FreeOrion

Make sure you leave enough room for longer planet names... Knuth is shorter than average.

I think you could get away with not actually writing "primary" and "secondary", but just showing the selection with highlighting or an outline. This is a general overview that people will be familiar with, so you don't need to spell it out (literally) completely...

What are all the extra two boxes below food, science, minerals and production? Money and Balanced...?

You might want to try putting all 4 / 5 resource production (and focus?) indicators in a column on the right side of the info box for each planet, rather than having two columns with 3 indicators each. Doing this would only require a slightly taller box for each planet from what you have now, and IMO it's better to have taller boxes than wider.

"Make sure you leave enough room for longer planet names... Knuth is shorter than average."

Font can be scaled down with very long names.
Thought the same about the neccessity of writing pri/sec/combined, but I think it is good as new players dont have any idea of focus system, and usually dont bother reading manual before trying. Would be clearer without though. kind of against using borderlines to show the focus, breaks the style.

"Money and Balanced...?" yes.

and boxes under them are for meters.

"taller box"
will play around it and see how it works, is there crucial data that still needs to be there? will something about planetary defenses be a neccessity? Also thinking of showing small icons on top of planet representing each building there. you'll see

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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

It would be clearer at first, but as I said, this is a pretty basic piece of information that will be picked up pretty fast. If nothing else, a tooltip or inteface tour could explain it. I'd hate to waste a bunch of valuable screen real estate for a slightly improved learning curve with no long term benefit...

Alternatively, consider "P" and "S" icons next the the appropraite box...

That should be a nono.

The little two boxes beside every foci are used to show which one is set to primary/secondary? If so, i really dislike it this way. miu, plz try to find a better solution.

Hmm, and the bluish style is also not to my liking. (same to the green one).

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Can COWs fly?

They also work as radiobuttons to select the focus, along with the left-click/right click. I find those very intuitive as you dont have to know about the right-clicking.

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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

Can the little Picture of Corn/Minerals/Cogs/Test Tubes just go from translusent to colored to indicate Primary Focus (maybe getting larger too). With the Back ground or border highlighting for Secondary. That would seem to be the densest possibly configuration with the selection button holding all the information that results from hitting it.

I also think shrinking Text for planet names is bad, let the Planet names stretch across the whole width of the side Panel and put a cap on the number of characters at ~20.

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Fear is the Mind Killer - Frank Herbert -Dune

IMO that's the sort of redundant / wasted space that should be avoided, IMO...

There should be a way to indicate primary/secondary focus without putting two little boxes next to every option. Highlighting and/or outlines or P / S (or 1 / 2) icons floating on top chould do the job. It shouldn't be necessary to have 10 indicators to show two choices of one of 5 (or 6) things.

4 buttons like now for selecting focus, the button with primary focus gets much denser (less blended) or brighter then the other 3, the secondary focus does the same thing to a lesser extent. So both primary + secondary means one very bright/dense buttton. If there's separate focus you get two brighter/denser ones that are easy to see wich one is the primary. For added clearness a small icon showing ½ 1/4 or 3/4 alternatively P or S.

To sum that up I agree with above post.

I think we should try to stay away from duplicating ways of doing the same thing in the UI. Focus selection should be done by clicking the little buttons on the side, or by left clicks/right clicks on the icon itself, but not both.

It's that time again! This is the time in the release development cycle when I start saying "where are some graphics for us to use, dammit?"

Here's what we (the programmers) need:

- A re-worked planet view graphic; the current one looks good, but has no trade imagery
- A research screen UI design, including how the tech progression chart should look, and how the currently-researched items should look
- A production queue UI design, including any interface that may be needed on the SidePanel
- Rotating planet textures (someone may already be working on this, iirc)
- A SidePanel redesign, something like what has laready been done in the previous posts in this thread

For the SidePanel, we need to reflect the meters in the planet panels in the SidePanel; when you change focus now, you are just adjusting the max for a meter, and if you are adjusting the max upwards, it takes some time for the current meter value grow to reach the max. So we need to have a bar or something that shows where you are placing the max, and where the current value is, so that you can see where you are setting the production level for a certain resource compared to where the current production level is. I hope that's clear.

We need this stuff as soon as it can reasonably be done, because very soon (within the next few days) it will start to hold up development progress.

I'll get on it as soon as this extremely hectic weekend is over and I'm less hung over

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Good afternoon! This is the Earth Alliance embassy diplomatic office. My name is Alex. How may I assist you?
HUMANS! BLAUGHRAN EMPIRE CLAIMS PLANET KREIGHTON! YOU GIVE RAY GUN SCIENCE OR BLAUGHRANS DESTROY HUMANS ON KREIGHTON!!!

Two big events in america right now, the election and 'ween. Things are pretty hectic in my neck of the woods, at least until after Tuesday.

Busy as well in IRL for week or so, arrenging a move here, with new net-connection and such. but slightly updated skecth.. http://users.evtek.fi/~k0201783/freeori ... sign08.jpg I really like the layout, style and exact details to be decided, with or without metal borders. I also will consider showing those meter walues tzlaine pointed in that empty space between production balues, but I think we could do just with showing them in the detailed planet/fullsystemview (which would be fullscreen instead of that little panel we have now).

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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'm to lazy. Hey guys, you too? I would like to do the programming part on sidepanel, but i need gui support. so, i'm looking forward to see something ....

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Can COWs fly?

Hey guys, I'm new here, but would like to pitch in and help out with some of the graphics. I took a stab at some new stars last night, they're at:

http://www.pbase.com/solartrix/inbox

If someone can point me the files for the menus / sidebars / etc I'll see what I can do with them (it always helps to have a place to start, even if just to get the right sizes of the images). I have the v.02 exe and didn't see much of the menu gaphics in there. Perhaps I'm just missing 'em...?