FreeOrion

Hello,

This is my first post and today i tried to play the game for the first time.
I'm a big fan of MOO1 and MOO2 (i don't like MOO3).

My first impressions about FreeOrion:

1. The interface is not intuitive.
Especially I don't understand how the tabs work (for example when trying to build something). Why all of them are on the same level: Available, Unavailable, All, Buildings, Ships. I guess some of them are like radio buttons and some are like checkboxes but which are what? Especially "All" means buildings+ships or available+unavailable? or both? I tried for 5 minutes to understand. They should not look like tabs and they shoud be grouped somehow.

2. The use of right and left click are sometimes reversed: move fleets with right click but scroll using left click. Isn't this strange? Also doubleclick sometime do things and sometimes not. Not too clear what and when it does. I feel that i'm missing windows/menus because i don't know where is possible to use doubleclick.

Note: i don't want to read the manual. i guess 80% of players will not read it

In some places, indeed it isn't. We're working on that.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

Good attitude.

Indeed it is. And if your statement was to be meant ironically, just think a moment about that: when did you last buy/got a game and have read the manual? For me I can say, I never read any manuals before I start a game, only afterwards to improve my gameplay or to lean keyboard shortcuts.

The information that used to be only found in the manual is now usually found within the game in tutorials, help screens, options, and/or whatever-a-pedias.

I don't think most people read all the documentation before actually playing... nor should they. But when people gets stuck, i think the majority turn to the documentation to try to find the answer.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

Proper behaviour is first try to find answer in documentation or in forum archive and only then ask question.

Ships, Buildings, Available and Unavailable act like checkboxes or toggles. Clicking turns them on of they're off, or off if they're on. The All button turns both Ships and Buildings on if either is off, or turns both off if both are on. It could perhaps be renamed "None" when both are on, and could affect avaiable and unavailable as well, but I figured it's more useful to be able to toggle all types on and off while only seeing the available stuff. Alternatively, since there are only two type of things to build (Ships and Buildings) we could probably do without the All button. It's much less useful here than on the research screen where there are 6 or so categories of techs to toggle.

Making them not look like tabs could help, although we have rather limited space to work with in the buildable items list to do anything fancy. Would the slight vertical separation in the following-linked mockup help?:

viewtopic.php?p=35030#p35030

I'm not sure what you mean by asking why they're all "on the same level". What would be the alternative? What "level" do you mean? Vertically-separated rows?


I don't really see what's strange about this. Ordering fleets to move with right click is an entirely different action than panning the map by left-dragging.

It would probably be good to have a discussion about making fleets be moved with left-click, though. Presently moving fleets is the only case where right click does something essential. Most other actions are done with left clicking. We'd just need to set up a mode for the UI where when you have a fleet window open, left clicking on a system mean "move selected fleet here" instead of using right click.


I think the only use of double-click is to open the production screen to show a double-clicked system. This can be accomplished by clicking the system and then the production button at the top right, or the production button and then the system. You're not missing anything else... This double-click functionality is just a shortcut for something you could do anyway.

Or are there other cases I'm forgetting?

There are double-clicks to add or remove techs to the queue or from the queue, which makes perfect sense.

Right. Same for ships / buildings on the production queue. Those are also cases where there's no single-click alternative. You can also double-click parts on the design screen, now that I think about it, although in that case you can drag-drop as an alternative. ... And actually, picking a hull on the design screen requires a double-click.

Right-click popups on tech panels, buildable items, ship parts or ship hulls with an appropate "enqueue tech", "enqueue ship / building", "select hull for design" or "add part to design" could be helpful.

It's also be nice if we had a better way to represent ship designs and hulls. Presently there are the large background images, but these make rather poor icons, and don't indicate anything about the parts in a design, so aren't very useful other than representing just the hull...

A list of hulls with distinct icons could support drag-and-dropping hulls on the design screen.

A way to represent a complete ship design as an icon would be very useful to make the production screen use icons for building types or ship designs and allow drag-dropping to the queue or production locations (planets) to enqueue.

