eleazar wrote:• "Reseach" now appears once in the upper left, emphasized with white type.
I quite dislike the extra window title bar at the top of the research and production screens. It's a waste of space, and on the production screen it also shifts the sidepanel down, which I especially hate.
• Transparency to the map screen is removed since it was cluttering up the tech tree display, and it has no bearing on reseach.
Have to disagree... Having the map partly visible keeps the whole game visibly connected, rather than separate unrelated interfaces, and the stars / lanes are sufficiently faded to not visibly interfere with the foreground techs and lines.
• All the controls for modifying the tech tree display are put together on the top.
While theoretically good (keep all controls together), I'm not sure this is really necessary. The tech buttons are somewhat like tabs for each category's techs (though hopefully will be independently togglable later...). Having the statuses (statii?) and types options below breaks this association visually. Also, having the status/type options between the category buttons and tree means that the mouse has to move extra distance between the two, which is bad because they're probably the most commonly used. Also also, the status/type options are conceptually different enough from the categories that putting them at the bottom isn't objectionable to me.
The statii and types should be independently togglable though, just like the categories. So you'd have on/off for each of researchable, researched and unavailable, as well as theory, application and refinement.
"Zoom in" and "Zoom out" buttons are added for those without scroll wheels.
Might be better to have a vertical slider over top the tree ala google maps. Shows the available range of zooms, lets the player zoom all the way in/out with one motion, not multiple clicks.
• Electric blue is used as a selection and hightlight color.
This conflicts with the category colours... Is there a problem with just a white outline, or a selection indicator of some sort?
• Each Tech displays it's own icon. Yes, you loose a little text space, but all large zooms the text is unreadable, but the icon might be recognisable.
I could go either way on this, though I don't think the icons are very well suited to display at various zoom levels, particularly not while shrunk down, at which point they'll probably be rather difficult to distinguish...
It might be nice to have techs that are moused over enlarge themselves (ala MacOS icons in a row that biggify when mouse over) so as to make them more readable. The point of the zoomed out view would be to see the overall tree structure... you'd have to mouse over or zoom in to read most techs names easily though... which is likely unavoidable.
• Scroll bar will highlight when mousewheel will move them (not shown)
Which is never... (?)
•Tech Descriptions only displays at the bottom when a tech is selected. Otherwise that space is free to display the tech tree. This box is slightly transparent because what's behind is relevant.
Why move it to the bottom? At the top is consistent with the research screen, which has a buildable items list at the bottom.
• This box also takes up as much vertical space as neccesary to avoid scrolling through the description. (this would be a bad idea if the descriptions get very much longer)
If it's resiziable, it might as well be player-controlled resizing, not automatic.
• Tech Description is reorganized.
explain...?
• Two small icons near upper left of text description toggle between the "verbose" and "simple" description text.
Why not have summary at the top of the description, and more detail below, with scrollbar if necessary? I don't see the use for two buttons for this... I had suggested and effects button and a description button previously, though in practice I don't see the need to make the distinction; in practice theories have lots of fluff and no effects, while applications have little fluff and effects described.