Needed suggestion for tech-screen UI

Development of artwork, requests, suggestions, samples, or if you have artwork to offer. Primarily for the artists.
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tzlaine
Programming Lead Emeritus
Posts: 1092
Joined: Thu Jun 26, 2003 1:33 pm

#151 Post by tzlaine »

I just posted this to the tech design forum:
I have uploaded a new version of tech-check.exe, along with two more apps: building-check.exe and tech-view.exe; they can be found here: http://freeorion.sourceforge.net/designer-tools.zip . Tech-view represents the current progress on the tech screen; as of this writing, only the actual tech tree part is finished. The colors are jacked up. Feel free to experiment with better ones. As mentioned earlier, the latest stringtable file can be found here: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/* ... gtable.txt and the latest techs.xml file can be found here: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/* ... /techs.xml .
Note these files are on about a 24 delay, and I committed them about 2 hours ago, so if at first you don't succeed, give it a bit and try again.
Here's what I need from the graphics team:

1) A color scheme that doesn't suck. Clearly I'm not artist. You can change the colors, and post screenies showing your take on what it should look like, and I'll change the colors in the code. Read the READMEs for info on how to do this.

2) A place to put quick-links for requirements that are not visible, such as requirements from another category. Some notes on this:

a) The layout code I'm using does not allow the techs to be different sizes. So placing a big quick link like the ones shown in this thread so far will clobber all the dependency lines. We need something more compact.

b) I thought of maybe having a little button somewhere that looks like an ellipsis ("..."), that pops up all the quicklinks when you click on it. Clicking on one of the quicklinks takes you to the corresponding dependency.

c) I also thought of having a single little button with an arrow on it (similar to the arrows at the ends of the dependency lines) for each non-visible dependency, and having the name of the dependency pop up when your mouse rolls over the button. Clicking on it would take you to the dependency like the quicklinks from earlier in this thread did.

I can't figure out how this should look, or whether b), c), or something else would be best. Let me know what you all think, including mockups that show how the new stuff will look on screenshots of the current tech-view.

tzlaine
Programming Lead Emeritus
Posts: 1092
Joined: Thu Jun 26, 2003 1:33 pm

#152 Post by tzlaine »

Something else I need: icons. I think we can probably keep the icons down to one per category. Icons should be at least 128x128, so I can show them up-close in the details of a certain tech, since I can always scale them down to show them in the techs in the tech graph.

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