Combat ship placement mockup

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Impaler
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#16 Post by Impaler »

battle-groups MUS be able to mix ships from different fleets inorder to keep the number of tactical units under control, thats the whole point after all

Clearly elezar has a point that it would be a crying shame for the player to have re-battle-group every time they enter battle.

I think I have a solution, battle-groupings are stored at the System level irespective of fleet movments. When a fleet moves into a system for the first time is automaticly copies the battle-grouping from the system it came from. This allows the SoD fleet to be keept organized as its desimating enemy systems. It also allows the player to save their defensive arangments on their border and core worlds. If fleets need to retreat they automaticaly re-organize into the battle=group last used when their was a battle in that system. This should give the maximum probability that the pre-set battle-groupings are what the player wants or are atleast close to what the player wants. And ofcorse if they arn't the play can easily re-configure (and their should be an explicity option to SAVE / NOTSAVE the new configuration over the old and some loading of pre-designed battle-groupings a bit like Macros)
Fear is the Mind Killer - Frank Herbert -Dune

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The Silent One
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#17 Post by The Silent One »

So here's a new mockup that uses some of the new ideas:

Image

- Ship pool: all ships that have not been assigned to any group

- Battle groups created by the player in previous battles are, if possible, recreated from the pool

- automated groups can be generated by type, size, function, etc.; there could be a button "place all" that makes the computer decide how to split the forces

- ships can be moved between groups by drag&drop, groups can be dragged/dropped on each other to join them or on the battle map to place them in combat

- new groups can be created by dropping ships on the empty space on the right of the groups

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Geoff the Medio
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#18 Post by Geoff the Medio »

The Silent One wrote:- Ship pool: all ships that have not been assigned to any group
Just make this "default group". No need to have a special case...
- new groups can be created by dropping ships on the empty space on the right of the groups
This is a rather big waste of space.... To be consistent with the fleets window, there should be a separate, non-scrolling, "new group" box, onto which ships can be dropped to make a new group. Alternatively, it's not really necessary to be able to make new groups from within the lists at the bottom, as you could just drag the ship(s) onto the map, creating the group there. I suppose for usability it's worth the duplication, though.

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The Silent One
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#19 Post by The Silent One »

New mockup:

Image

- cleanup and reorganisation of fleet organisation buttons
- replaced the fleet auto-generation buttons with a menu (more efficient use of space)
- added 'new fleet' box
- added a fleet marker on the map: shows a fleet id and number of ships in fleet

[Edit] - should replace 'fleet' with 'group' to avoid mix-up

[Edit] new Mockup added:

- 'fleet' replaced with 'group'
- formation menu
- small changes to group representation (ship count, formation)

Image

I don't think there has been an official word on fleet formations, but IMHO they are essential to simplify the combat setup. Any suggestions/commenta?

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Geoff the Medio
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#20 Post by Geoff the Medio »

I'm not getting the idea behind the menu you show open... What are the various options, and how would they work?

On the actual map, I'd expect to see actual ships, grouped together as appropriate, not an icon.

I'm not liking the groups list at the bottom left. There's only three groups visible, with a scrollbar that would be quite annoying in practice... The individual group boxes also seem like mostly wasted space.

Instead, why not think ahead for what else we'd want the in-battle UI to have to display groups in a list, and then make something similar to display the groups while placing and defining them at the start of the battle?

The list of groups could extend all the way up the left side of the screen. Probably we'll have a limit on the number of groups such that there'd never be a need for scrollbars. The groups can also be represented by somewhat smaller boxes than what's used now... probably just an icon (if even that...) and a label name. I'm thinking of something somewhat like what they do in Nexus screenshots. eg this.

That shot is a bit misleading, as the screens are clearly shrunk from their actual resolution, and contain all the ships, not just groups of ships, which is perhaps infeasible for FO.... though perhaps not... Being able to put an icon for all ships in a battle would be good, as we could then colour them or put symbols next to them or otherwise use the icons to represent the state of all ships to the player at a glance during the battle.

Another alternative: instead of having the groups listed vertically, have them arranged in a horizontal row along the top of the screen. Each group would then act like a drop-list, which would list all the ships in the group. You could double-click to open/close the list, or just click once to select the group.

I realize this is getting a bit off the topic if pre-battle ship placement, but we should probably try to use the same UI for this as in the actual battle, as much as possible. And, I think we can do some general planning for what sorts of UIs would work for listed a reasonable number of control groups (< 20) of ships, without knowing much else about how battle mechanics would work...

loganis
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Re: Combat ship placement mockup

#21 Post by loganis »

Hello kids,
Just wanted to throw my 2 cents in.
This is going to be a very complex game with differing styles of gameplay. I would suggest
we take some hints from the more flexible UI's that are becoming the norm for modern
gameplay.

1. Floating transparent moveable Windows
2. customizeable icons (selecting those of importance to a player's strategy)

The more flexible the interface becomes, the more adaptable it is to individual playstyles and situations.
I've ripped off graphics from a Hw just to help illustrate.

EVE online has a great system for UI
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combat mockup screen
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utilae
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Re: Combat ship placement mockup

#22 Post by utilae »

Cool. But needs explanation.

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The Silent One
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Re: Combat ship placement mockup

#23 Post by The Silent One »

This looks really great, and I hope the project will soon reach the stage where we can actually lay out the combat UI. However, I believe there is still some design and programming groundwork to be done.
If I provided any images, code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0.

loganis
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Re: Combat ship placement mockup

#24 Post by loganis »

Sorry for any lack of explaination. This was more of a suggestion as to how floating translucent windows
could have an advantage over shoving everything into the bottom third. Letting people open whatever windows they thought necessary for the circumstance or play-style. Symbols on the bottom third UI could open up these necessary windows.

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