I think it works that way so left-clicking on a star can always do the same thing-- bring up that star in the sidebar.

Left and right might ultimately do a similar thing in battle, left click selects, and right click (if you have something selected) makes the selected ship(s) do something to the target.

I'm not sure which way is ultimately best.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

It would be great if the interface could work without right clicks - that would enable porting FreeOrion to smart devices with touchscreens. The context-menu, which appears on right clicks, could be opened by clicking and holding-down the LCD-stick - like context menus in windows mobile work.

In many games the right click deselects/cancels an action.
For example left click on a fleet selects the fleet and then left click on a star moves the fleet.
If i want to select a star then first use right click to deselect the fleet and then left click on a star to select it.
Also in many software applications (not only games), scroll/pan is done by draging with right button pressed (not left) but i guess this could be configurable by users.

A great improving of the interface would be to change the mouse cursor while moving over any active area (button, icon etc)
Also a hourglass would be useful when the action is not done instantly (for example when selecting a star)

That's what I had in mind.


Really? I can't recall ever using right click to drag. Do you click and hold to drag, or click ones to start and once to stop? I'm used to google maps and similar, where left drag is used to pan, and most PDF viewers, where left drag pans.


We generally highlight the thing under the cursor in these cases, rather than change the cursor itself.


This is actually rather difficult to do with how the FreeOrion GUI is set up.

For comparison, another case I wanted to change was when starting a new game: It says "Generating Universe and AIs..." even after the AIs and Universe have been generated and downloaded, and it's just your local client processing the data and setting up the map screen. This is a problem because there were a few graphics system related crashes (typically inadequate OpenGL versions) that would cause crashes of the client, but the last thing the player saw was "Generating Universe and AIs" which seems like something happening on the server.

Unfortunately, the rendering system doesn't update until the main game logic is done processing whatever it's currently working on. In the case of processing an update from the server, after this is done the map immediately loads, hiding the text that would ideally have said something different, so there's no use in changing it after processing the update. The text can't be changed at the start of the processing of the update either, since the next render doesn't get done until after the processing, so the change would also never be seen.

Similarly with cursors, I'm semi-assuming that any updates wouldn't happen until the loading is done.

Better would be to load the art that slows down initial opens of the sidepanel in a background thread, but that's rather difficult to get set up properly, and not a high priority right now.

Do we even use contextual menus?

Weather or not, it seems to me that a touch-screen device would be best if you configured the input specially for such a device. I think most would agree that options to configure your keyboard and mouse controls would be good to have anyway--- if not a current priority.


It seems like reserving the right button to cancel is a waste.

I can. Im my experience dragging, not click-move-click is more common.

In my experience complex games use the right and left buttons in a lot of different ways. I don't think you can make a good case that any one method is "standard".

We should probably use the upcoming space-combat implementation as as the basis for right/left click behavior. We'll do whatever is easiest and most efficient for combat, since that's where the seconds count most, and then extend that paradigm to the rest of the game, if it doesn't mesh with what we already have.

_________________
—• Read this First before posting Game Design Ideas!
—• Design Philosophy
—•— My Ideas, Organized —•— Get an Avatar —•— Acronyms —•—

I had a discussion with tzlaine about making hotkeys (keyboard commands) configurable, and I think we (or he) determined a good way to do it. Making mouse commands configurable is a bit more complicated though... In some cases, like left-click-hold-drag-release for drag-dropping is more or less hard-coded. In other cases, the effect of clicking could be made configurable fairly easily. In still others, it could be made configurable with moderate but not extremely tricky means.

Likely left-click to activate some GUI widgets will have to remain hard-coded... Which may not be that bad, since otherwise you could conceivably set a config setting so that you couldn't click on anything, which would make using a click-assignment GUI to fix it impossible.

Anyway, there are a lot of current priorities... Should I be bumping up a hotkey / mouseclick assignment GUI into a higher priority?