FreeOrion

What would you suggest be the point of categories then, in a tech tree of the current basic layout? If they're not useful to sort by what sort of things techs do, then how are players going to use categories, and how are players going to find techs that do a particular sort of thing?

You are conflating two different issues. My complaint here is about the categories. There's no rule that a tech can only unlock new techs in the same category. But i would argue rather strongly that for instance, planetary stealth screens should not be in the "ships" category merely because the technobabble explains them with similar imaginary science , and some ship part tech is a prerequisite for the planetary stealth screens. Weather planetary stealth screens should have ship part tech as a prerequisite is more debatable.

I also disagree with your assumption the only interesting research decision is between the new techs unlocked by the last thing he researched. Weather detectors are all in the same branch or scattered willy-nilly all over the tree, the player is still making the same essential choice-- weather he wants to prioritize better detectors now, or something else.

Of course there is no category that that planetary stealth screens, or a good amount of other stuff could naturally fall in. That's what i'm compiling about. Because i'm worn out i don't have constructive alternatives at this time.

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Perhaps a Planet Defense category is warranted?

There's no reason we need to stick with just 4-6 categories. 10-12 narrower-focus categories could be fine, some of which could have rather few techs in them.

Planetary Defense sounds good, (sounds like a good place for Troops)

revision 4383:
"Added planetary defense tech category, and provisional icons for that and ships category."



revision 4384:
"moved existing techs into 'planetary defense' category."

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Do i remember correctly? I thought Geoff added a flag to make techs invisible (for the ones that have a housekeeping function for effects), but i can't find it.

We have "unresearchable" techs, but they are perfectly visible in the tree.

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There is a Unresearchable flag, which is used on "LRN_RUINS_MOD" and seems to be working for me...

I'm using night's binary from SVN 4373.

I get it. They are invisible in the tree, but not in the list view.

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If a tech refers to a non-existing tech as a prerequisite FO crashes without leaving any error messages in the console. It took me at least an hour to narrow it down to that. It would be nice if it was a little bit more robust in dealing with invalid prerequisites.

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I'm pretty sure that leaves an error message in the log files, doesn't it?

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I may have removed such an error message during recent changes to tech input validation in order to remove requirements about theories only depending on theories, or similar.

I dunno, i haven't been using the log files for errors. Console.app seemed to be giving me the info i needed -- at least when FO didn't crash.

Now that i look at it, the log does give a nice report on redundant tech prerequisites.

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I think it should also still report circular dependencies.

I added a ground level tech "Domesticated Mega-Fauna" that's now required to raise monsters from the monster nests.

If you don't have the tech, but colonize a nest, it will be safe, but produce no monsters until you get the tech.

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I haven't read the whole thread, so i hope nobody else has already come up with this idea. But I think you should highlight in the tech tree, which technologies give rise to buildings, ship improvements etc. and which are just prerequisites for other technologies. I think this would make the tech tree much clearer. you just need to add some icons for buildings, ship improvements etc. in the tree.