FreeOrion

A couple issues with this...

The red bar suggest that the current meter will be dropping a little bit every turn, accumulating to a large drop. This is inconsistent with the game, in which the only time a current meter drops is, at present, when the max meter drops. In this situation, there's only one turn of change, after which the current meter equals that max meter, and no further changes will occur.

The green bars don't make much sense as drawn either. The 5-turn and 1-turn increases are both above the max meter (indicated by the dark grey, or light grey if the dark and light are the same length). Current meters can't grow higher than max meters, so this is impossible. In fact, the max meter effectively *is* a long-term estimate of meter growth, so I don't see much benefit to a 5-turn estimate as well.

You are completely right. I got distracted by the order of light/dark and forgot we has already had made better provision for showing long-term change.

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Both points are valid; sorry, I made this mock-up quickly and didn't think it over. Here's a screenshots of the situation which I meant to improve:



The green change bar (production) is only 1 px wide, which makes it impossible to estimate how long it will take until the production max will be reached. A dark-green 5 turn change bar however would be significantly broader and thus allow the player a rough estimate of the number of turns until the max is reached.

If you really need to know how many turns it will take, you can look at the precise numbers in the tooltip...

I don't see how the tooltips help here... the left tooltip shows the change in production output, but no max production, and the right tooltip shows the max meter and which factors contribute to the meter, but not how fast the meter grows, so the player can neither use the actual production nor the meter to determine how long it will take until his meter change is completed.
Also, it's not really convenient to have to look at a tooltip if the information could be directly avaiable.

I've posted this in the planet special icon thread already, but since the mockup includes some sidepanel changes, I think it should be found here:



Those are the changes I propose, comments please.

I agree with all of the following:
- system summary in two rows
- planet name bold
- special icon position

However, the size of the special icons is an issue; right now, they're by far larger than the other icons on the sidepanel; the question is, should the special icons reduced in size, or on the contrary, should all the other icons increased in size? I'd like to do a mockup of that second option, but it'll take a while before I can get to it.

Also, we could put the icons in a box so that the can be hidden; like here:


Admittedly, it looks somewhat awkward, but that is also due to the difference between the text and the icon size.

Nice artwork!

If you see the other icons with their text beyond as a whole, then the special icons are not larger. It looks much prettier in this size, don't make them smaller.

Now there's space beyond the planet for large shipyards, stardestroyers, solarguns, black-hole-generators and all the other stuff

The first two are good. I don't object to the last item, but i doubt that it's necessary if the icons are rendered at a reasonable scale.


Feel free to do a mock-up, but i'm pretty confident things won't work at that scale.
Remember, while it's great to plan in accommodations for larger screen sizes, everything needs to fit at our minimum supported screen size 1024x768 (by far the most common size currently on the web).



This entirely misses the point. (and it's not only kroddn) What icon wouldn't look prettier if we made it huge and glossy?
When designing a UI, the main concern is creating a clear interrelation of all the parts. A good UI requires a careful balance of the function and importance of ever individual part.
A good, usable interface does not result when the highest priority is "how can i best show off the beauty of this particular icon?"

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Having nice icons doesn't hurt the UI. Instead it can even improve it's usability. I've explained this 2 times now in the relevant thread, but you didn't respond. If you have a problem with those icons, you are free to provide other ones, that work better. Proove to me that one can create icons that transport complex meanings like 'techtonic instability', 'tidal lock' and so on with an icon as big as a letter(13x13). At the same time, those icons should be easy to distinguish from each other and easy to remember, because you don't want to come back each time and use the tool tips.


No one has mentioned the colonize button's proposed position, so I guess everyone is fine with this?

So here's the mockup I wanted to do, it's quick but should have all the relevant information. All icons are 24x24!



This mockup contains 3 aspects/ideas:

1) The planet name gets its own infopanel; clicking the "minus" button hides all panels completely except the name panel itself
2) The special icons are moved to the pop/health panel (arguably - could also be put in the name panel); the grey background helps to distinguish them from the meters; minimizing the panel hides all special icons
3) all icon sizes have been increased to 24x24; for size comparison, the old size is shown on the right. Imo, the space loss is irrelevant in comparison to the gain in readability. the icons, however, could be spruced up -

[Edit] And about the colonize button: centred - good, left-aligned might also work well.

Obviously those fat bars, don't look very well and it's a waste of space. Also, i liked size of the font as it was before.

Here is another mockup:


- resource icons and output are aligned vertical(as with the system summary
- all meters are put into one 'graph', the color relates to the resource
- meters are 'shaded', not to make them pretty, but to help distinguish them
- meter popup information, could be included into the icon popup, which would be more intuitive, but is not needed.

Not sure yet, how to show the meter progress yet, suggestions are welcome.

I think we should get rid of those fat drop down menues, as well.

Perfect, very inspired.


We discussed several options when this first came up; I think that the main advantage of the drop-down lists was that that they were moderately easy to implement. Also, functionally they work well; though I agree that they don't look nice atm. Maybe we could dismiss the yellow triangle and make them clickable as a whole:

Yep, that's much better. Now since, there is some space left, I guess we should also label them appropriate(primaray/secondary Focus, maybe shortened).

Specials icons on the same panel as the population and health info doesn't make any conceptual sense. They'd fit better on the name panel.

Removing the down arrow from the drop list makes it much less clear that the widget is interactive, and how to use it.

Please have all mockups include the relevant changes for the population and health meters and panel. The six icons and values lined up horizontally and six meters lined up vertically looks fine for resources, but we need the layout to look reasonable for both panels.

Edit: Also, a bit more height and vertical separation between the meter bars might make mousing over each one easier. The current meter bars provide tooltip info distinct from the number / icon, so unless a better way to group / organize the tooltip info is provided, the meters need to be relatively easily mouseoverable.