Difference between revisions of "User:Geoff the Medio"

Revision as of 18:31, 16 June 2005

forum profile

Musings Ships

Emails to tzlaine Dump

• For moving things around in the queue, it would be rather nice if the # Turns indicated on the box for the tech changed as you dragged the box up and down the queue. The number would indicate the number of turns it would take if you dropped the tech at the location where you current have it dragged. This way, you wouldn't have to actually drop it to find out how long it would take in a particular queue position. (You could also update all the other techs on the queue to show how long they would take if you dropped the tech you're currently dragging.)

• IMO the double clicking (a tech on the queue) to remove from the queue isn't very intuitive. It also has the somewhat annoying side effect of centring the tree on the removed tech... Could you add the ability to drag and drop a tech from the queue onto the tree window to remove it from the queue?

• Similarly, being able to drag from the tree onto the queue would be good

• A minor complaint: If I expand/collapse the subtree off a tech, the tech moves. It would be much more intuitive if that tech stayed in place, with just the stuff around it changing.

• A semi-major complaint / request, that I doubt you'll be able to fix: It would be nice if techs were spaced horizontally according to the number of prerequisites they have. This would be based on the longest path from the tech back to a tech with 0 prereqs. It would ensure that all 1st-tier techs (with 0 prereqs) are at the left edge of the tree, and all 2nd tier (with all prereqs having 0 prereqs themselves) would be at the same distance immediately to the right of 1st tier techs, and all 3rd theirs (all prereqs having 0 or 1 prereq them selves, and at least 1 tech with 1 prereq), etc. It's rather odd looking now to have a 1st their tech floating around some 3rd tiers, as happens now with Orbital Construction and Industrial Farming in the All view (assuming your tech view displays the same as mine). This is especially problematic in that it's hard to see much of the tree, and there's no quicklist of currently researchable techs, so unless you hunt around looking for every last tech, you could miss some currently available techs because they aren't grouped logically together near other techs of the same tier.

• A related request: An alternate view in the tree window that just lists all techs, appropriately colour coded for available/researched/unavailable, in alphabetal order by category/all would be good. A few minutes ago I was trying to find a tech (Environmental Encapsulation), but couldn't remember what category it was in. It was rather difficult to find it. The alphabetical list could go in place of / alternate with the tree view, since you'd only need one or the other at any given time. Being able to sort by cost / research time would also be nice.

• Also, a minor thing: The Requires / Unlocks listings at the top right could be compressed vertically. There's a lot of wasted space in there... You could chop about 6 pixels off the height of each tech box without problem, I think. An extra tech or two could then fit into the window without scrollbars.

• You can't enqueue a tech that's not currently available (ie. for which not all prerequisites are known). This is problematic because it means we can't enqueue a long series of techs, which means that a) the player has to keep going to the research screen to enqueue new stuff, even if they knew what they wanted beforehand, and consequently b) we won't be able to save / load research queues which include techs not currently available. Various people have been quite keen on the idea of saving / loading queues...

• It's hard to immediately know which category you're looking at in the tree view, especially after clicking on a quicklink at the top right. I realize that the tech you click is shown in the top middle tech info box, but the tech shown there isn't always in the category of the tree being shown, so isn't a reliable indicator of what category view you're looking at. Could you make the buttons look like tabs, as in BreadMan's mockup, or could you highlight the button of the techview currently being shown

4

Add controls in-game to adjust autosave settings. Current command-line or config.xml options:

--autosave.multiplayer
    If true, autosaves will occur during multiplayer games. | Default: 0

--autosave.saves
    Sets the number of autosaved games that should be kept. | Default: 10

--autosave.single-player
    If true, autosaves will occur during single-player games. | Default: 0

--autosave.turns
    Sets the number of turns that should elapse between autosaves.
    Default: 5

