and only function as more = better. (Except perhaps industry and minerals that are somewhat intertwined with eachother's values on an empire-wide scale...)

Instead of just a mark at 20, marks at 20, 40, 60, and 80 might be good. Or, just marks at 20 for meters for which 20 has some special significance.

Could I get some 64x64 pngs with transparent backgrounds of the icons for health and construction, in the style of the mockups?

Also, a few 128x128 generic building icons would be good, just as filler until we can get a bunch more customized for actual buildings...

Do we have SVG support yet?