SE:IV Gold vs SE5 Demo: Basic UI

[Phoenix-D]

Part 2:

Ship Design Screen, main: SE4 has buttons for switching between ships/units, enemy ships/units and show obselete. SE5 makes you click through a sub-menu or right click on the colum header to do that. SE5's Ship Detail screen has all the details of SE4s in fewer pages, except it does not show component levels. SE5's Upgrade/Copy buttons don't always copy the ship name. Upgrade will sometimes add a number (12345) or a Roman Numeral (I, II) to the end of the name, but this isn't consistant. More importantly, if you try to change the ship's name, the name is completely erased.

Advantage: Slightly SE4. Improvements: Show component levels as small numbers in the component boxes, as in SE4, allow changing the ship strategy from the design details box, remove the Filter button and move the buttons in that menu back to the main menu..there is room. When the player clicks "set name", input the current name into the box so the player can change it rather than having to re-type the entire thing.

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note: this next section is JUST ABOUT THE UI. The merits of the new ship design system are off-topic.

Ship Design, Designing: SE5 has a screen to select ship size, SE4 has a pop-up screen. If you want to change size in SE4, you select a new hull. Doing the same in SE5 clears all components from the ship. In SE4 you can select a name from a drop-down box or click in the box and type one; in SE5 you have a button elsewhere on the screen to click, bringing up a screen with the same function. SE4 allows you to add new design types and delete old ones; SE5 does not.

SE4 displays to-hit, defensive bonuses. SE5 displays strategy, crew, ordinance, and allows you to set the strategy here. SE5 has an "Autocomplete" feature and a "clear design" button. SE4 allows you to filter comps with a button; SE5 has that and a right-click menu. SE5 has tonnage remaining on a different display than speed, cargo space, etc. SE5 displays total hull structure.

To add multiple components in SE4, you click multiple times. To do the same in SE5, you shift-click on slots. You can't switch between decks while "holding" a component in SE5. SE4's component list displays 9 comps at a time, and can only be scrolled by clicking. SE5's displays 8 at a time, and and be scrolled by clicking or the scroll bar. To use a mount in SE4, you click Comp Enh, then the mount type. To use one in SE5 you click the mount type.

SE5 displays component levels only in the component list, not on the ship. SE5's component detail screen is scrollable; SE4's is not. SE4 allows you to use obselete components; SE5 does not.

Advantage: Nil. Improvements: SHOW TO-HIT EFFECTS. They could fit quite easily into the display between tonnage used and total cost. Allow clicking on the name to change it. Swap the locations of the Hull Structure and Tonnage Used displays. Impliment custom Design Types and allow deleting of design types. Show component levels on the ship itself.
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General Interface Issue: The use of the keyboard is not consistant. Sometimes Enter closes a window, sometimes ESC does, sometimes you can use the arrow keys to move a list sometimes you can't.

Advantage: Nil, SE4 had the same problem. Improvement: Allow the use of the keyboard in ALL windows. A good example of one that doesn't allow it is the ship design screen- ESC and ENTER work, but you can't scroll the ship list with the arrow keys or pageup/down. Filter Components allows the use of ESC but not ENTER; stuff like that.

[Phoenix-D]

Part 3:
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System List: This has no equivilent in SE4. Improvements: The Filter list would be more useful if you could select multiple items. Like all report screens, the tabs seem to take up too much room. The additional sorting capability would be good, but some tabs could be combined (planet icon and size, in the planet list for example). The "layout control" option would be more useful if you could copy existing layouts and save them.

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Planets List: SE5 displays all the information SE4's screen did, but its split into multiple layouts. Creating a custom layout aleviates this problem, and still allows use of the new features like time to arrival. SE4 had multi-line displays- it showed picture, size, type and name on one tab for example. SE5 has single-item tabs, which allows for finer sorting. In SE4 you click to go to a planet, in SE5 you double-click. Both allow a right-click to access the planet detail screen. Both forget where you where if you use Goto Planet.

Advantage: Clear SE5. Improvements: Add a "SE4 style" tab to the default layouts for SE4 users. Remeber which planet the player used Goto on and start there the next time the screen is opened.

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Colonies List: The top-left screen has all the same info, and SE5 adds "number of races". SE4 filtered via side buttons, SE5 does it via the filter popup box (are we sensing a theme, here?). The screens are otherwise very similar except SE5 has more information and customizble layouts. SE5's list. Advantage: SE5. Improvements: As with System List and Colony list, some of the headings seem to take up too much room and could be combined.

