What is the problem with SE5?

[Captain Kwok]

Kana said:Yeah I can't believe Aaron hasnt played the game he created, that would be like SJ making CB mod, and never playing it...

Again, a slightly misconstrued reference - but I will say he probably doesn't get much of a chance to play for fun...

[PsychoTechFreak]

...besides playing GalCiv.

...I mean, only for the purpose of investigation of course.

[Suicide Junkie]

Captain Kwok said:

Again, a slightly misconstrued reference - but I will say he probably doesn't get much of a chance to play for fun...

Although it took only a few months of implementation, CB did simmer for years in the planning stages. Then another long while of upgrades and refinements.

And CB is just a mod, not a game engine.

[Azselendor]

I believe a more accurate comparison would be steve jobs at apple using windows instead of a mac

[Arkcon]

Azselendor said:
but personally I think Aaron needs to consider taking SE6 in a more modern direction than the other games.

This statement is intriguing -- you may have reached the very question we're searching for. How, specifically, do you think SE6 should be made more "modern" than SE4 or SE5?

[Azselendor]

By Forced Simplification.

This process basically dictates that every aspect of the game's interface needs to be reduced to a point where as little thought as possible is needed in the determination of how to do something.

For example, component placement in ship design in SE5 requires you to click on a component, then place it on the ship schematic, then click to install it (i guess that's the word?) on to the schematic and so on.
Forced Simplification would force it to operate via drag and drop with the computer also able to allow us to double click a component to automatically install it into the design.

Another would be to remove the panning, zooming, and scrolling buttons and allow the player to merely right click and drag the camera while holding it to the position and angle the user desires, zooming would of course be handled by holding the right mouse button and spinning the scroll wheel back and forth.

And similar steps could be taken across the interface to reduce the insane number of mouse clicks required to do a single task.

[Phoenix-D]

Using right-click for the camera would remove it for the UI, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.

[Fyron]

Azselendor said:
Forced Simplification would force it to operate via drag and drop...

Except that drag and drop is the same number of operations. Mouse down, move, mouse up, versus: Mouse click, move, mouse click. I'm not sure how that makes the interface any simpler to use?

Though really, drag and drop is a lot more operations overall, because in the current system you can do simple shift-clicks to add multiple copies of the same component without moving back to the component list and reselecting it. Double-click for auto placement beats both though.

[Azselendor]

most people are used to drag and drop as a natural function of computer usage. Forced Simplification forces us to use simplest and most natural means of accomplishing a task.

[Fyron]

I just don't see how it would provide any improvement what-so-ever. There is a visual indicator of what is happening when you click on a component, just as you see in a normal drag and drop. It might take a split second to retry with just a click if you first try a drag and drop, but that is all.

If the current system was eliminated and replaced with drag and drop, it would slow ship design down tremendously. Drag and drop of one item at a time is extremely tedious. You could potentially keep the shift functionality to be able to add a second (and a twelfth) copy of a component with just clicks on nearby boxes, but that would seem to violate the "forced simplification."

"Forced Simplification" seems a little like buzz word marketing to me... ala synergy.