triangles vs descriptive fleeticons

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Daveybaby
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#31 Post by Daveybaby »

utilae wrote:Perhaps. But, if you have small, medium and large dots and you have not seen the small one yet, only the medium, how do you know it is the medium sized dot. It might be hard to judge based soley on size. After all can you accurately tell the difference between a 10mm dot and a 20mm dot. They could easily be confused in my opinion. :P
Very, very true. Different sized blobs is an ergonomically terrible way to determine the status of an object.

It works fine if youve got several objects lined up next to each other for comparison, but for single (or spatially separated) objects its a no-no.

Besides, you cant have very many recognisable levels with blob size - 3 levels max, which really isnt enough if you want to tell at a glance how big a fleet is. Is 10 ships a lot (it probably is in the early game) is 100 ships a lot (maybe not in the late game). IMO you need 8-10 levels in an exponential scale.
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krum
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#32 Post by krum »

Having each size have a shape different from the other could work. Just to throw an idea in: Small dot, three dots in a triangle, triangle (bigger), three triangles, five/six-pointed star (bigger still), three stars. come to think of it, the could also represent the variety of ship hulls, thee smaller items for a swarm of small ships, one bigger for a few large ships.

Starrh
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#33 Post by Starrh »

leiavoia wrote:for number of ships, i think it would be easier on all fronts to just use ship count numbers. It's a little more stark, but it does give the most information and doesn't need any mental decoding. If you have 18 ships, it's just a colored triangle with "18" inside it.


I would agree leiavoia on this one in fact I don't even think you need a triangle with it unless you want the triangles color to represent the threat potential.
For example
White = no threat
green = some threat
yellow = Medium threat
Blue = Greater Threat
Red = Vicious warmongering fleet!!!!
Ultimately I think the you give the player a button on the side panel or the f5 key that toggles the number above the fleets on and off. That way you can give a quick look at fleet sizes possibly threat assessment with triangles or shapes then they can toggle ot off. Also I think it would be an advantage to be able to right click on the fleet and to bring up the dialog with the fleet composition giving you a list of ships and quantities. It would also be nice down the road to have a question mark appear when you moused over a certain ship design in the list and then when you click on it a picture of the ship appears with statistics and weapons make up. Of course only if you where in sensor range!:wink:
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miu
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#34 Post by miu »

I've grown quite fond of those lil' empire-colorcoded triangles we have currently.
For showing the strength of fleet, I would like it simple, having a little bar on right side of triangle.
crudely as I'm bit on rush and don't have time for photoshopping right now:
<|
<|.
<|:
<||

- basically same as with dot's, line scales well when zoomed out, and the lenght of the line tells the general streght of fleet. This should be stepped, maybe 5 different lenghts. When fleet icon comes mouseovered, it will show the amount of ships after it.
<|: (37)
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Satyagraha
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#35 Post by Satyagraha »

hm, why not stick with what you suggested before?
http://www.evtek.fi/~k0201783/fleetwindowmockup2.jpg

i like that, dots make me think of numbers, but lines of something different, like status or something. and race-specific icons are way more fun than triangles, triangles are boring...
Last edited by Satyagraha on Sat Mar 27, 2004 12:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

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pd
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#36 Post by pd »

wow, this looks good to me. when/where was is suggested?

Satyagraha
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#37 Post by Satyagraha »

it´s a thread by miu on page 2. there was also a post with more of those ship icons and some really really good concept drawings of ships but i cannot find it anymore... anyone knows where it is?

Impaler
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#38 Post by Impaler »

Doing a Thread Resurection here (please forgive if this is offensive) I though this thread might have some relevence to V0.3 Graphic improvments.

To sumarize the Thread we want to find a means of showing releative Fleet Strength in the Fleet Icon and possibly Race as well.

My current idea would be as follows.

Each race has 2 or more Fleet Icons that convey information about the make up of the Fleet. The 2 Icons would corespond to Combat/NonCombat ships but if more types of icons are desired like ones for "Colony Fleets" "Bomber Fleets" ect this is also possible. My opinion is Combat/NonCombat is good enough for now. What ever ship type is in the Majority for the Fleet determines what kind of Icon its show as.

To show Size add up what ever criteria we use to size Fleets (by ship type #/cost/mass units what ever) find the largest Fleet that a Player Controls. Now Mark all fleets by their RELATIVE size to that largest Fleet. If we want to have 5 levels then its simply.

