First Impressions

[Ripcord O'Reilly]

I'm always listening.

The idea is to keep the combat screen free of clutter and anything that might break you out of the experience. I think it's kind of an extreme reaction to games that just display too much, too many little menus and bars and so forth. Dunno about you guys, but I want to see the ships.

So, those are some of the reasons we implemented it the way we did, with a mouseover for reviewing each ship's status.

Still, as I said at the top, I'm always listening.

[ZylonBane]

Ripcord O'Reilly said:
Dunno about you guys, but I want to see the ships.

If this were a screensaver, I'd agree with you. But since the status of each ship is the most important thing in a battle, of course people are going to be constantly mousing over each ship to view their status, because that's the only means of obtaining that information you've given us. By attempting to declutter the combat display, you've forced the opposite effect.

So yeah, your testers were right. Mini hull/shield bars should have been in there.


A few more suggestions/bug reports:
================================================== ===========
There should be an ENGAGE button on the system view window. It got so tedious going through the VIEW, CLOSE, wait for map to zoom back, ENGAGE cycle that I eventually started skipping the VIEW button entirely.

When you add a ship to your fleet, the ship display always switches to firing arc mode.

I found it really frustrating that you have to abandon leftover credits if you don't make a precisely equivalent trade. Obviously a standard currency exists in this universe. Let me just take my change and go!

Once I tried to board a derelict, got attacked, escaped, came back, and this time the ship really was derelict. Seems like the state is being rolled randomly every time you enter the system instead of being persistent.

I think it'd be a nice addition if mirror-translocated ships would head back to their home systems.

After you've used a trader ship in combat and they ask for payment, it's confusing that the button to refuse payment is labeled CANCEL. You're not really cancelling anything. I think it would make more sense to have a REFUSE PAYMENT button (or just REFUSE if that's too long).

When mousing over items in a store, I think it would be better if the descriptions appeared at the bottom of the window, where the items are, instead of way up at the top of the window, in... the title bar???

The ship status display says "Lightspeed" next to the Deep Space and Nebula speed bars. But the speed of light is a constant. This label should be just be "Speed".

[Combat Wombat]

ZylonBane said:
Space and Nebula speed bars. But the speed of light is a constant. This label should be just be "Speed".

For the record the speed of light is not constant

[ZylonBane]

Pfft, fine Mr. Wizard. The speed of light in a vacuum is constant. Happy now?

[Shadowcat]

On damage bars...

It occurs to me that there's already an existing HUD display for all ships in combat. Every ship has a triangular boundary indicating if it's friend, foe, or neutral. (And I'll just diverge a moment here to remark on the beautiful way this has been tweaked in the sequel such that the triangles are clear at a distance when they are needed most, but smoothly fade away as a ship becomes larger on your screen so that you don't notice them once things get big and beautiful).

Anyways, I think this display could be ammended to indicate other things such as damage, as well, but not seem too excessive given that it leverages a display that we're already used to seeing.

If this option were enabled (and as well as a default value, it ought to be able to be toggled on and off by mouse and/or keyboard during combat), then the triangles would not fade from view (or not to the same extent), and they might look something like this very rough mock-up:



One of the long sides showing shields, the other hull strength, and the short side indicating the status of the on-board systems.

At the front I've put a triangle to indicate that the ship is in "aggressive" mode (see Hugo's ramming/auto-evasion thread).

There are probably better ways to do it, but something like this would blend in fairly well I think... not too distracting, but telling you (once you're used to it) pretty much everything you need to know.

[Hugo]

Has poll has been created on ISF (infinite space federation).
Suggestions have been made regarding the game's user interface, among other things, and now you can vote on one or more features that you would like to see in the game.

http://s7.invisionfree.com/SAIS_Foru...?showtopic=110

[ZylonBane]

Shadowcat said:
It occurs to me that there's already an existing HUD display for all ships in combat. ... Anyways, I think this display could be ammended to indicate other things such as damage, as well, but not seem too excessive given that it leverages a display that we're already used to seeing.

The problem with this is that bar graphs are most easly read at a fixed orientation. Having them spinning around with the heading indicator would make them quite difficult to read. And if you were wanting to know the status of a fighter that's only 5 pixels across onscreen-- impossible to read.

I just want some little fixed-size, fixed-orientation bars floating under each ship. Of course there'd be an option to hide them.


I also don't want my ships to flop around like fish out of water whenever other ships get near them. IMHO, the close-combat AI is currently broken. I'd rather have direct helm control than have to constantly trick the AI into not getting itself killed. The weird thing is that the enemy AIs seem to have no trouble staying on target during close combat.

[The_Lensman]

I'm with Ripcord on this one. The combat screen is perfect, in my opinion. I'm not really a serious gamer, and didn't even think about any of this stuff until reading this thread.

My first impression of the demo is: freakin' AWESOME! Simple 2d, yet incredibly gorgeous, graphics. Great music and ambient FX. And the ease of modding the game is almost enough to make me weep. Except for a snag in the combat screen, I've got the orignal Enterprise sailing through Sector Prime. Switched out Lexter(?) picture with (at different times) some admiral from ST, and myself (showing a friend how easy it was to mod).

I've got idea's for some Trek stuff and my own stuff as well. Thanks for creating such an awesome game!

[gordonstrange]

Actually, speed of light in a vacuum is -not- a constant.
Light can also be bent by strong gravitational forces (either black holes, neutron stars, cloaking devices, and sometimes a card carrying games developer can whip out his/her Artistic License & do a quick mod.



GS
-It all depends on the definition of the word 'definition'-

[ooheadsoo]

I want to reinforce the complaint about there being no fixed damage indicators. This is a major problem for those who want to play more tactically without having to pause the game every 10 seconds. With higher resolutions available, the hud would not have to take up a lot of screen real estate. With my resolution at 1280x980 on a 21" crt 3ft away, I could easily get away with a larger hud with more information . Having the option to turn it off for those playing with lower resolutions, or even higher resolutions should yield a result pleasing to any side of the argument.

I remember in the original game, you only needed to click anywhere in the window to close it. Now that the windows open in the center of the screen half the time instead of where you originally clicked the star system or info button, it's even more important that it be effortless to close the popup. I think the window should pop up near the item clicked on AND should be closeable with a click anywhere but the title bar, which is still used for dragging. It's pretty rare when you want to drag the window around. If there was an algorithm for tiling windows so that they did not overlap, I would guess that the windows would nearly never be dragged.

I also recall that double click would bring up the info screen in the original game. Is there any reason this could not be brought back?