FreeOrion

I thought some of you artists and other curious people may be interested to see this. I found it in on my harddisk - it's the first mockup of FreeOrion that I can remember. It was made by Burndaddy, who was also the first lead of graphics. This is back when we had the legendary "old forums" which have been lost on a backworld somewhere in the forgotten regions of the universe.

By the way, did I understand that right, that there's no way we can retrieve the discussions there?

That is correct. The old forums have gone to the same place that your missing socks also go to.

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I imagine the mockup was a pre-rendered .PNG image, but I must say - I do like the fonts and the star effects on that image

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There are three kinds of people in this world - those who can count, and those who can't.

I'm keen on the background gas cloudy stuff... it's much better than the blobbish randomly spaced nebulae we have now.

The starlanes also look better... as do the background stars.

i agree, that this mockup looks pretty nice.

those lens effects on some stars look nice. we could easily add those by using a second layer (much bigger than the stars itself) on some stars.

i also do like those ultra thin starlanes. maybe we really shouldn't scale them(same with the stars). i know somebody was proposing this already aeones ago. *squintsatgeoff*

to achieve nebulas similar to those in burndaddys mockup, we would need to use bigger ones(current ones are 512x512 i think) and more of them. since they need to overlap to get away from the blob-look. and then we should also use bigger pictures for the bg stars. they are at 256x256 now and we have a ugly patterns this way..

personaly i would suggest using 1024x1024 for the bg stars as well as for the nebulas. but i'm not sure if this will be a memory overkill.

oh yeah, those fonts are also nice.

Actually, I tried it out by removing scaling of stars from the code. It does in fact, as predicted by some, look a bit odd to not scale the stars at all, as when they're all close together, the individual star sprites end up looking a lot bigger than they do when spread all out due to a weird perception optical illusion type thing... and this is bad because it ends up looking like they're bigger when you're zoomed out, rather than zoomed in... (though I suppose it's possible one would get used to this after a while). The starlanes and the fleet icons however definitely, IMO, should not scale.


I've discussed this before:

http://www.freeorion.org/forum/viewtopi ... 5877#15877

(that post is itself a set of links to other posts...)

To summarize: I think you're overlooking an ovious and potentially better solution, which is to generate these procedurally. Particularly for the background stars, this would be easy, and could be much better, as individual points would have consistent locations between zoom levels. For the nebulas, it would perhaps be a bit more complicated to generate and look good... so maybe a bitmap would still be best, either a photoshopped something, or a NASA telescope image of an actual galaxy as the background...

Since the starmap is whats viewed the most, how about the option to select a map that fits your system requirements. med-res, high-res, or ultra hi res.

geoff, if the coding team is able to create nebulas similar to those procedural, they should go for it. for the bg stars at least this should be pretty easy, right.

one thing speaks against making this procedural though - the ease of changing/modding.


good idea.

Most systems should be able to handel at least 1028x1028 for the background. I do more 3d graphics then 2d graphics and few people I know would think twice about using 6 images that size for a skybox now-a-days.

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Time flies like the wind, fruit flies like bananas.

I really like those star lighting lens effects. Make the stars less circular.

It would be great if stars are rendered as actual lights (with possible lens flare) rather than as sprites. At least in space-themed games 3D rendering has proven to be infinite superior to 2D sprites. Most of the times it just look amazing. (Several examples out there, Nexus for example). If the star of fleet size become a problem when zoomed you can always do other things, some posibilities:

1.- Move the star along the z coordinate so it gets closer on mouse-over
2.- Make a circle or other selector to surround the star on mouse-over so that the selector has an adequate size.

NICE pick by the way!

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My proposals for: Resources - Spies

Allow me to provide a fuller view of the gardens...



Something I picked up and stored some time ago.

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If you do not fight to keep what you have, you will soon find yourself without it.

hrm,

That's one my early mockups of the current sidebar.

As a side comment. It has been proven that a "bottombar" is a much better idea than a sidebar because human eyes are separated horizontally. The human field of view benefits a lot when you leave the sides relatively clear, making the impresion of more amplitude and a cleaner, simpler display (even if it`s not really that way). Just compare the last mockup to the first one posted.

That is in fact the reason why blizzard changed the UI from the style in warcraft2 at the side to the bottom of the screen like in starcraft and warcraft3. It just seems less crowded displaying the same info.

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My proposals for: Resources - Spies