>100-80% Jumbo Icon (double normal size)
80-60% Large Icon
60-40% Medium Icon (Normal size)
40-20% Small Icon
20-0% Tiny Icon (Half normal size)

Enemy fleets are sized relative to YOUR largest fleet, not theirs so what might be a medium Icon to someone else might apear as Jumbo to you (inwhich case your probly in trouble unless you either have a lott of medium fleets or your tecnologicaly more advanced). By making size relative you get usefull information through out the whole game.

Oh and another point, if you have multiple fleets at a Planet the values are added to gether to make the "waiting at" Icon for that System larger then just the size of the largest fleet. This dose not count towards determining largest fleet size. This will prevent say a group of 3 medium fleets from apearing as just a medium Icon, the total would be added up to make a Jumbo Fleet.
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hadrian_27
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#39 Post by hadrian_27 »

Impaler wrote:Mark all fleets by their RELATIVE size to that largest Fleet.
I agree, although IMO it would be good to have empire flags as ship icons (represening the spread of that empire), and color-code the flag icons as offensive/defensive etc. (all of this of course assuming the flags won't be completely non-represenative drawings unable to relate in any single way to the military of the empire itself :roll: ).

Just my $.02 :wink:
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Geoff the Medio
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#40 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Impaler wrote:My opinion is Combat/NonCombat is good enough for now.
What sorts of non-combat fleets are there? Just colony ships? It seems a bit odd to call the icon the "non-combat ships" icon when it's only applicable to a single type of ship. I imagine the vast majority of fleets would be combat, so a classification primarily by combat / non-combat isn't very useful...
To show Size add up what ever criteria we use to size Fleets (by ship type #/cost/mass units what ever) find the largest Fleet that a Player Controls. Now Mark all fleets by their RELATIVE size to that largest Fleet.
This could be confusing... For a player's own fleets, the size of a fleet's icon would have no reliable meaning in situations in which there is a single large fleet in the empire that's in a combat situation. As soon as that fleet gets attacked, it's size is drastically reduced, and suddenly all other fleets get promoted two icons in size? ... Even worse is the other player's fleets... If their icon size is based relative to your fleet sizes, you'd need icons for > 100% the size of your biggest fleet.. up to 10000% or so. The alternative of basing their icons on only their fleet sizes is even worse, in that the size of the icon you see has little to no strategic informatin conveyed, and can changed rapidly (as in the big fleet being reduced example above) without you having any indication of why it happened.

IMO, it'd be better to base fleet icons on the average size of your fleets, or your number of ships per planet, or something like that, so that the sizings aren't so sensitive to temporary groupings of ships. It might be even better to base the averages for the whole galaxy... though that would tend to give you strategic information that you shouldn't be able to know...


Rather than having 5 designations, each covering 20 % of the size of your best fleet, I'd suggest having ~10 different icons that are one half to one full order of magnitude apart (Icons change when fleets "power" is 3 times bigger than the previous icon minimum size). (Could use factors of 2, if preferred).

If have a reasonable number of icons in a logarithmic system like this, it doesn't matter how big the galaxy is, there will never be enough fleet power to use up all the icons.

Of course that does mean you lose some of the fine distinction between icon ranges... so maybe scaling the ranges of the logarithmic icons so that your empire's average fleet is the middlemost icon, and ranking all fleets according to that benchmark (using logarithmic icons) would be best.

Impaler
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#41 Post by Impaler »

I think it will be hard to visualy distinquish anything more then 5 sizes witout making the Icon so frikin huge it blots out the system its at. Besides that I see how their could be some usefullness to logarithmic aproatches. It will depend on play style as some people just lump everything into 1 fleet and others spread them out.
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utilae
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#42 Post by utilae »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
Impaler wrote: My opinion is Combat/NonCombat is good enough for now.

What sorts of non-combat fleets are there? Just colony ships? It seems a bit odd to call the icon the "non-combat ships" icon when it's only applicable to a single type of ship. I imagine the vast majority of fleets would be combat, so a classification primarily by combat / non-combat isn't very useful...

Or instead of Non-Combat you could have support. Support would cover troop transports and any unarmed ships, that have some kind of speical device or purpose.

I guess Combat and NonCombat is good enough for now though.

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