Geoff the Medio wrote:None of those mockups have fleet move lines. Could you include some?
tzlaine wrote:... In addition, I'd like to see what fleet movement lines look like when passing through a system -- do the lines follow the curve of the system ring? It would make things a lot easier to judge the mockups if those fleets were actually colored using the top 10 empire colors or so, especially when determining if the fleet movement lines will interact badly with them.
Sure i can do some fleet lines. But i don't really see how that helps judging the mock-up, except for showing how the lines go around the circle instead of under the star. No matter how we do things, fleet move lines will intersect with moving and non-moving fleets. Can't eliminate overlapping. But we can minimize it, especially the most confusing instances.
If a coder wants to get fancy we might have the lines follow the curve of the system ring. But it should be fine, and simpler to simply have the lines disappear when they reach the system ring and reappear on the other side.
Geoff the Medio wrote:If ships are seen to move in the space between circles around stars, rather than the space between centres of stars, the distances of intermediate steps could vary oddly...
Yeah, the visible intervals that a ship can travel would vary between long lanes and short lanes, but with the markers indicating how far the ship will go each turn, there's nothing to get confused about. The mess that occurs when a few fleets are overlapping a star, and you want to select something, is much more troublesome.
tzlaine wrote:Also, I'd like to point out that this: [snip]
... probably should never be visible all at once, unless the user does something special to turn it all on. The default should show only much more essential info. If shipyard, capitol, and homeworld are indicated in the system name (IMO a great idea), that still leaves all of this for inside the system ring, which should be turned on or off based on the user's settings:
Sitrep flag
User-definable "flag"
Room for information overlays (population, research levels, PP etc.)
Visibility indicator (can you currently see what's in this system)
Empire flags(maybe)
I think the visibility indicator and (if used) empire flags should be just kinds of overlays, with the sitrep and user-defined flags togglable on top of the ring as icons. I think that will all fit, in fact.
* What i clumsily called "Visibility indicator", better known as "fog of war", is something that i wanted to be on all the time, but i couldn't figure out how to make that work without ruining something else. So that will probably be something you turn on and off.
* I've about given up on empire flags. Since you can potentially
(though it's not likely) have 10 empires resident in a system, it would take an excessive amount of space to fit them all in an any legible size.
* sitrep and user-defined flags seem pretty important to me. Though obviously they won't work at the lowest zoom levels, i want to make them so they can be on all the time. I haven't tried much with them yet, so i'm not yet sure what will work.
The idea that came to me after i did all the mock-ups is that the highest zoom level might be a lot different, i.e. have a lot more stuff than the previous zoom level. I.E. flicking the scroll wheel all the way would be the quick way to find out the basics about a star.