sam0t

Join Date 01/2006

Dark Avatar beta 2 UI issues/improvement ideas

Furher editing done since DA final + patches. Thanks for applying some of my suggestions SD!

UI Issues

-- When naming a ship, naming should start from the end of the name. IE. Colony 1, typing should beging after the 1 number , not from the beginning before C character.

-- Technology screen. Thank you for making a zooming possibility, but the zoom should zoom where the mouse cursor is. At the moment it always zooms on a selected tech.

-- Star bases should be deselected when clicked elsewhere. Actually everything should be deselected when clicked on empy space. Constructors, star bases, planets etc. Only work around I have now to deselect constructor area is to select solar system.

-- Same class buildings should always be at the same spot in planetary building list. Current system with changing building names create confusion since the building list changes all the time.

Each class building should be color coded, example. Factories could always be surrounded with blue color and so on?

-- In rallypoint minimap make the rallypoint different colour or something. It is very hard to spot since its almost the same as planet dot. Bottom line, the rallypoint minimap as it is, is completely useless.

-- Selecting a trade route in financial manager/trade screen should make the trade route glow/different colour in the minimap.

-- Cannot give fleets to AI in diplomacy

UI feature adds

-- In Financial manager screen the Approval rating should be coloured.

-- Colony manager screen needs a minimap.

-- You should be able to select with multiple ships with ctrl/shift buttons from space port and launch many ships at the time.

-- A small check box for every ship/fleet which would make them "gifts" would be nice. These gift ships/fleets would show on different colour in diplomacy screen.

-- Ship building window should have similiar buttons for components (newest,old,all) as does the planetary screen for buildings.

-- I would like to see planet surface on Invasion screen. This would make it easier to choose invasion method.

-- Having a "what do you want from this" choice in diplomacy would make diplomacy much easier.

-- Population growth rate should be shown in pop up or with own box in colony management screen/planetary screen.

-- A keyboard button for moving all autopilot moves would be more than welcome. Did not GC1 have this assigned to Space bar? Bring it back!

-- There should be a two more buttons in "choose your civilization" screen. One called "reset all races to default" and "delete all player made ship designs/templates"

-- Star base bonuses should be show on main UI when selected. Remove class, moves and range from the little box and replace them bonuses that the SB gives. You could even add (number) kinda thing after the bonuses to indicate how many additional components could be installed.

-- Holding down ctrl-button could act like pressing middle mouse button? Atleast in main map and in ship building screen. Pressing middle button is clunky with some mouses.

-- Ship upgrade button for ship yard screen would be nice.

Also in ship upgrade window should have the same choises as the ship yard screen has: all, core, user.

-- I would like to see which planets are so called "extreme enviroment" ones in civ manager screen. Maybe put a little icon next to the mini planet gfx.

-- There should be graphical icon for ships that are in guard, survey or eplore mode. This when you have zoomed out the map to tactical view.

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Shameless bump

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Nice list.

I'll add this here instead of creating new thread.

- Have DA read and use the preferences set in GCII. After almost a year I've got GCII set up how I like and it was kinda jarring at first when starting DA with different options.

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Played for a few hours last night, not too seriously, just kinda goofing around and seeing what was different. Most of my UI nitpicks are held over from Dread Lords, not new problems in Dark Avatar.

Specifically, when the builds completed screen comes up at the end of each turn, (where it says "Factory completed on Earth, now building nothing"), after you go to a planet and select something for it to build, then go back to this screen, it does not update. It still says "now building nothing." Can be a pain when you have lots of panets and 15 things all finish at once, and you need to go to each planet and select a new build. Would be much easier if it updated after I select each new build.

I wish the selection highlight when you have a ship selected was more visible. Right now, I usually play zoomed out to the tactical level, so I can see what's going on more clearly. If there are a ton of ships, planets, and other things on the screen, it can be hard to tell which ship is selected, with that faint little blue circle around it. Sometimes autofocus doesn't center the ship exactly, and I'll find myslef scrolling way to the side, then hitting FIND just to get it to snapback and center on the ship so I can see which one is selected. Furthermore, the FIND button doesn't seem to center on the ship if you're scrolled off-center only slightly. So I have to scroll in one direction a good ways before the FIND button will center me. I must admit I spend a lot of time doing this trying to figure out which ship is selected.

