0.4 combat UI

Development of artwork, requests, suggestions, samples, or if you have artwork to offer. Primarily for the artists.
Message
Author
User avatar
pd
Graphics Lead Emeritus
Posts: 1924
Joined: Mon Mar 08, 2004 6:17 pm
Location: 52°16'N 10°31'E

Re: 0.4 combat UI

#61 Post by pd »

Thanks for all the input.

Just so I don't forget it, I'd like to add 2 more possible (target) objects: asteroid mines and minefields.

User avatar
Geoff the Medio
Programming, Design, Admin
Posts: 13587
Joined: Wed Oct 08, 2003 1:33 am
Location: Munich

Re: 0.4 combat UI

#62 Post by Geoff the Medio »

pd wrote:Just so I don't forget it, I'd like to add 2 more possible (target) objects: asteroid mines and minefields.
Unless you need a comprehensive list, just add "* Buildings - Any building that is described as being in space, around a planet or elsewhere in the system". We don't need to limit this to just a few specific ones.

User avatar
pd
Graphics Lead Emeritus
Posts: 1924
Joined: Mon Mar 08, 2004 6:17 pm
Location: 52°16'N 10°31'E

Re: 0.4 combat UI

#63 Post by pd »

You're right.

I've tried to visualize the scenarios in a simple storyboard way and just finished another mood painting, based on the Field Battle. I'll go into more detail(close range combat) next.

Image

Image
* star colored starlane entry
* empire colored engine trails
* lousy ship designs, made up on the fly
* unusual(for me) color choices

User avatar
Geoff the Medio
Programming, Design, Admin
Posts: 13587
Joined: Wed Oct 08, 2003 1:33 am
Location: Munich

Re: 0.4 combat UI

#64 Post by Geoff the Medio »

I think it would help to orient the player if there was a semi-transparent (yellowish or whiteish) square grid or concentric circles grid with radial lines going out from the star. The spacing of the lines could be 100 units and 10 units (of a 1000 unit wide system battle map).

Assault might involve defending fleets in addition to planets.

Escape / Hunt might involve the escaper / prey exiting on the same starlane that the hunter arrived on.

Transit should have some case considered where there are blockading fleets trying to prevent the transiting ships.

I suppose another possible scenario might be hide. If a stealthy ship can be detected on the galaxy map, then a battle might start with another empire trying to find that ship within the system. The stealthy ship could want to remain in the system, and would have to avoid being too close to any moderate-range detector ships during the battle time. It might hide in nebulae or at the edges of the system, or move around to avoid the roaming detector ships. The hider might also reveal itself briefly to destroy an isolated searcher and then try to resume hiding before the other searchers can surround it.

User avatar
pd
Graphics Lead Emeritus
Posts: 1924
Joined: Mon Mar 08, 2004 6:17 pm
Location: 52°16'N 10°31'E

Re: 0.4 combat UI

#65 Post by pd »

Should it be possible for the player to know whether enemy ships can or can't see his ships? Should the UI reflect this or will he only be able to tell by the behaviour of enemy ships? As I understand it, a ship is stealthy, if it's stealth meter's current value is higher then the enemy ship's detection meter current value. In addition to this, can stealth be turned on/off by the player?

User avatar
Bigjoe5
Designer and Programmer
Posts: 2058
Joined: Tue Aug 14, 2007 6:33 pm
Location: Orion

Re: 0.4 combat UI

#66 Post by Bigjoe5 »

Anything that a player would be able to determine by scanning all the enemy ships and making the relevant calculations should be shown via the UI. Since a player could know from the enemy ship's detection values and his own stealth values whether or not he is visible, there needs to be a way to show this to the player, based on all the knowledge available to the player at the time. Furthermore, a very creative way of showing which empires are able to see a certain ship would probably be useful.

Ships probably won't be able to directly control their stealth levels, since to make it necessary, there would have to be some corresponding bonus for the ship, which is too much complexity. Rather, ships' stealth could be modified based on their fighting stances, i.e. a ship that's going to fire this turn will be charging weapons and firing, decreasing stealth for that turn. A ship trying to leave through a starlane would probably have decreased stealth for the turns before it exits. Being in orbit around a friendly planet could give a stealth bonus, while orbiting an enemy planet, which has other tactical advantages, would be a stealth penalty. An ship hiding in (the equivalent of orbiting for asteroids) an asteroid belt would have a higher stealth bonus, significantly more so if it has an asteroid hull.

Those are my impressions, anyway.

Edit: Engine colour is a nice way to distinguish between empires.
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

User avatar
Geoff the Medio
Programming, Design, Admin
Posts: 13587
Joined: Wed Oct 08, 2003 1:33 am
Location: Munich

Re: 0.4 combat UI

#67 Post by Geoff the Medio »

It's difficult or impossible to reliably know whether your ships can be seen by enemy ships since those enemy ships could themselves be hidden from you, and the game shouldn't be sending any information to clients that they aren't supposed to know according to game rules (such as the location of not-visible enemy ships).

