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Pnakotus

Join Date 03/2006

+5

DA and UI

I've recently started playing the DA beta, and it's lots of new content and long-awaited features and fixes. However, when starting a new game, I notice some UI niggles that still exist. A quick search suggests they haven't been mentioned (at least recently).

- Tech information display, particularly RU. When choosing your starting techs, you have to click on a tech to select it, then remember how many RUs it is to fit it into your starting set. When you right-click on a tech in a trade window, it pops up a huge window that doesn't mention the RP value of the technology. In both cases RU is important - I usually don't care what a tech DOES, simply how much money I spent to get it - and yet is not readily displayed. Simply changing the 'tech bar' (used in the tech-select screen and research tree) to include an indicator of the RU-value would resolve this. Also, with those pretty tech bars, why aren't they used in the right-click trade function? Slap a '50' in a corner, put them on top of those tooltips, and problem solved.

I also think the right-click tech info should rather be a small tooltip than a giant ugly window. I check it to check trades or see what the tech gives, not to see lists of ships I can build or anything indepth. A simple tooltip with Techname, RU value, and what it gives/leads to/allows would be easier, smaller, and less obtrusive.

- I'm sure this has been mentioned, but I don't understand why it's a) impossble to launch transports with 0 population and

why it's possible to take the pop slider to zero. Removing one or the other of these conditions would make transports far less irritating to use. The ship has a crew like any other so I don't see why it needs pop aboard to launch, but in that case there is no need for the pop slider to go to 0, since you cannot launch. The current setup means you must carefully move the slider to CLOSE to zero but NOT zero, when the zero position is totally useless.

Overall I'm really enjoying DA - particularly the much more aggressive and interesting AI - but I hadn't actually started a new game in some time and these elements struck me as quite fiddly and unpolished. Odd what you get used to after playing a game for some time.

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Glad to see somebody else take intrest in UI also! I have been rather dissapointed by the lack of intrest in UI development by these forums. People do seem to be rather excited in discussing balancing issues and other features, but there are hardly any threads about UI.

The only UI enchantment I see in DA betas is the thing where you can choose which direction you can launch ships from orbit. Hardly anything that blows you mind off, but lets hope SD adds more enchantments to UI as they finalize DA.

Here is my old thread where I and others added up UI stuff: UI thread

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Yes, I noticed the 'launch direction' thing, and it's pretty neat.

I'm less interested in game-changes than play-changes: Stardock is going to make the game they want, and I'm going to like it or not. Either way, it should be as easy to use and play as it can be. It's pretty sad that many people don't appreciate how important the UI is to any piece of software - of course Stardock have plenty of experience in this direction.

I'm cooking up an example of what I'm suggesting for the diplomacy-tech tooltips, and I was thinking the amount of effort you put into getting a tech is important, just like the population/improvements on a planet or the modules on a starbase. It'd be nice to know - at a glance, without having to dig through other screens - how many turns/dollars you spent researching something or if you bought/found/stole it. And of course, the setup 'choose your techs' interface involves either basically ignoring it and grabbing a tech and moving on or tedious clicking around to see what tech costs what and how much you can squeeze in.

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- I'm sure this has been mentioned, but I don't understand why it's a) impossble to launch transports with 0 population and

why it's possible to take the pop slider to zero. Removing one or the other of these conditions would make transports far less irritating to use. The ship has a crew like any other so I don't see why it needs pop aboard to launch, but in that case there is no need for the pop slider to go to 0, since you cannot launch. The current setup means you must carefully move the slider to CLOSE to zero but NOT zero, when the zero position is totally useless.

A little silly that it goes to zero, yes, but easily dealt with.

Slide it all the way to zero then click the right arrow for a population of 1 and launch.

Now you have a very lonely soilder with the run of the transport.

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Actually GC2 is littered with these kinds of illogical little quirks. No doubt its because the team is pumping out new features and they have limited human resources. But I would like all these little annoyances dealt with before SD starts implementing new features with patches.

To sum it up: SD please spend as much time as needed to fix these minor quirks before start implementing new stuff. I love the new features ofcourse, but some of these illogical quirks make the whole product feel unfinished. Unfinished is a wrong word, but cannot think anything else right now.

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Not neat comes to mind.

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I like rough/unpolished better.

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Continuing with the research UI, I'd like a change to how research investment is displayed at the top of the research screen. Currently it displays investment in terms of bc. I think it would be more intuitive to display it in terms of RP.

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Knightsedge, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Of COURSE you can work around it, but that very workaround is a failure of the UI. It's irritating and it shouldn't exist: it's not like you have to carefully choose between two options: zero pop simply will not work, and you just wasted your time. The ability to drag to zero only performs one function: to prevent you launching empty. Thus, what should be a one-click function requires far more attention and use of the arrows than should be necessary... all because you can drag to zero, which performs no useful function under any circumstances. If it's useless, why does it exist?

Njero, I'd like that sort of thing to be toggleable. I noticed the other day that even if you sort by 'cost', it doesn't actually tell you what the cost IS. I've never gone for the tech victory, so how many RPs are the very latest technologies?

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re: njero. True. I'd like to see a fairly detailed rundown of exactly how many RP are slated to be done when I hit the Turn button, and I'd like it updated every time I change a focus-production on a planet. Also I'd like to see the research cost & how much research has been done on it already. To go another step further, it would be good if you could click on any tech in the tech tree (even if you already researched it or it has been unlocked yet) and see the research cost.

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I've created example images to illustrate what I'm talking about. The 'tech info' tooltips were a patch-added feature I believe, so it could always use a little polish. The tech-select screen is one most people probably don't spend a lot of time looking at, but it's very simple to make it much more n00b-friendly.

Showing the cost on the 'tech banner' makes getting the best-fit tech choices less of a click-fest.

The 'tech info' tooltip in the diplomacy screen can be reduced to a standard 'tooltip' popup instead of a giant window (only 25% of which contains useful information). This version also uses the 'tech banner' (because they look neat) with added 'tech cost' text to give an idea of it's raw worth (disregarding strategic concerns). Due to it's small size, it can easily have much more information added: I experimented with versions that show the local area of the tech tree to illustrate where this tech leads, what it requires etc.

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In my opinion GC2 could use alot of this kinda UI tweaking. The information could be distributed much more easily with tweaks like these, good stuff. Instead of pumping more and more features I really hope SD realises that before they add stuff, they should make the UI more "people" friendly.

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