Tooltips tooltips tooltips! Later versions of Dread Lords have added tons of new tooltips, but I want more! I feel like mousing over just about ANY number on ANY screen should give me a tooltip saying how that number is determined (esp. on the planet screen). I'm running an empire here; I need to know where these numbers come from!

Regarding research, the zoomable technology tree is probably the most obvious and helpful feature I've found in the new expansion. It solves like %90 of the problems I've had with the tech tree. I can't overemphasize how nice this feature is

My only problem now is that right clicking on a tech doesn't give me very much info at all. Sure it tells me what techs it will lead to, but I'm looking at the tech tree! I can see what techs it leads to already, I don't need that info when I right click. I want info like how much this tech costs. And if you're going to tell me what kind of buildings a tech lets you produce, then I need to be able to click on that to tell me what that building does. It's great to know that Fusion Factory Production lets me build fusion factories (or whatever), but what the heck does a fusion factory do? Right now it seems like I can only get building info AFTER I have the tech, then I can select it to build on the planet screen, and THERE it will tell me the effects of the building, cost, etc. I know it sounds like I'm asking for a Galactopedia, and I guess I kind of am

But it doesn't have to be that complicated; why not just a tooltip that po=s up when I hover over a building name that tells me the construction cost and the benefits that building brings.

In closing, can I just say that the addition of the ship graphics actually visibly orbiting the planet they are orbiting makes me irrationally happy

Thnaks for listening,
Anto

PS Is there any cheat or god mode in the beta? It seems like it would be very handy for bug spotting if we could choose to see exactly what the other civs were doing, building, etc.

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I just want to add another little suggestion to this list. When Dark Avatar gets installed, it would be nice if it used the same options as the original game. I mean, I had problems in Dread Lords when using the software cursor (it stopped responding after a while) so I enabled the hard ware cursor in the video options.
After installing Dark Avatar, it would have been nice if this option was also enabled, but it seems all options are just some kind of default instead of what I chose in Dread Lords. Which ment I had to reboot my computer after some turns because my mouse stopped responding (Hardware cursor disabled).
Not a big problem, but still would be nice...

Thanks for the fun game, I'm back to playing now...
Scorpiana

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I have a small bug.

After about 100 turns the mini-map got corrupted. It just went staticy.

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- A ship will follow the shortest route if you send it somewhere. This is not necessarily the fastest one. It will move into asteroid fields, ending it's movement for the turn.
-Miners will not create or upgrade a mining outpost if you send them to a spot that is more then 1 turn away
- End turn button doesn't lght up after a guard order (if that was the last ship with movement points)
- Colonize techs should be far more expensive, they're not really that much more expensive then the average tech.

That said, i think dark avatar is a great enhancement to an already great game. It has a totally new feel to it. I had to explore new possiblities and tactics. Spies sabotaging my economy really forced me to focus on mining to have a good production.
The new enviroments where the cause that in my game the colony rush was less intense but lastest for almost 3 years. There are also loads of minor tweaks that really add to the game. For example if you look closely you can see the cloudcover moving and changing in shape. Very nice.

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In my last game i created a custom race. Nothing fancy, just chose a name,super ability and such.
I was able to travel all across the map, also out of the ships range.
If required, i have a save file of my progress in that game.

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In addition the "hazardous" planets do not appear nearly as often as I would like. They seem to be pretty rare. Like above poster suggested, the tech should cost more but also there should be more of these "terraformable" planets around.

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Sort of UI related I guess:

In the galaxy setup screen the right arrow under habitable planets doesn't respond if you click in the top right quarter of the button. It seems to light up when you moveover the arrow but until then it remains inactive. Running at 1024x768 windowed.

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The super-ability Super-hive grants the player unlimited range. Might want to check if that's the one you chose.

They have so far appeared alot in all my started games. In my current one, I see 31 habitable planets and 15 of them are special enviroments. That's nearly half of them.

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Hmm must be bad luck on my part. I have only played medium maps with common stars, I´ll try large map with abundant stars.

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Alstein

Join Date 07/2004

+55

I do think overall, your asteroid mines should be controllable via a menu, perhaps like a Ctrl-M hotkey, where you can change the ownership of all your fields, and perhaps upgrade them or give them away.

