6756

Describe your experience with the latest version of FreeOrion to help us improve it.

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yandonman
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6756

#1 Post by yandonman »

Notes from build 6756

Non-transparent background graphics
  • Xetronium Armor (ship part)
  • Larval Kraken

LOVE the Merge Fleet (wish it was accessible from the main-map fleet icon)
Default fleet stance (defensive) is not right for attack ships
What I find myself doing is merge, followed by using the "By Design" grouping. It would probably make sense to combine the two into a single UI action ("organize by design" perhaps?).
The layout looks experimental at the moment


AI is kicking my ass


Want: Upgrade Design button
- Any part that has an 'upgrade' gets upgraded to latest tech. Sensors/weapons/Armor/Stealth
- Also, clicking on any 'upgrade' part in the part selection window (of the design window) would replace any lesser ship part (in same part 'class') if now open slots were available.

Combat is not "holding" monsters in place (makes them very difficult to contain)
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MatGB
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Re: 6756

#2 Post by MatGB »

yandonman wrote: Combat is not "holding" monsters in place (makes them very difficult to contain)
Most of your post is what I was planning to say, and yes, I really like the fleet merge/split functions, although it does look clunky. I also like the clearer highlighting/selecting on right click functions.

But I'm not noticing pinning failures, I've had small ships sent off to pin floaters while the rest of the fleet kills the previous one (started as gysache, when your pilots can't even pop a bubble of gas you've problems), but I'll keep an eye out better.

Overall, it seems to flow better, I'm playing far larger games without major system/lag problems. Can't say the AI is killing me but it is putting up a decent fight and I'm actually losing fleets on occasions, which is nice.
Mat Bowles

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: 6756

#3 Post by Geoff the Medio »

yandonman wrote:LOVE the Merge Fleet (wish it was accessible from the main-map fleet icon)
Why? You'd have to go into the fleets window anyway to see the results.
Default fleet stance (defensive) is not right for attack ships
Switch it to aggressive then...
What I find myself doing is merge, followed by using the "By Design" grouping. It would probably make sense to combine the two into a single UI action ("organize by design" perhaps?).
I don't want to add too many options to the popup menu, and I want to retain the ability to split a fleet without affecting other fleets in the system.
The layout looks experimental at the moment
Layout of what? The popup menu? How else could / should it look?

yandonman
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Re: 6756

#4 Post by yandonman »

Geoff the Medio wrote:yandonman wrote:
LOVE the Merge Fleet (wish it was accessible from the main-map fleet icon)
Why? You'd have to go into the fleets window anyway to see the results.
Because I found my self repeatedly trying to do this action from the main-map fleet icon. I wasn't thinking about it, I was just trying to do it, and that's what came out.
Upon reflection, this is likely because the operation is on 'all ship at this location', and that main-map fleet icon means 'all ships at this location'.
Additionally, right-click menus, as a general industry standard, operate on the object that is being clicked on. This breaks, or at least stretches, that paradigm, and it feels unnatural.

On the second point: No. One does not necessarily need to. I routinely have planets producing only one type of ship. I know what's at that system because I set it up that way on purpose.

Additionally, one has to click on the fleet icon just to see the fleet window contents. The mouse is already at the map fleet icon. Making the player move the mouse to the fleet window from its position is not necessary. That may sound pedantic, but this is an operation that a player may do a hundred times in a game - it deserves the usability optimization. It'll help (in a small way) keep the player immersed in the game by having fewer mechanics to go through to implement their intentions. For people with carpal-tunnel syndrome (or any other repetitive stress injury), it will make the game hurt less.
Geoff the Medio wrote:Quote:
Default fleet stance (defensive) is not right for attack ships
Switch it to aggressive then...
Presumably you mean "patches along this line are welcome" as opposed to other interpretations.
Geoff the Medio wrote:I don't want to add too many options to the popup menu, and I want to retain the ability to split a fleet without affecting other fleets in the system.
I agree with the goal of not having too many right-click options. Placing the small set of operations that act on 'all ships at this location' as a right-click off of the main map fleet icon would reduce the number of right click options acting on a single fleet. And would actually help with the next question...
Geoff the Medio wrote:Quote:
The layout looks experimental at the moment
Layout of what? The popup menu? How else could / should it look?
The layout of the Fleet popup menu and the layout of the Ship popup menu. On the fleet popup menu, the line separator is a "-" (dash): it should be changed to a proper line break. There are too many line separators on the popup menu: It should have no more than 1 line separator for every 3 to 4 actions. Perhaps: Explore, Rename, Scrap | Merge, Split, Split by Design.

