FreeOrion

I believe once starlanes get done, perceiving systems get clearer. I'd wait till playable version comes out to see how it works and modify it by feedback to make it as playable as possible. If the amount of details shown is too big, one option is to do two modes in mapwindow like in Moo3.

.Miu
FreeOrion Graphics Team Lead

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Difference between a man and a gentleman is that a man does what he wants, a gentleman does what he should. - Albert Camus

I doubt every planet could support 2 or 3 superdreadnoughts. Frigates, definately, not SDN's. IMO the only planets that should/could be able to build the largest ship types are your homeworld and your inner colony's. Unless of course your in a 3 race game on an extremely large galaxy, but then also, you must remember that realisticly it would be extremely hard to find a planet capable of sustaining life for your race, but thats another story. Now back on target, I agree with Miu. IMO there should be several map views. If you have played Simcity 4 and the expansion, there are 2 views when your in the region view. A transportation view (highlights roads, highways, ferry routes, etc.), and a satallite view (shows buildings, water, nothing is really highlighted, just shows it as it is). Something similar could work for FO IMO. Maybe normal, starlane, economic, and more.

I agreed with you! However, assuming that every ship will be maximum size is silly -- most real life fleets use various sizes to combine both firepower and flexibilty (as well as speed).

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I’m sorry that this is off subject but this is in regards to what iamrobk wrote on the number of ships “more than 100 ships per side is kinda stupid and way unrealistic IMO.”

I know that I am new to this forum and I have not been able to get my self up speed on all the details of this game, but it seems to me that regardless of the size of a planet once the appropriate tech level has been reach any size ship can be managed. One way can be through the use of automated ships. These ships can be small or large self maintaining resource scavengers that can pick the smallest particles drifting through space to the largest asteroid to a dead world. If there is none of those around perhaps an enemy’s planet or asteroid belt can be exploited. All of this is filtered and processed into the desired component or material and used in the maintenance of the fleets they are assigned to. And there are numerous other things that can be employed by an advanced civilization to compensate for a planet’s deficiencies.

So to summarize the resource scavengers produce whatever that is needed and either work with the automated repair systems of a vessel or they can be responsible for all of the maintenance that a fleet my require but my point is there may be a limit to the number of and size of ships that a planet can support at first but these things become irrelevant as a civilization develops, and a fleet of an almost unmanageable size can be supported even in the smallest of territory’s. I am not trying to be a smart a** this is just my opinion.

What does everyone else think?

I think if a player manages to have 3 super dreadnaughts per planet good for him. We can make ships expensive to support, etc but a player who has good tech and loads of cash should be able to have as many dreadnaughts as they like.

Also, I think the galaxy screen is cool. There is not too much noise. Its great.

Personally I think at most, each planet shoyld be able to support maybe 1 SDN, if we use the same ship scale as in MOO3.

as i read before i still like the whole "system shipyards" idea.
it just seems more coolio to have 1 fairly large shipyard supported with allt he money ofa system

all that and,

please no starlanes, or add an option , let the players choose if they want starlanes or not. i know this is double the effort developement-wise, but the reason i loved moo was because it didn't have starlanes (not moo3, i don't consider moo3 having anything in common with moo1 or 2 other than the name for marketing purposes) and you could have 32768 ships of one type in one fleet, oh yeah and i'd love to see ultra-mega-huge galaxy sizes, pbem support. hmm i think i'll pay a visit to the brainstorming forum :)

This is kind of getting really off-topic here, so maybe we can keep discussing it here, if we need to: http://www.artclusta.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=261

Starlanes have been discussed to death already, even on the brainstorming forum. Don't waste your time.

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superdreanoughts? why stop there? i like big guns...

speaking of which, weapons should be shiny, like looking good shiny

and i say there should be a lot of different effects for them(more than MOO3)

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Some thoughts...

Instead of (random?) greenish nebula that stretch halfway across the galaxy, maybe put in a background image that helps "fill in the gaps" so the galaxy map actually looks like a galaxy (more like the ones seen on the galaxy setup screen).

An example from the VGAP site:

http://www.vgaplanets.com/v4map/epnames.jpg

This would probably require a background image without many distinct features built in... so that the stars' locations or various details generated with the galaxy would make up most of the map detail.

An on/off toggle for showing any background stuff not involved in actual gameplay would probly be a good idea.

(I realize / hope the greenish blobs as they are now are probably only temporary)


It'd be nice if the movement of the background starfield scaled with zoom level. Currently the background stars move based on how many pixels I scroll the map, not how far this actually is in game-distance. This is inconsistent. If these stars are supposed to be very far away, then when I'm zoomed in, scrolling the map should cause almost no scrolling in the background stars and when zoomed out, they should scroll roughly as they do now. If they're just behind (near) the plane of the galaxy, then they should move roughly as they do now when fully zoomed in, and scroll at the same speed as the stars in the galaxy when fully zoomed out. (talking about frontmost plane of background... further away ones have slightly slower scrolling always, as they do now) (nitpicky I realize, but the inconsistency is distracting, I find)

Zooming in or out also currently causes the background stars to scroll slightly. (I'm guessing this is intentional so the starfield doesn't look the same between zoom levels...)

Having just compiled FreeOrion, I started it up, made a new large galaxy, and saw this:



I think something needs to be done to make the game stars more distinct from the background stars when zoomed out (without starlanes visible)

I'd suggest reducing the density of the background stars first... and making them a bit fainter and/or blurring them slightly. Could also replace some of them with sprites of galaxies or nebulae or other such things.

Animating the forground stars would also help, and that's being discussed. More so than animating them, though, they need to be brighter, at least in comparison to the background.

There needs to be a low end limit on the scaling of the star sprites. Now, they end up being a single pixel, or less than a pixel, when fully zoomed out.

Regarding the system info sidebar:



I don't think asteroid belts should be labelled numerically as planets. For example, the asteroids in earth's solar system aren't "Sol V" ... (Jupiter is)

I dislike the feedback on the focus selection buttons when clicked. Instead of dropping down and to the right, they should highlight with a "glow" while the mousebutton is down. Having them move down to the right is odd, I find, when the UI feature itself is based around different "directions" representing different things... down to the right is the research button... having the buttons move around, even just a little, seems ill-advised

In the image above, the star covers up the system summary for # of production and defence bases. Need to put an outline / box around those numbers or move them or the star so they're on a black background. The system name is also hard to read, due to being over the star, so also needs a background / move.

Regarding the galaxy map fleet icon:

The mouseover feedback is good, but should depend on whether the mouse is in the area of the larger of the two sizes (size when highlighted) and not the smaller (size when not highlighted), or, even better, depend on the smaller size to be highlighted, but only unhighlight when cursor has moved out of area of enlarged icon.

Hmm i'm not a design guru, but buttons act usualy this way. i will see what miu says about it. could surely made better.

I'm aware of it, i will add some transparent background to make it readable.

I don't think so. If you do it like you suggested you might end up with two buttons which are beyond a single mouse position. The fleet btn responds is only in place to inform you about entering the fleet btn area. It was difficult for me to hit those buttons. I usualy had to try several times to hit them.

I don't mean to be flip, but all this just means you should zoom in or explore your neighborhood.



This is a really good point. I'll add this to the todo list.