Here's what I need from the graphics team:I have uploaded a new version of tech-check.exe, along with two more apps: building-check.exe and tech-view.exe; they can be found here: http://freeorion.sourceforge.net/designer-tools.zip . Tech-view represents the current progress on the tech screen; as of this writing, only the actual tech tree part is finished. The colors are jacked up. Feel free to experiment with better ones. As mentioned earlier, the latest stringtable file can be found here: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/* ... gtable.txt and the latest techs.xml file can be found here: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/* ... /techs.xml .
Note these files are on about a 24 delay, and I committed them about 2 hours ago, so if at first you don't succeed, give it a bit and try again.
1) A color scheme that doesn't suck. Clearly I'm not artist. You can change the colors, and post screenies showing your take on what it should look like, and I'll change the colors in the code. Read the READMEs for info on how to do this.
2) A place to put quick-links for requirements that are not visible, such as requirements from another category. Some notes on this:
a) The layout code I'm using does not allow the techs to be different sizes. So placing a big quick link like the ones shown in this thread so far will clobber all the dependency lines. We need something more compact.
b) I thought of maybe having a little button somewhere that looks like an ellipsis ("..."), that pops up all the quicklinks when you click on it. Clicking on one of the quicklinks takes you to the corresponding dependency.
c) I also thought of having a single little button with an arrow on it (similar to the arrows at the ends of the dependency lines) for each non-visible dependency, and having the name of the dependency pop up when your mouse rolls over the button. Clicking on it would take you to the dependency like the quicklinks from earlier in this thread did.
I can't figure out how this should look, or whether b), c), or something else would be best. Let me know what you all think, including mockups that show how the new stuff will look on screenshots of the current tech-view.