0.4 ship design UI

[pd]

Good points. I didn't realize the size difference is that big compared to my previous mockup and I sometimes forget what kind of difference it is, when working on 1600x1200 or above. If I scale down the image to about 50-60% it will be as big as in the mockup and this leaves us with parts at 64x64px, which - I agree - seems big enough.

My plan was to keep the slots and parts the same size, and rescale the hull image behind them, while keeping the centre points of the parts fixed over relative positions in the image. The parts / slots stay the same size in pixels and have the same relative position. I'm currently using 64x64 slots and parts (see attached arrange in parts list), but could make them resizable (collectively - this could be a sperate UI setting).

This will introduce overlapping, especially at exteme zooms but it still could work and is worth a try.

We could have the option to use non-zooming hull images and pan, if desired... Or have both pan and zoom user-controllable, like the tech screen. But there has to remain an option to see all slots at once; users won't care about fantastic art and scale of huge hulls if they can't design their ships.

Not beeing able to design ships is an exaggeration, if it just takes some paning, but you have a point of course, since you were referring the the uber-sized picture.

[Geoff the Medio]

Could I get a few part icons made up? These don't need to be fancy or final, but I'd like to not have a part palette that looks like the attached... (those are all different parts).

The ship_parts.txt has a bit more detail, but for now I've made up these parts:

• Laser
  Ion Cannon
  Nuclear Missile
  Active Radar
  Deuterium Tank
  Antimatter Tank
  Electromagnetic Damper
  Lead Armour Plating
  Defense Grid
  Deflector Shield
  Colony Pod
  Cryonic Colony Pod

[pd]

Are there different versions/refinements of each part expected - like Laser Mark II, Laser Mark III, etc?

[Geoff the Medio]

Are there different versions/refinements of each part expected - like Laser Mark II, Laser Mark III, etc?

Short answer: No

Long answer: Yes, sort of. We'll have refinement techs that improve or alter the appropriate part. You won't pick between different refinements of a part when building a ship, however. We could alter the appearance of the part when the refinement is researched, but it's not a high priority.

[Tortanick]

Think now might be a good time to officially start designing the actual ship parts?

[pd]

Every contribution regarding Ship Part Icons should go here.

[eleazar]

I think I mentioned this before, but I'm not sure anymore. Those images are supposed to be shown at 100% - always. What doesn't fit on the screen will be cropped. The player can pan the area. Zooming should not be necessary

That's just not feasible. We're targetting 1024x768 minimum resolution, of which maybe 700 pixels wide and 200 pixels tall can be devoted to just the hull image and slots (after the parts list and part/hull details/encyclopedia panel). Perhaps a bit more bit more height could be gotten with some rearrangement of panels. With a 2048 by 410 hull image shown full size, the UI would be basically unusable.

My general opinion is that if we need to pan or zoom to place parts on the hull, and/or understand what's what's been placed, then we've included too many slots, or done something else wrong. The ease-of-use i believe we were seeking with a slot system would be significantly degraded if we can't see and understand all the added components at once.

[Tortanick]

Every contribution regarding Ship Part Icons should go here.

Isn't that thread for designing how ship parts look? I was thinking more along the lines of designing the gameplay effects for various ship parts.

[Geoff the Medio]

Every contribution regarding Ship Part Icons should go here.

Isn't that thread for designing how ship parts look?

Yes...

I was thinking more along the lines of designing the gameplay effects for various ship parts.

I don't think the post was in reply to yours.

Regardless, there are brainstorming threads about ship parts, and feel free to make a new one. I'm not ready to have a fancy official discussion about this, but if you've make some interesting parts or hulls and submit them (as ship_hulls.txt or ship_parts.txt format hull or part entries, with corresponding stringtable entries), I might stick them in SVN. Please don't discuss it any more on this thread though, as it's off topic.

[Bigjoe5]

Just a quick idea for the implementation of the "parts" box...

Instead of having several buttons on the top that select the type of part shown as Geoff posted, how about we take up the whole space of the box to show the players basic options in a kind of grid/pattern, then when the players general selection is clicked on, that image kind of expands to fill the whole box and transforms to show you your options for that category, then a smaller button in the corner would "zoom" it back out to the main type selection stage. For weapons, it could possibly go into a stage where it shows SR/LR/PD/(special?) before showing the individual weapons.

I'd like this because a) it would look pretty sweet and b) you wouldn't have to take up space with the buttons at the top of the part box. It would admittedly be slightly more clicks for the player to have to go back to the first stage each time before going to a different category, but that's only 2 clicks (3 if you were in the weapons category) instead of 1. Not too heavy a price for something to look a lot cooler.

Did what I say make sense? Can you kind of see it in your mind? I'm not very good at explaining this visual kind of stuff...

[eleazar]

I'd like this because a) it would look pretty sweet...

We should be going for a UI that is simple and functional at this point, since it is highly likely that things will need to be added, moved around, and changed as the project continues.

"Bling" and special effects should only be considered for the GUI when we've reached a much more finished state.

[Bigjoe5]

stuff that eleazar didn't address, i.e. point b.

I see your point of course, and I don't expect anything fancy to be added for at the moment, but even a basic non-fancy implementation could definitely be a space saver, if the ship design screen was feeling a bit cluttered.... Just a thought.

edit: to clarify, I mean you could just click on one category and it would just switch to the next stage without any fancy transition. It still has the benefit of saving space by not having extra buttons, without any of what eleazar calls "bling".

[dissident]

i've got a suggestion:

3dsmax has a quite handy 'quad-menu' which is context-based and can save a lot of time. by using something like that we could save a lot of space on the screen for tasty flavor graphics (which i think is a good thing because they ad to the feel of a game) and keep usability. i made a quick sketch (not really beautiful) to show what i mean:



A) a dropdown list containing all ship designs made by the user so far. you can select one and delete (or change) it. by clicking on 'create new' a window opens up that let's you select hull type and enter a name. by double-clicking on the name of the chosen design it can be changed.

B) a box that shows general information about the design (cost, time to build...) as long as the cursor stays in a neutral place.

C) a parts slot. by clicking on one of those some icons apear showing general types of parts (lasers, sensors...) as depicted in D (uh, i messed up...the upper D of course)

E) is a list of icons showing the different possible parts in the chosen category and opens up by clicking onto one of the icons of D. Select a part by clicking onto it and you're done.

the general information box (B) could show information about the different parts when hovering over the icons.

lower D will let you choose to clear all slots or save the design and return to the main game ui.

i think there are some arguments for this method:
1) it's pretty clean. the screen is not clustered with icons, buttons and so on.
2) any given part can be selected by three clicks, which can be done really fast with only a short period of time needed for players to get used to it. (compare clicking three times at positions close to each other to drag and drop - i think it's faster and even easier to implement, but i'm not the one doing the coding, so correct me if i'm wrong)
3) more space for fancy graphics of impressive ships
4) with properly designed icons all will be quite self-explanatory while the context-sensitive infobox has enough room for further information

please excuse any bad spelling, as i'm no native speaker plus it's getting late and i had some beer.

[Josh]

Neat diagram.

[eleazar]

A) a dropdown list containing all ship designs made by the user so far.

A dropdown makes a lot of sense in that place, as long as it is a nice and long menu.