FreeOrion

For ship designs, a dedicated dialog or window is probably necessary. Players will likely have many pre-made and in-use ship designs and will want to filter or sort them... Such a dialog could open, or "drop", if desired, though.

A droplist that is just a list would need to have a lot of information shown per design in the list for players to be able to easily find anything they're looking for, and even then would be awkward to use when there are lots of thing to pick from.

Why? How many kinds of ship do you think the player will be using simultaneously?
And since the player has designed and named the ships, i don't think he should need a ton of info to pick the one he wants from the list.

The game should automatically filter out any saved ships he doesn't have the tech to make. And in most cases he'll want to hide obsolete ships.

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Absolete ships should be scrapped by player for credits, not be hided. In MOO I there were only 6 ship types permited and wasn't problem with that. If we allow upgrade, then hundreds of ship types won't be necessary.

We're not talking about "real" ships. I'm talking about saved ships designs-- you might call them blueprints.


The game has a tab for "saved ship designs", which at least in 0.3.11 doesn't seem to be accessible. Presumably this means that ship blueprints made in any game will be available while playing another.


While the differences in our tech trees make is less impractical than saving old ships designs would have been in MoO#, I don't see what is different about FO that would lead to players wanting this. Nor do i see the benefit in making it true. If saving ship blueprints is needed then we've probably made ship design too complicated.

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There are a couple of reasons that speak for blueprints:
- players can easily load up a design, they made previously in another game
- players can share designs with the community
- developers have access to a ship library when balancing/testing, instead of heaving to recreate everything each time.

Why would they want to do that? I certainly didn't want it in MoO1 or 2.
Our ships designs are significantly simpler than MoO3, and probably simpler than MoO2. There's not that much to show off.

Furthermore the ship you use at a particular time is dictated by your Species pics, Strategic plans, Current Tech, Enemy tech, Enemy strength, etc. Without all this context a ship blueprint with its few stats isn't that interesting or valuable.



Presumably we'll have some sort of "auto-design" feature. After all, we need to build one so the AI can design ships, so we might as well make it available to the player too.

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i agree with eleazar. the problem with premade blueprints would be that there would have to be many in order to have at least some fitting into a given situation of a given player, and that of all those anly a small amount won't be either obsolete or not yet buildable by this player. since the player is relatively free in what technology to research in which order the number of blueprints whould have to be huge if you presuppose that any player at any time should have, say, at least five blueprints to choose which are usefull for and buildable by him at that time. there are, as far as i can see, four solutions to this:

1) abandon the concept of blueprints - which is the least best option imho
2) give the player some filtering tools to find the blueprints he needs to reduce the unnecessary amount of information which leads to a more complex and less intuitive ui
3) let the game do the filtering for him so that he is only confronted with those blueprints that are of use
4) instead of blueprints give him some templates that adopt to his level of technology. for example there could be a template called "long range destroyer" which means the most sturdy available hull with the most fitting available armor/shields and long range weaponry, whereas "fast point defence cruiser" would be a medium sized hull trimmed to speed and fitted with the best point defence weaponry available to that player. i think this option is the best but seems quite complex on the coding side.

as for point 3 and 4 i'm not able to see why this can't be done with a dropdown. maybe one more button that changes between player made designs and premade blueprints/templates would be necessary, but that's it.

i also can't see why a player should amass dozens of designs when, as i presuppose, ships designed in early game would be rather useless in late game. it would be far easier to simply delete them than using filters and presets to find the usefull stuff. designs that are outdated could even be displayed with a red background or something like that and could alltogether be deleted by holding control and clicking the delete button.

Whenever I play a game similar to the Master of Orion series, that gives me the ability to create my own ship designs, I end up with lots of different 'branches' of designs. That means, at the beginning, after the initial colonize-as-many-planets-as-possible phase, I start building my first fleets with some more or less arbitrary (depending on often I played the game and how much freedom the design system is giving me) designs. These different designs are then sent into combat at some point, in which they'll have to proof themselves against my enemies. Some may do well, some may do bad. After those first battles, when it is time to update the designs to keep up with the advancing technology, those designs that did very well may receive an update in form of another version which is basicly the same but with updated techs, others that did ok may receive an update too as a new version thats still very similar but tweaked a little here and there, others may get obsoleted and also some new designs, based on existing designs or completely new, might be introduced.

Point is, after some time I end up with designs seperated by their individual names, and lots of versions of those with increasing numbers (like Commander I, Commander II, Commander III, Marauder I, Marauder II, ...). All information I need when deciding which type of ship to built, or which design to improve is in the name of the design. I very rarely make any use of informations like some abstract values for firepower and defensive capabilities. The only values that are of real interest interest to me are cost to build, cost to maintain and up to a certain extend also traveling speed.

