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More Visual Improvements

Functional and Fashionable

By CaretFarmer on January 28, 2005 5:13:23 PM from

CaretFarmer

Join Date 10/2004

+1

Happy National Kazoo Day! This week was kind of a mixed bag in terms of what I worked on. After last week's push for the media tour, this week was a time for going back and fixing things that weren't quite right under the hood but that were better left until after the deadline: fixing memory leaks, making things more efficient, etc. Also, it was a time for putting in more features that you can actually see:

First off, you've probably noticed that the overlays which indicate which tiles are usable are a lot brighter now. We wanted to make it crystal clear which tiles were usable. Before brightening (B.B.), the overlays sometimes blended in with the underlying terrain, but no more! A new age of clarity has dawned and there's no turning back!
But, even more interesting is the introduction of those little icons in the lower left corner of some of the planet's sectors. Scott (who we like to call "Scott" here at the office) whipped them up so that we could show which sectors give bonuses when certain types of improvements are placed on those sectors. So, for instance, if you were to build a power plant on the sector with the lightning bolt icon, the power plant would put out a little extra juice when it became operational. If instead you built, say, a farm on that sector, you'd get no bonus. The number and type of bonuses isn't finalized yet, but there will probably be about a half dozen or so. It just keeps getting better.

Paul

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Wow! The planet terrain tiles are starting to look real nice. I'm not sure if color is really needed for the small icons if the shapes are distinctive enough. I'd like to see the other tile highlights for the upgradable tiles first and than see if the colored icons would clash with the other colors in the tiles themselves and the colors of the highlights. Sometimes black and white objects are easier to see when everything else is colored.

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Regarding the special symbols: I think some color would help to differentiate between them, e.g. yellow for the lightning, blue fpr the mineral(?) etc.

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ck/magma should have more mineral bonuses. Just a thought.

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border as they currently do.

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Looks good - Like the icons and highlighted areas!

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s engaging as these so... way to go!

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Regarding coloring the icons: I'll pass those suggestions on to Scott; he may have had a reason for making them black and white, but then again maybe he didn't. It's a simple matter to experiment with what looks best now that it's implemented so we'll probably try out different colors to see how they work.

@Shai-Hulud: Centering them in the tile would make them more visible when the tile is empty, but once something is built there it's probably best if it's off to the corner. That way, you can easily see if what you've got built there is compatible with the intrinsic bonus of the tile. Maybe it could be centered when there's nothing there and in the corner otherwise? I'll have to experiment with that....

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When it comes to the bonus icons being colored, anything is possible at this stage of the game, but I fear that colored icons won't 'pop' the way the black-and-white ones do. Keep in mind you'll also be looking at the icons when improvements have been built on the tile, so too much color may cause the two to confilct.

Like I said, though, I'm always up for making things better, so we can play around with some colors and see what works

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In case you didn't know, BoogieBac = Scott.

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h more wide ranging?

Also, perhaps the icon means that one bonus could suffer. Say, a production improvement would have a negative effect on farming, because the soil would not be as good in that sector.

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For the time being, bonuses will be just that: bonuses. So, if you build a farm on a tile that's better suited for energy production, there's no penalty on the farm's production. The effect of the bonus will be a simple percentage increase in the corresponding production level, so it'll be something like another 10 MW of power, etc.

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