FreeOrion

Basically, when you make a change that affects your resource output it takes a few turns to actually happen. Say you change your primary from farming to manufacturing. Nothing changes for the current turn, but the next turn you will see a shift down in farming output and a shift up in manufacturing, which continues for the next few turns until you reach the levels you actually set them to. Hence on my mockup the green numbers represent a shift up while the red mean a shift downwards.



Just gives you a little more control. It's a gameplay decision; in the early game especially its nice to be able to manage your planets on a slightly more detailed level. Its the difference between "this is the only thing I want you to produce, anything else is a byproduct" and "spend the most effort producing this, but then put some effort into this other thing as well."

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That's not quite right... or at least doesn't sound quite right. The "shift down" is an instant drop that occurs because the max meter level of the previous focus is much lower than it was before, so the current meter level is capped by that much lower level, meaning a sudden large drop in the current meter will occur. Imagine focus is Farming/Farming, so you get +15 +5 = +20 max farming meter bonus. If the current meters initially are farming = 17 and all others = 0 (for example, not realistic) and then you switch to Mining/Mining, the next turn your max Farming would be 0, so your current farming would be reduced to 0, and your max Mining would be 20, and you current mining would grow by a few points (depending on other things, like the construction meter)

Attempting to integrate sidepanel into whole production screen...

And more...

Looks promising, sorry im not much help, GUI design seams to generally leave my mind feeling blank.

Something that does accur to me.

While the Map in the middle is good. Why not make it much smaller giving much more room for the other boxes.

Toggle buttons could partually collapse the info boxes to the view you have now, so the player can drag the map to the correct position.

Obviously.

When that time comes, im happy to help.

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Some interface shots of Space Empires 5. Being Beta tested at the moment.
http://www.malfador.com/

Click SE:V in the top menu, then 'Gallary'

Glad to hear that Mystiqq. Your contributions so far have been very valuable and much appreciated.

Also http://www.starbasedelta.com/scrnshots.shtm

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Could you work away at the remaining tech theory icons then? I've added a bunch more descriptions since the first spurt of output, and we really need the rest of them...


The map needs to be a minimum size to be useful... I don't think it should be much smaller than it is. The size of the other windows is basically a function of how big one of them needed to be to fit in the info... the top left window's height was determined from the number of lines of text info I put in, and then I just made the top middle the same height as that so it lined up nicely. The width of the sidebar at the right was determined from how wide I needed it to be to fit in text and my sad sorry excuses for production indicators. The queue width is somewhat arbitrary, but there's no particular reason it needs to be much wider. The bottom panel, the buildings palette, is a bit smaller than I'd like, but may be sufficient... I have to play around with it and adapt it to the new style of window enclosure used on the other boxes.


I already have that to some degree... the star pictures can be removed by clicking a toggle button on the sidebar, and the buildings and political info from the sidebar can also be toggled on off. I suspect in future there'll be a ground forces panel as well, and perhaps others.

There's also no particular reason that the top middle window/box couldn't be resizable up and down, making more room for text at the expense of map space.

Donno yet... Im probably going to concentrate more on 3d stuff, its been too long since i last did any 3d at all. We'll see...

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That was in reply to Obiwan's post.

But if you want something unrelated to work on, how about figuring out some nice box or circle or somesuch to put around a star on the map screen to indicate which star is being shown in the sidepanel? Or some way to give mouseover feedback to the player to indicate which star their cursor is near? These don't need any particular information to be displayed, so it's pretty much a pure graphics thing...

Ok, Ill definately put some more work into them.
Curantly ive been working on the maps for Zachs spinning planets.
Not quite finished there. But once they are it'll be the icons .

Did a bit more...

Looks nice to me.

However I have one question:
Can the scrollable windows be scrolled with the mousewheel without having to click into the window first? Like just hovering the cursor over a window and scrolling it up and down? That would make playing the game much more comfortable IMHO.

Hmm . Maybe it's a good ui-design (hard to tell without detailed description). But LOOKS nice ... (@geoff, no offence:) I guess you are targeting functionallity first)

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