Obiwan wrote:Looks promising, sorry im not much help, GUI design seams to generally leave my mind feeling blank.
Could you work away at the remaining tech theory icons then? I've added a bunch more descriptions since the first spurt of output, and we really need the rest of them...
While the Map in the middle is good. Why not make it much smaller giving much more room for the other boxes.
The map needs to be a minimum size to be useful... I don't think it should be much smaller than it is. The size of the other windows is basically a function of how big one of them needed to be to fit in the info... the top left window's height was determined from the number of lines of text info I put in, and then I just made the top middle the same height as that so it lined up nicely. The width of the sidebar at the right was determined from how wide I needed it to be to fit in text and my sad sorry excuses for production indicators. The queue width is somewhat arbitrary, but there's no particular reason it needs to be much wider. The bottom panel, the buildings palette, is a bit smaller than I'd like, but may be sufficient... I have to play around with it and adapt it to the new style of window enclosure used on the other boxes.
Toggle buttons could partually collapse the info boxes to the view you have now, so the player can drag the map to the correct position.
I already have that to some degree... the star pictures can be removed by clicking a toggle button on the sidebar, and the buildings and political info from the sidebar can also be toggled on off. I suspect in future there'll be a ground forces panel as well, and perhaps others.
There's also no particular reason that the top middle window/box couldn't be resizable up and down, making more room for text at the expense of map space.