So, what would the perfect ship design screen look like for me? Well, it would have a tree like view for my designs that shows me which design evolved from which. And it would show me some kind of measure of how good a design is doing in battles. Some kind of an kill/death ratio for each design.

Ok, well, I guess thats not going to happen, but still, now I have written it, and I am going to post it. To get to the matter at hand, which is blueprints and how to display them:

I would say that giving the player a list or dropdown menu of his saved designs is probably the simplest and most effective solution. Whereas I would prefer a drop-down menu for quick access when your're going with just displaying the names of the designs and a fixed list on the left or the right side of the screen if you want to display additional information together with the name. Saving and loading designs as blueprints would be neat, but I wouldn't try to display all designs the player ever made in every game. Just give him the option to load an older design if he wants to.

Also, from my perspective, such a list should be as long as possible and scrollable. I rarely obsolete any designs and even keep very old ones around because in most cases these are very cheap to build and I can just build a lot of battle proven, cost effective designs in a few turns if the need arises. Or I can take an old one thats completely outdated and upgrade it slightly to make a cheap design thats up to the current standard. And even if none of those reasons apply, I might still keep them for pure reasons of nostalgia.

Cropped from a mockup pd made:


Can I get a mockup of a way to use these shapes with part icons? In particular, while the parts are in the list of parts you can drag onto a design, it would be good to have a background or partly transparent shape under them or around them that indicates the type of slot the part can fit in. I'd rather have something that's the full size of the part icon, so it's clearer that the shapes correspond to the slots (more so than an icon in the corner would). I don't think we want to limit the shape of part icons to those slot shapes though... overlaying would be better.

Some slot images - ideally 256x256 or so - for the two types would also be good, to use as the slot icons.

Perhaps the same slot icons could be used as the slot icons themselves, and as a background for pure external and pure internal parts, with a separate icon of the same style used as a background for mixed-slot parts?

Not sure how this world work. It could perhaps change in appearance with mousover, but it should be possible to tell what a part just by looking at it not moused over...

Something along those lines?



The icons used to indicate external or internal are shown at the top left. The actual part icons are as in your previous mockup just layered above the first row of icons. I've played with transparency and blending modes, even different colors, but I think doing it like this works best, even if it's not ideal. Some of the part icons need to be shrinked a tiny bit(armor, damper). Also notice the 3px(2 at least) spacing between the icons in the windows where they are all listed.

The icons in the second row are used to indicate empty slots on the hull. The brighter outline makes it very easy to notice those. They can be completely replaced with the icon combo from the list.

I've slightly darkened the backdrop too.

Thoughts?

I'm a bit worried that some part icons will cover up the edges or differences in their backgrounds... particularly for icons like the current Electromagnetic Damper, which is a big square with stuff over top. The armour plating or fuel parts might also be problematic, depending on the sizes of things. (I'd also prefer there were only part icons that looked like actual bits of machinery, rather than a display like the EM Damper or Active Radar, but that's a separate issue.)

Is there a problem with the spacing between icons in the parts list now?

That's the reason some icons will need some minor shrinking. It's already done with the armor plating(in the mockup), but still needs to be done for the damper. The tanks should fit in fine(into the internal ones).

To differentiate between external or internal parts, we have two options , that I see - do it by shape, or by color. I'd prefer doing it by shape for a couple of reasons, that all have come up in previous UI discussions and I don't need to repeat here.
Doing it the way shown in the mockup, the player has to look out for the corners - are there any or are they cut off.


Well, there is none. It works all right with just the current icons, because they are of different shapes and usually don't extend to the borders. But when you put the gray icons behind, all icons will touch, which looks a bit weird.

I just realized that it doesn't work for parts that can use internal or external slots. Will update soon.

I assumed there would be another part background that has triangles cut out / off of both the corners and middles of the edges.

That's what I had in mind too, but it robs too much space from the icons and is perhaps not different enough from the external ones. I'm currently rethinking the shapes, trying to find something better.The horizontal and vertical symmetry bothers me because it's very limiting and in the end forces the icons into a certain shape, which is what we wanted to avoid in the beginning AFAIR.

edit: I've done it anyway. The purple tank had to be shrinked.


Turns out, it's not too similar to the other ones, but the ship part icons need to fit in and overlap has to be avoided. Still looking for a better way. If you want to do it like in the mockup, do you mind using slot images, and icon backgrounds at 70x70px, instead of 64x64(as the part icons)?