Some sort of visual indicator of detection range might be useful to indicate whether enemy ships you know about can see your ships, though. This could be made slightly more complicated by having the displayed detection range for enemy ships decrease according to the stealth of your ships if you select one of your ships. Since multiple ships could be selected, the lowest stealth among the selected ships could be used. The idea would be to reduce the displayed detection range of the enemy ship by the stealth of your ship, as this would indicate how close they'd have to be to your ships to see them. But again, this wouldn't help to know whether hidden enemy ships can see your ships... although in practice, ships with high detection should probably generally have low stealth, and high stealth ships should have low detection.

A ship being stealthy doesn't require its stealth meter to be higher than enemy detection. If that was the case, then there'd be no way for the detector to see the stealthy ship, regardless of its location, which should be relatively rare and difficult to have happen in game. More common would be cases like one side with detection = 15 and the other with stealth = 5 (for example). The stealth means that the stealthy ship can be just outside (15 - 5) * 10 distance away from the detector and not be seen (the * 10 is a scaling factor due to the size of the system and scale of meters). This would still be a pretty stealthy ship, as it would not be seen unless a lot close than the distance where an unstealthy ship could be seen by the same detector.

I'm not sure whether we'll have variations in stealth during battle for v0.4. It might be better to keep thing simple and have fixed stealth for the whole battle. I would eventually like to have things like firing weapons or being in orbit or being in a nebula have effects on stealth or other battle statistics, but it might be better to wait until after v0.4 to implement these. I suppose we could also have a "turn off stealth" order... although it's probably more of a toggle that works independently of other orders. If moving vs. stationary has stealth effects, it might be simpler to just have ships move around if they want to advertize their position, although different actions (moving. vs. firing) might have different stealth penalties... Probably for scripted story purposes, we'll need some way to have ships make their stealth go to zero, though.

User avatar
pd
Graphics Lead Emeritus
Posts: 1924
Joined: Mon Mar 08, 2004 6:17 pm
Location: 52°16'N 10°31'E

Re: 0.4 combat UI

#68 Post by pd »

Another one, focal length is 80mm, so it's a near parallel projection and the view is less shallow this time.
Image
* star names above starlane entries
* nebula at the edge of the system, obscuring(maybe just partly) the system disc
* fleet icons
* shipyard(should have an icon as well, I guess)
* blue circle: scanning distance, red circle: weapon range (both could have different patterns as well)


quote from relative size of the system, planets and ships
Geoff the Medio wrote: Alternatively, since when zoomed in quite a bit, there's a lot less distance to worry about, and it's more difficult to control much of a large scale battle anyway, so we could have the amount of shrinking-with-distance be dependent on the zoom level. When zoomed out, rotating or panning wouldn't change the apparent size of objects significantly, but when zoomed in, the distance shrinking would become more significant. Exactly how to make such a transition, I'm not sure.
I had the exact same thoughts - smaller focal length, when zoomed in. When the focal length decreases, the angle of view increases, which appears as if one is actually zooming out. So if we want to use smaller focal lengths when zooming in, the zooming simply has to be made more prominent to counter this effect.

Also, in the tech demo it's possible to "hop around" by double clicking on the orbital plane and by doing so changing the camera's position. In future, when this is done on moving objects, the camera could perhaps attach itself to those objects and move in parallel. This seemed to work very well in Homeworld.

User avatar
Geoff the Medio
Programming, Design, Admin
Posts: 13587
Joined: Wed Oct 08, 2003 1:33 am
Location: Munich

Re: 0.4 combat UI

#69 Post by Geoff the Medio »

At the zoom level in that mockup, we'll probably need to switch to non-rendered 2D icons for planets, given the relative scale of things...

The star names on the openings are nice, but I wonder what they'd look like positioned more on the side of the lane opening away from the star, instead of over top of the opening?

The nebula should probably stand out from the background a bit more... although some radial (from star) grid lines being hidden under it might also help mark its borders / make it stand out, in addition to the concentric ones.
pd wrote:In the tech demo it's possible to "hop around" by double clicking on the orbital plane and by doing so changing the camera's position. In future, when this is done on moving objects, the camera could perhaps attach itself to those objects and move in parallel. This seemed to work very well in Homeworld.
Homeworld allowed full 3D movement of ships, whereas in FreeOrion movement is restricted to a 2D plane. I think we're better having the view be moved around by dragging the "map" by left-click-hold-drag just like on the galaxy map. I don't object to being able to lock the camera onto an object and having it move with that object, though.

tzlaine
Programming Lead Emeritus
Posts: 1092
Joined: Thu Jun 26, 2003 1:33 pm

Re: 0.4 combat UI

#70 Post by tzlaine »

FWIW, the DD describes starlane entrance points as being ellipses. You have them here as polar grid squares.