"Split Ships Into Fleets For Each Design" is too wordy: It should be much shorter, such as "Split by Design".

Onto the Ship popup menu, there are no line separators, which is inconsistent with the Fleet popup. And again, it's breaking the paradigm of only operating on the thing one is clicking on. My suggestion would be get rid of the various Split operations that operate on other ships. Baring that: Pedia Lookup, Rename, Scrap | Split Design from Fleet. But the right thing to do would be to follow the paradigm of right click only operates on the thing it clicked on.



My 2c
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Geoff the Medio
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Re: 6756

#5 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Presumably you mean "patches along this line are welcome" as opposed to other interpretations.
I mean you can change the new fleet drop target setting to be aggressive, and then it should respect that for newly created fleets. It seemingly doesn't at present, but it was supposed to. Edit: Fixed in SVN /Edit
On the fleet popup menu, the line separator is a "-" (dash): it should be changed to a proper line break.
It already has, but that's not really a layout issue...
There are too many line separators on the popup menu: It should have no more than 1 line separator for every 3 to 4 actions. Perhaps: Explore, Rename, Scrap | Merge, Split, Split by Design.
The separators were intended to group actions by conceptual similarity. Exploring, renaming, and scrapping don't have much to do with eachother. I don't have a rationale for separators other than that... What's the point of them, otherwise? I suppose there could be a "misc" section and a "fleet regrouping" section, though.
But the right thing to do would be to follow the paradigm of right click only operates on the thing it clicked on.
That's a nice theory, but it would prevent the inclusion of potentially useful actions that involve more than one fleet or ship.

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Ta'Lon
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Re: 6756

#6 Post by Ta'Lon »

OK, something I noticed immediately in the 6756 build I just downloaded, as compared to the 4.3.1 release, is that the build list is no longer listing the planets where the construction is taking place in the build entries.

This was very helpful in one of my last games under 4.3.1, as I had only a few planetary systems that could build Titans, and I was trying to keep them fed with Titan construction orders. By scanning the list, I could determine which planets in those systems were building ships. With techs advancing, I didn't want to just cue up a bunch of them at the same time on the same planet, so I could choose/cue up the upgraded designs when they became available.

In that game, I had over 80+ planetary systems, and over 150+ planets by this point. One system had three planets capable of building them, and was close to the front lines so to speak, so keeping all three planets busy was helpful.

I have some ideas for the build list, but I'll post those in the relevant forum.
Conquering the galaxy, one planet at a time...

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: 6756

#7 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Make your game window horizontally larger, then restart.

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MatGB
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Re: 6756

#8 Post by MatGB »

As Geoff says, resize then restart, what's happened is that the game defaults to 1024 wide, which isn't wide enough to show the system names, when you widen it it remembers next time. This isn't new behaviour, but you probably didn't notice, whereas those of us that DL the test version every week get used to it losing all preferences and having to reboot after install, etc.

When you have restarted, you'll notice somethign rather nice has been done that actually improves the issue you're *cough*highlighting ;-)

(OTOH, what are you doing building titans? Horribly overpriced hulls, in need of some serious help to make them viable, workign on that...)
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Ta'Lon
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Re: 6756

#9 Post by Ta'Lon »

Thanks that fixed it.

I run in windowed mode, so I can keep an eye on my CPU and memory usage widget. CPU usage is generally spiked on both of my dual cores with FreeOrion, and I still have a fair amount of headroom on my memory, even on large maps. 3.3 GB or so of total available memory, and I generally don't go above 75% usage - 35% or so of that goes to the system. BTW, 32 bit, the other .7 GB are assigned to system functions/integrated graphics memory addresses, and there is a 4 GB memory address limit with 32 Bit Vista. But that isn't really relevant to this discussion.

Can't wait for my next laptop...
Conquering the galaxy, one planet at a time...

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: 6756

#10 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Ta'Lon wrote:...there is a 4 GB memory address limit with 32 Bit Vista.
32-bit applications such as FreeOrion will have this limit regardless of the OS's support for larger memory address spaces.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: 6756

#11 Post by Geoff the Medio »

yandonman wrote:Non-transparent background graphics
  • Xetronium Armor (ship part)
  • Larval Kraken
Reverted those icons.

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