[StarShadow]

Quote:

"Upgrade will sometimes add a number (12345) or a Roman Numeral (I, II) to the end of the name, but this isn't consistant. "

I've noticed that it is consistant (sort of), to me it's an interesting feature. If I make a ship and call it 'Dart Mk I', every time I upgrade it the 'I' increments to 'II' and so on. However any ship that doesn't have a roman numeral last, gets a random number, that needs to be fixed.

[Phoenix-D]

Not entirely true. A ship named Vomit A, on upgrade, turns into Vomit A II. I think it may be tied to the single-character thing at the end.

A ship named Alabama gets the 265657 thing. Some get none at all, which I really don't get.

[Mephisto]

FYI: The latest version has an improved ship report screen which displays informations about a component just like in the ship report in combat.

[Phoenix-D]

Will: the ship-design right click menu is there. You have to right-click on the Design tab. Same with the component window. Same with ships/planets/colonies. Just right-click the tabs.

Log screen: click on the tab above the icon. Combining reports would be very nice, yes.

Orders: Ooo, good idea.

System: you can turn off the grid in..empire options, I think.

[Phoenix-D]

Part 4:

Ship/Unit screen: SE5 displays bases in space and mothballed ships/bases in addition to the info in SE4's upper-left box. In SE4 you can display ships, units, and/or fleets. In SE5 you can do the same and also show enemy/allied items, but you can only do one at a time. You cannot, for example, show units and ships at the same time as in SE4. the layouts are similar but SE5's General tab has slightly less information.

Advantage: Nil. Improvements: Same as with the other list screens. There's a lot of wasted space on the right side- putting commonly-used options back into those boxes from the Layout and Filter screens would save time. Also, showing fleets should show the fleets, not the ships in the fleets. In games with extremely large fleets, the fleet display option will be all but useless.

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[Will]

A few UI improvement suggestions:

Ship Design screens: allow right-click menu for filtering buttons, to bypass the dialogs. So changing for filtering from non-obsolete ships to non-obsolete units takes two clicks and small mouse movement, instead of three clicks, and much more mouse movement. Same for component filtering in the actual design window.

Cargo Transfer/Unit Launch/etc. screens: make the display collapsable. So if you have 100 sats in a group, and you aren't working with any particular satellite in the group, you can just collapse the group and have more screen space for anything else in the sector. This applies to the cargo/supplies/ordnance for individual items as well.

Treaty Negotiation: allow for this to collapse as well, so specific provisions do not appear until you select the higher-level provision it is under. For example, don't show the 5-30% in trade treaties until you select the Trade Percentage provision.

Systems/Planets/Colonies/Ships/Construction Queues screen: allow Layout and Filter buttons to have right-click menu access, to prevent needing to go through the dialog.

News Screen: Make a small view! While the pictures are pretty and all, I want to be able to see more than three news items at a time. And also, if a spaceyard constructs more than one item in a turn, put that all in one news report, instead of breaking them up into several.

Orders Buttons: it would be nice if the 18 orders buttons in the bottom right of the screen could be customized. So, in the early game, I could arrange it so the top six buttons are Move, Goto Waypoint, Colonize, Explore, Survey, and Resupply at Nearest, and arrange the other orders in customized submenu buttons. It would be even nicer if we could do this based on the context of what is selected, and save these layouts to distribute to others. Or... I could just start memorizing those hotkeys

System View: it would be nice to have the axis of rotation for panning be somewhere other than the center of the system. This one is completely pointless, really, it just makes things look cooler; you can set your camera over one of your colonies, and survey the system from that POV. Also, is there a way to turn off the hex grid? How about grid off, and keep the outer boundries for FOV? Also, clicking on a flag should highlight the sector the flag is attached to.


That's it for now, I'll probably come up with more later.

[Captain Kwok]

Will said:Ship Design screens: allow right-click menu for filtering buttons, to bypass the dialogs. So changing for filtering from non-obsolete ships to non-obsolete units takes two clicks and small mouse movement, instead of three clicks, and much more mouse movement. Same for component filtering in the actual design window.

You can already use right-click to filter both items from their column header.

[Will]

Ok, didn't know about the right-click on column headers. Would still be nice to offer the same right-click menu for the buttons as well.