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Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2003 7:46 pm
by drek
Looks great as it is, much better than I anticipated. Those rendered nebulas look fantastic.

Just as an aside, I thought a different design was choosen for the side bar...one of the more minimalistic ones. Not complaining though--looks fine as it is.

Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2003 9:05 pm
by skdiw
I didn't know UI is passed. Let me post my ideas about fleet icons real quick just in case.

-Fleet icon should have animated vector when leaving instead of moving left and icon size is depended on the fleet strength, or another animation like shrinking or enlarging.

how to show fleetsize.

Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2003 11:54 pm
by miu
Better idea to indicate fleet's size, resizing is clumsy:

On the down right corner of icon, if the icon is big/close zoom there would a number saying how many ships is included in the fleet (using very small and readable font). Or if numbers are too cluttering, few small balls/cubes/dots. They could go for example like: First dot 1-5, second 6-15, third 15-30, fourth 41-100, fifht 100+.

Again, fleeticons are great way to show valuable information, why to hide it behind clicks.
.Miu

Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2003 1:28 am
by Tyreth
drek wrote: Just as an aside, I thought a different design was choosen for the side bar...one of the more minimalistic ones. Not complaining though--looks fine as it is.
Yep, it was, but when tzlaine started coding it he felt this design would be more appropriate to implement for reasons I can't recall. It's buried in one of the programming threads, or maybe even the thread where we discussed the sidebar.

Povray has turned out to be great for nebula :)
miu wrote: Or if numbers are too cluttering, few small balls/cubes/dots. They could go for example like: First dot 1-5, second 6-15, third 15-30, fourth 41-100, fifht 100+.
I love this idea.

Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2003 1:31 am
by iamrobk
Yeah, but I thought at max battles were only gonna be like 100 ships vs 100 ships, so they should be scaled down a bit....

Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2003 3:32 am
by Tyreth
iamrobk wrote:Yeah, but I thought at max battles were only gonna be like 100 ships vs 100 ships, so they should be scaled down a bit....
I don't recall this having been officially discussed, where was the max battles defined?

Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2003 3:58 am
by Zanzibar
tyreth wrote:Povray has turned out to be great for nebula :)
Thank you, thank you... glad you approve!! ;) It also might come in handy for other things as well... and well... it's free!! ;) I think that's the most important bit, anyhow. You just might be surprised what sorts of things you can generate with it, if you do it right. Take this missle turret for example...

Image

Pov-ray source code that generates the image.

Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2003 3:43 pm
by Aquitaine
The maximum number of ships has not been officially decided. On the old forums, we used the 'Total War' series as target in terms of number and organizations (e.g. same-type ships grouped together) but I think we were throwing around numbers like 500 v. 500. But that is certainly not official and won't be for a while as it was more of a brainstorming session than an actual discussion.

But if I had to estimate the final result, I'd say 100 on each side would be quite low.

Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2003 5:07 pm
by iamrobk
Meh 100 per side seemed to be what most people liked in the topic I made in the brainstorming topic, and I never considered it official, I was just saying what (it appeared) the majority wanted. Btw I don't wanna get this off topic, but more than 100 ships per side is kinda stupid and way unrealistic IMO.

Re: how to show fleetsize.

Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2003 5:09 pm
by skdiw
miu wrote:Better idea to indicate fleet's size, resizing is clumsy:

On the down right corner of icon, if the icon is big/close zoom there would a number saying how many ships is included in the fleet (using very small and readable font). Or if numbers are too cluttering, few small balls/cubes/dots. They could go for example like: First dot 1-5, second 6-15, third 15-30, fourth 41-100, fifht 100+.

Again, fleeticons are great way to show valuable information, why to hide it behind clicks.
.Miu
I would say why hide it behind zooms? I imagine your method will get cluttery so I advise animation or sizing. Why would resizing get clumsy? What about spinning? Why not just combine the balls into the icon itself? Don't you want some animation to spice that stagnant galaxy up?

The # of ships in battle weren't discussed officically but it was brainstromed under something like "A big (imo) ship to ship design"

Note of iambork: we have to "pass" something for it to be official, otherwise it still up for debate. Some of the passed feature are listed under game feature, which ... uhh..needs an update. Basically it goes like ideas -> brainstorm -> game design -> game features -> FO.

An idea just came in about that empty space on the side panel. How about if you mouse over the planet, the planet is blow big and the empty space starts a mini slide show of all important info. And if you see that you want more info about a particular slide, click on it to bring it up. Of course you can still use the other conventional method yadi yadi yah.

About the comet streaking thing . . .

Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 2:56 pm
by chaloobi
From a true science perspective, comets do not streak between stars. On the scale of this map, you'd never see a comet, as they hug relatively close to their parent stars. And since it's the proximity to solar wind that gives the comet it's tail, any cometary object between the stars would be completely invisible anyway.

BTW the screen shot is awesome. Looks absolutely beautiful. I can't wait to wage war in that galaxy!

Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 7:09 pm
by Soumaxeridis
I must admit that when I first saw this effort, I was certain that the gameplay would be great because the players themselves will make the game. But I wasn't so sure about the artwork. After seeing this galactic map though, I was very surprised! It looks magnificent! Congratulations on all the people who worked to make it happen.

realtime fractal based fog?

Posted: Sat Sep 27, 2003 12:16 am
by miu
I dont know if this idea can be/is wort of programming , but if it would, it would be very cool: I've seen some very impressive demos with fractal-based plasmas and effects. I wonder if is possible to make a algorithm to generate slowly moving space fog to screenbackround in realtime without using too much processing power? If there's any democoders here, I would love to hear their opimion :)

.Miu

Posted: Sat Sep 27, 2003 2:23 am
by Zanzibar
A pre-rendered animation using POV-ray's particle system and/or atmospheric effects might work... :)

Posted: Sun Sep 28, 2003 10:06 pm
by Ron_Lugge
iamrobk wrote:Btw I don't wanna get this off topic, but more than 100 ships per side is kinda stupid and way unrealistic IMO.
"unrealistic"?? I'm sorry, but I don't buy that. Even if ships are big, expensive propositions, each planet can (presumably!) support 2 or 3 of them -- otherwise the one-planet system you start with (I think) couldn't even go interstellar. And command and controll for such a force would hardly be difficult. (Note that full scale superdreadnoughts would be more expensive, but you get the point.)



And back on topic, I do have one complaint about the galaxy screen - there is to much noise. It looks gorgeous, but I'm worried about being able to pick out the relevent details from such a mess -- especially finding stars that haven't gotten names yet.