BreadMan's mockup originally had tabs, but tzlaine's implementation doesn't... I'm not sure why, but I suspect that GG (tzlaine's graphics library) didn't have things set up to do so easily. I emailed him to ask if he could do tabs, but he didn't reply (which doesn't mean much, as I sent him a load of emails and he often only replies after fixing the bug or to discuss a specific detail...). I think I also suggested highlighting the category selection button of the currently displayed tree... and making the buttons toggles for adding / removing their category from the view, rather than buttons to pick which category to diplay to the exclusion of others.Mystiqq wrote:Made a "small test" to see if i could improve the current techscreen. This is still incomplete.
Image size is 140KB (1024x768)
techscreen test
You need to think ahead... as Tyreth said, there's going to be more than the 5 categories we have now. A while ago I made this test image by adding a few extra categories to the techs.xml file:Im not sure if the tech category icons would be better for the "buttons", but personally the text seems to do the job.
And that's only 9 categories, plus the "All" button... If we have more, it'll get even worse. In response, tzlaine said that the solution would probably be icons (though we'll worry about it when the time comes). So... that's why we'll probly need icons for the categories for this purpose.
I think people can tell when they've put the mouse over a scrollbar without it highlighting... And really, you don't use the scrollbars much in practice. You can just click and drag the tree view itself.Something about the things on the screen:
The bottom or horizontal scrollbar here is in the "mouse over" state and the vertical scrollbar is "inactive".
Already suggested on sourceforge. Good to have a mockup though.Mystiqq wrote:Also perhaps color "coding" the techs in the tree itself as well.
I don't think ~10 distinct colours is really a problem... unless you're colourblind to some degree, in which case you're no worse off than we are now.Tyreth wrote:Bear in mind that there will likely be 10 categories by 1.0, perhaps even more, which may make a colour scheme per category difficult, if those colours are to be very distinguishing.
Edit: Perhaps a very small rendering of each icon to place on each tech item, which has it's own category.
I'm reluctant to put the category icon on the tech boxes though... They're already rather bigger than they should be (see my suggestion to shrink them for the production screen... which should also apply to the research screen).
Ideally I'd also like to have individual icons for each tech, sized to fit in their boxes, as well as the larger colourful rendered view as in Mystiqq's mockup on the tech info box at the top of the screen... and adding category icons as well would be quite a lot... though I think just the colouration would be sufficient in mosts cases, such as telling what you've got mostly on the queue. I do think the individual icons for each tech are important though... partly to make them identifiable as with SMAC techs and build projects, and to keep things symmetric with buildings, for which icons are rather important in my mockups in order to pick out what you want form the build palette, and to identify what you've got on planets in the buildings window...