5

• IMO it would still be better to use a marker icon or text on the fleet's box in the list of fleets to indicate orders given to the fleet, rather than reordering the list using an autosort by order type. The icons would be in addition to the textual indication below when each fleet is selected. This could also be extended later to cover additional orders as they become implemented... for now "Moving" and "Idle" or somesuch would be sufficient, or appropriate icons. Later we could have "Patrol", "Blockade", "Intercept" or whatever is relevant. Indicating move destination or target of the fleet (when applicable) on the fleet box might be nice, but there's probably not enough room. The icons don't need to be pretty right now, so it shouldn't be an art issue limiting such a feature... Even a red circle (or octagon) and a green circle for stopped and moving would be sufficient.

15

We previously discussed the RefineBuildingType effect, and how it allows adding of effects groups, but not removal. You suggested adding the opposite effect, where possible, to achieve the same thing, but this is rather unsatisfactory and limiting. So, I'd like to work out a way to make it possible to remove effects groups that you won't find too time-consuming or difficult to implement...

How about giving effects groups an optional text identifier tag (somewhat like stacking group)? To remove an effects group from a building type, you'd include an id tag in the effects group's description, and then indicate the id tag of that group in the appropriate effect description. New effects groups would be added the same way they are now (and could include id tags as well...)

Is there a huge design problem with this I'm not anticipating, or an underlying technical reason why removing effects groups would be problematic?

16

The AddOwner effec thas some odd results...

Here's my tech:

<Tech>
 <name>ZHP_EXAMPLE</name>
 <description>ZHP_EXAMPLE_DESC</description>
 <type>TT_THEORY</type>
 <category>ZHIPS_CATEGORY</category>
 <research_cost>1</research_cost>
 <research_turns>1</research_turns>
 <prerequisites></prerequisites>
 <unlocked_items></unlocked_items>
 <effects>
   <EffectsGroup>
     <scope>
       <Condition::PlanetType>
         <PlanetType>PT_OCEAN</PlanetType>
         <PlanetType>PT_TERRAN</PlanetType>
         <PlanetType>PT_OCEAN</PlanetType>
         <PlanetType>PT_BARREN</PlanetType>
       </Condition::PlanetType>
     </scope>
     <activation>
       <Condition::Self/>
     </activation>
     <effects>
       <Effect::AddOwner>Source.Owner</Effect::AddOwner>
       <Effect::SetMeter>
         <meter>METER_POPULATION</meter>
         <value>50</value>
         <max>0</max>
       </Effect::SetMeter>
     </effects>
   </EffectsGroup>
 </effects>
</Tech>

After researching the tech, each turn I get a whole slew of sitrep entries about "Your population at planet ERROR in system has starved to death" (there's an extra long space between "system" and "has", incase gmail decided to remove it for me)

I then have ownership of all the populated planets in the game (all enemy empires have homeworlds on terran planets), but all the systems are shown as half owned by me, and half owned by them... I'm not sure if a single planet can have shared ownership, but there's no indication of this on the UI if it can.

Parts of the UI also slow to a crawl. Dragging the map around is very sluggish or jerky, with about a quarter second delay between mousemove and graphical update. Dragging the sitrip around the screen is just as jerky, as is scrolling up/down through sitrep entries, or the sitrep scrolling is sometimes nonresponsive. Dragging fleets windows around seems to work fine, however, and the UI in the fleets window seems response, and giving move orders seems to work fine.

I'm also a bit unclear as to why all those planets are starving... I have plenty of food available. Unless maybe there's a quirk in the population loss algorithm so if you have waaaaay more population than the max, they all die... (I'm setting current pop to 50... though actually I haven't specifically tested the effect to set current meters... maybe I should do that...)

The server should also probably be updating me with info about those systems, like their names and starlane connections and contents, in addition to not killing all my people on thim... though I suppose that requires a full turn of colony ownership, which I suppose I'm not getting if they're all dying...

18

Now we need to show stockpile numbers somewhere.