FreeOrion

The "finished designs", yes. But probably also in the encyclopedia. (I hope to eventually move the small icon at the top left into the actual encyclopedia text and make it a bit bigger.)


Yes.


That requires players to give all their ships unique and memorable names, and would require players to know and use the names given to designs by other players. What "stats" would be adequate to identify ships isn't clear, and I suspect there aren't any for many cases. What is the "primary weapon system" in the general case also isn't clear, and doesn't cover cases with no logical "primary" weapon.


Having part icons be arranged along the top and bottom of the ship icon with the hull in the background could work.

Yeah, works OK. It's certainly enough to distinguish one design from another, that's using different parts. The icons have been scaled down to 30%. We could also put it to the left or right. This would reduce the landscape format a little, considering that some ships might be high, instead of long.


edit: These are of course supposed to be finished designs, rather than empty hulls.

edit2:

I was mainly refering to things like SR, PD, LR, etc - the role in which the player intends to use the ship, which I imagine is the most important stat and which could easily be shown using these abbreviations(or an icon), next to the name, or in one of the 4 corners.

I'd prefer to avoid forcing the player to define/classify his ships as one of a set of predefined roles/classifications, if at all possible. Modularity, versatility and creative design should be encouraged in ship design.

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It's not a forced classification, limiting the ship to only act in this certain role. It's a label, to help the player organize and recognize his ships. This label would then also be shown in combat, so the player is easily able to see his SR ships, sitting behind PD, etc.

I think this has been discussed earlier in this or another thread(0.4 combat UI?). I remember Josh and Geoff being involved and I quite liked the idea and have been working under that assumption ever since. It also has been said, we are avoiding ships, that are able to do everything equally. As a consequence, we'll have ships that work very well in one particular role, hence the idea to label them.

It would be great if we got some additional graphics for hulls. Currently we just have 2, so most ships in the design view look alike.

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But won't they be just placeholders anyway? When races are fully implemented all of them will have their own ship hulls, am I not right?

I'm don't see why that matters, but we certainly won't have only one or two hulls per species.

Placeholders can be useful.

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Seconded.

Thirded....kinda makes me a tad dizzy looking at the big list of same hull graphics...Makes me think like im seeing double..etc...maybe at least a color variation would help for the time being if no new hulls graphics exist.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/dawn-of-victo ... s#imagebox

Just some nice examples of a cool holographic style interface. It might give you guys some ideas.

I think it could be could to have armour change the colour of the ship and shields add a halo around the ship. This would add some variety to the appearance, without having to draw entirely new designs.
Also having the same picture at a difference size for different sizes of the same kind of hull could also be a good temporary measure.