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Updated the list. New general issues "section" and some more bugs added. Relocated some issues.

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Ah I didn't realize that traveling into an asteroid field would drop the movement speed of the ship. I was thinking that was a bug. So that is one off my list.

I didn't see anything new bug wise on my next game however I do have a few UI suggestions:

1) A new Governor to control asteroid field assignments would help. It would allow me to shift whole groups of resources from planet to planet as needed. You know in case a certain planet is working to complete a new GA or if I need to shift my warship production to a more front line planet.

2) Maybe I just didn't notice but is there something on Civ Manager Colony screen that indicates a spy may be on the planet? I play the game almost exclusively from this screen and the strategic view. Would make it faster then scanning each individual planet.

3) Remove or make an option to turn off the auto centering that occurs in the ship yard now.

4) With the addition of spies I think maybe the GNN report about another race building something special should go away or at least require some intelligence level or something. Right now it is too easy to just immediately send a spy to that planet to negate the building.

5) A spy on a trade good shouldn't that steal the trade good rather then just remove it from the enemy?

6) Economic and Research Treaties. Now maybe I missed it but there was nothing to set how long or how much. I just clicked it and poof I'm now making extra BCs and my research went up. Also once I made the offer and got the treaties with one empire I could not offer it to any others. I could ask them for one but the option on my side of the screen was gone.

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And my little addition(s):

When you skip the last ship with available movement points, GCII would immediately end the turn and go into the Auto-pilot ships. In GCII:DA, you have to hit the End Turn button or [enter] to get the turn to end. I much prefer the old way.

TOOLTIPS! I totally agree with antop on this. I would love to be able to hover over a starbase and have a tooltip come up with all it's installed modules (and more if possible) so I can see where I need move a Constructor quickly and efficiently.

Also would like a list of Asteroid fields (akin to the Colony Management screen) so that I can quickly change the destinations of the bonuses like cyberj914 mentioned in his post above. Also tooltips on those to tell where the bonus is going and what current level of improvement it is at.

All in all....LOVE IT! But with all of the above, I'd love it more!

Phu

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I'm trying to post some bugs but the forums are not the best way of posting bugs. Something like buzilla will be nice. Meanwhile:
1. Starting the game one of the defaults for terran alliance is 25% trade. If I'm chosing any of the trade skills options I will not be able to select 25. If I'm reseting the setting no way of going to 25% (only 10, 20 30% available)
2. If I'm playing with YMessenger started (or any program that have the nasty habit of poping up messages) the click in the down right side of the screen does not work any more and any switch to windows, switch to game give a "general program" error. I have 2 Gigs of RAM so memory should not be a problem.

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UI Issue

Super Abilities: they don't show up on any of the information tabs (stat & graphs, etc.) They need to show up there and on the opponent's screen after a proper amount of spying. Right now you have to figure out what your own super ability is (non custom race which you choose yourself) either by reading something on the web or looking at free techs.

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Some things I noticed:

1. Ships on autopilot charge through asteroids instead of going around.

2. Minor races only appear if set to random, but choosing a number (I took 8) results in no minor races.

3. Deleting an old ship design, and then designing a new ship with the same name results in the game "forgetting" where the components go, making the ship look like a mess.

4. Tile improvements don't show up. I've heard others have seen a few, but I haven't seen ONE in two games.

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Got a hard crash, debug.err can be found below:

WWW Link

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2. Minor races only appear if set to random, but choosing a number (I took 8) results in no minor races.

I've had Minor Races when I've chosen 8. I met at least 4 of them in my last game.

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UI Improvement
In the ship design screen, the ship templates should have a filter for hull size.

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Edit working again.

Updated UI featured adds and put new additions with yeallow color. Also removed some incorrect issues.

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Edits been bit flaky lately, but managed to update the list. New items on yellow. UI issues, UI feature adds and general issues updated.

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I'd like to see the results of treaties somewhere on the on the forgein relations screen - all in one place.

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One thing from my computer:

1. Whenever I Perfect the first Radioactive Planet tech (the one that enables you to colonize radioactive planets) the text describing it seems to have been cut out half way through. The Advanced version of Radioactive Planet tech has no text at all. I have just downloaded the update of the beta, so it may already be fixed.

A wonderful game, all in all!

Sam

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