User avatar
Bigjoe5
Designer and Programmer
Posts: 2058
Joined: Tue Aug 14, 2007 6:33 pm
Location: Orion

Re: 0.4 combat UI

#71 Post by Bigjoe5 »

Perhaps information about what enemy empires have visibility of you (based only on information that would be known to the player of course) could be represented by a circle underneath the ship that looks like the radar ship part icons in the colour of the empire that can see the ship.

When multiple empires have visibility of a ship, it would be split into multiple equal pieces.

It would look kind of like this (forgive my absolutely horrible attempt at creating a mock-up; the tools I'm using are limited, and my understanding of them is even more so):

Image

In this image, the left-most ship is visible to the orange and pink empires. The others are all visible to nobody (mostly because I didn't want to maul this image any further). Probably just having nothing down there when a ship is visible to nobody would make it most obvious, but maybe just a grey circle would be better, since it might look awkward with some ships having them and some not. (Also, ideally the circle would cover the same area as those green circles, instead of just appearing like a sprite in two dimensions regardless of how you rotate it. I'm just really bad at this.)
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

User avatar
The Silent One
Graphics
Posts: 1129
Joined: Tue Jul 01, 2003 8:27 pm

Re: 0.4 combat UI

#72 Post by The Silent One »

How about arrows on the border of the green circles that show which empire (color) detects the ship from where (direction of arrow)?

Like this:

Code: Select all

     XX
   XX  XX < (blue)
     XX
     ^
    (yellow)
Ship is detected from east by blue and from south by yellow.
If I provided any images, code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0.

User avatar
Bigjoe5
Designer and Programmer
Posts: 2058
Joined: Tue Aug 14, 2007 6:33 pm
Location: Orion

Re: 0.4 combat UI

#73 Post by Bigjoe5 »

That would probably be more useful in some cases, but what happens when there are multiple enemy ships that can detect the ship? Does it show multiple arrows, or does it only point to the strongest detector, or the enemy ship that has the highest visibility of the player's ship (my preference)?
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

User avatar
Bigjoe5
Designer and Programmer
Posts: 2058
Joined: Tue Aug 14, 2007 6:33 pm
Location: Orion

Re: 0.4 combat UI

#74 Post by Bigjoe5 »

Regarding the activation of special systems in combat:

It is ridiculous of course, to suppose that the player should have to find and click on an individual ship to activate and deactivate specific parts. It is also ridiculous that there would be any parts with a localized or stacking effect in combat that would be important enough for the player to activate and deactivate.

However, the idea of having ship parts with certain disadvantages while they are activated is very intriguing; for example, a ship part might indiscriminately lower the stealth of all objects in combat, or prevent all ships from exiting via starlanes. There would need to be a way to activate and deactivate these systems without actually finding the specific ship, or all specific ships which have this part.

Since these effects are non-localized and non-stacking, it doesn't actually matter where the ship with that part is. The player doesn't need to care about that at all, except to protect the ship with the valuable part. In terms of activation, a drop-down or pop-up panel somewhere on the perimeter of the screen would be adequate for activating and deactivating special systems.

There is also no need, for the purposes of activation and deactivation, to link these special functions to any particular ship; if you have one or more ships with a certain part, that part's options appear on the menu. If not, they don't.

It might be useful however, if next to the each option, there was an expandable list of ships with the part that allows that option, so that if the player had many such ships, he could tell how many are left and what type they are fairly easily. Also, clicking on a specific ship in that list could bring the player to the part of the map containing that ship.


Regarding the mini-map:

The mini-map should obviously only use sprite icons to identify objects. It should probably also be able to be hidden and revealed on demand. The functionality of the map would be to give the player an overview of the battle and facilitate easy movement between different regions on the battle map. I wonder if perhaps, since the battle map is zoom-able, instead of just clicking on the mini-map to get to a part of the map and always switch to a fixed zoom level/stay at the same zoom level, the player could click-drag to select a little rectangle on the map, and then the player would be taken to the selected part of the map, at a zoom level corresponding to the size of the rectangle drawn?

Anyway, that's just a few thoughts I wanted to get out there.
Warning: Antarans in dimensional portal are closer than they appear.

User avatar
strooka
Space Kraken
Posts: 165
Joined: Tue Jun 23, 2009 5:34 pm
Location: Bielefeld, Germany

Re: 0.4 combat UI

#75 Post by strooka »

could you supply some things?

a star background decoration consisting simply of some stars.
it must consist of 6 fitting textures for the 6 sides of a cube.
(www.nasa.gov)

a laser beam particle effect (there is an editor for this in ogre)
(ask pd i didn't find the link)

an alpha blended texture similar to that in this thread for the interface of the space combat (there is already one in this thread - but not alpha blended - means the combat area must be left out)

an alpha blended grid texture (means there should be only the grid lanes visible)

define an alpha blended texture for defining a circle that indicate which player they belong

define the 2d ship symbols in different colors - alpha blended.

supply the star entry points - the worm holes.

pls supply in a zip file

this isn't much work - most has already be done.

yours

strooka

Post Reply