Morberis Morberis

UI

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UI

from Sins Forums
Within 5 minutes of starting up this game for the 3rd time (beta 1 was far too boring for me) I notice 3 glaring problems concerning the UI.

When I scroll out the little symbols for the ships group up becoming a mash of ships, perhaps they do have a distance between them but for me at least it was so bad I had to zoom in all the time to select ships.

The ship symbols are far too small, the ones I see on screen zoomed out not the ones on the left. I had to squint and put my head to the monitor half the time to see correctly what each ship was. Possibly make a slider bar in the settings menu to change the size of the symbols representing ships

This one is tied in with the other two - the symbols for the ships just aren't distinguishable enough. It creates alot of confusion when looking on that bar on the left with the ships and you can't tell the differences between them. This could be changed by making the symbols more distinguishable or by making them bigger. Again the slider bar would do wonders here. Also it would be nice to use a right click menu to add and remove ships/objects from that bar thing on the left. I don't care about half the stuff on there and it clutters up my screen. If you want a good example of this check out Eve Onlines Overview Box, thats the type of display options I want.
14,992 views 36 replies
Reply #26 from Sins Forums Top
You could do this a few different ways for sins. You could have one shape that represents each type. Like a square represents a static object (like a research station), a triangle could represent a frigate, etc. Inside of these icons you could have some other little things that represent a particular function. Like in SupCom if a unit was an AA unit, then it had a little arc in it's shape. So there could be a few different units with just the arc, but they would have a different major shape. Or possibly you could have it so that it is easier to tell the units apart by looking at their symbols, you could have the same thing you have now, but sort of with a partially transparant overlay/backround that become even more visible as you mouse over or select a unit, you could have a symbol that means a type of unit.
Reply #27 from Sins Forums Top
I dont think its necessary to use symbols for the modules or capital ships, just the little stuff.
Star Control: Origins
Reply #28 from Sins Forums Top

I dont think its necessary to use symbols for the modules or capital ships, just the little stuff.


yep , agree!
Reply #29 from Sins Forums Top

I dont think its necessary to use symbols for the modules or capital ships, just the little stuff.


Same here. I think it will be a good middle ground. For huge structures and may be for capital ships use increased version with black outline of whatever we have right now. For all other ships use abstract icons with function symbol inside.
Reply #30 from Sins Forums Top
When it comes to fleets, grouping and stuff I have to ask:
Is there a way to ungroup a group?

Reassining oviously wont work, because of the feature that allows moving objects to belong to multiple groups.

A nasty workaround is to take a single fightersquad and map it to Ctrl-[0-9] the remap everything from scratch. but thats a pain...

Have I overlooked something or is there really no easier way?

Cheers
-Jonathan
Reply #31 from Sins Forums Top
FYI, for those of you wanting simple symbols for the icons, it should be easy enough to edit the image that contains them all (empire.tga, I believe) and see how it'll look for yourself
Reply #32 from Sins Forums Top
Is there a way to ungroup a group?


Set the group without anything selected.
Reply #33 from Sins Forums Top
I actually did fiddle around with the KOL image earlier to see if i could make any visiblity improvements but i gave up on it because i was having trouble to find the option to save it uncompressed. The compression was destroying the transparencies, unfortunatley.
Reply #34 from Sins Forums Top

FYI, for those of you wanting simple symbols for the icons, it should be easy enough to edit the image that contains them all (empire.tga, I believe) and see how it'll look for yourself



maybe my next day off...
Reply #35 from Sins Forums Top
Oo, yes a white outline could very well help the visibility of the icons.
Reply #36 from Sins Forums Top
multi if you could email me the empire.tga , i'll work on it here at work, its a slow night... else i'll fiddle with it tomorrow...