First Impressions

[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!