FreeOrion

eleazar's latest attachment looks pretty good, IMO. Being able to change the size indicators independently of the "head" of the icon that would probably indicate type or composition of a fleet is good.

Might I suggest some angled chevrons instead of straight horizontal bars, though? They look more like miliatary rank insignia this way...


I'm also pondering having special icons heads for a few other ship-like objects in systems, like swarms of space krill, a pod of space squid, or a mated pair of space wyrms.

Awesome, really.

Spacemonsters?

The swept-back idea is good. I'll have something in trunk is a few more minutes... though i fully expect the heads to need revision as our fleet concept progresses.

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I made these at 32x32, but they should be perfectly understandable down to 16x16— but probably not much beyond that.

The "head" and "tail" graphics are separate, but both fit in their appropriate place in a 32x32 pixel square.

As for the coloration, the idea is for the white to take on the empire color and the black to remain black to separate the icon from whatever may be behind it. If i need to switch things around to accomplish this in-game, that's no problem.

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These are very nice.

I second that. This is for the combat UI?

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AFAIK this was meant for the galaxy map. Presumably similar icons could be used during combat when zoomed out too far to see ship models, though.

Yes, these are for the galaxy map.

For reasons i'm explaining in the other thread, I don't see how the "tails" could be useful in the battle maps, but it would be ideal if the design of the "heads" could be carried over to the battle map ship icons.


EDIT: Here's a better example of the sequence

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I'm skeptical that three levels of icon detail is necessary... Rather, I think we'd be fine just having a far-out zoom icon or two icons that indicate the presence of any fleets. Optionally, mousing over this icon could open a pop-up box in its place that would show all the icons that would appear if you zoomed in.

If there was to be a medium zoom level though, how would it differ from the max-out zoom? How does a single fleet icon vary in appearance to usefully convey information about multiple ships?

In a potentially related or unrelated question, when zoomed out far, is there just a single icon for any fleets in a system, or does each empire get its own fleet icon as is done now?

I'm also generally skeptical about the info ring being placed outside the fleet icons. We're likely to have situation with more than two or three fleets in a system, and I'd rather not have to resort to a "there are more fleets that can't fit icon", which would be rather clunky. Rather, I think we could put the ring inside the fleets, and have the fleets spread out around the ring, taking as much space as needed to display them all.

I'm also a bit worried about the ring being around / outside the system name. We probably will want to make the name a bit more readable, perhaps with a background or with an icon to its left or a box around it of some sort, which would interfere with a ring if the latter is outside. In some mockups, a rather short system name was used, "Sol", which also hid the fact that the name would have overlapped with the ring were a longer name used. Other mockups made the ring even bigger and somewhat avoided this, but I suspect those rings were big enough that adjacent systems' rings would have overlapped, had the mockup shown more than one system / ring.

You are probably right. It would be nice to have that extra info, but it would tend to be confusing.


I think it's rather important that it's clear to the player weather the ships of more than one empire are in a particular system or not.
To that end, we should either:
1) Not show any fleet icons until we have room to display an icon for every empire, or
2) At zooms too small to fit icons for all empires, a different, white generic fleet icon would be used to indicate the presence of ships, without indicating empire, or looking like the fleet icons that indicate empire.


The previous mock-ups were general ideas, rather than precise mock-ups.

The next stage of mock-ups include different zoom levels and potential issues like long system names and lots of fleets coming and going to make sure things really work.

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I'd like to start implementing changes to fleet buttons, but can't do much until the planning here is finalized, so could I get some additional mockups and discussion about how it should work?

What do you need to know exactly, what is unclear? The ring should perhaps be discussed in the other thread and regarding the icons I think most of it should be clear. I think that even when zoomed out, enemy forces and the player's ships should be differentiated. It might work if we throw all enemy ships together though.We could use the triangle at those zooms, whatever ships there are.

Green is a player fleet and some enemy has ships at the same system. It doesn't matter, who it is. They all get the flipped triangle. I'm not sure what to do about the color. Actually using a color might be confusing, if there is an enemy with the same or a similar color. We could use white of course, but white doesn't look very hostile.

edit: black with a white outline is neutral and could be used for the bad guys...

I need to know exactly what everything should look like in all relevant situations / zoom levels.
-How many icons
-What those icons look like, in general, when clicked or when rolled over with the mouse
-What those icons represent and how what they look like depends on what they represent
-Where those icons are placed on the map or relative to the system icon and how this depends on what the icon represents and the state of what the icon represents
-What happens to the arrangement of icons if more are added or some are removed

I need the "next stage of mock-ups" mentioned in eleazar's last post.

i'll start today.

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Err, i guess i didn't.

If someone could get me a set of updated screenshots of a view with every single zoom level that would be helpful.

I made a set back in april (when i got ahold of somebody else's PC for a while), but that didn't have the new skinny lanes or the gasseous stuff. I can work on it with what i have, but the refinement will be much more effective if i can see what i'm doing in context with how the game actually looks.

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