Tooltips again!

[RCIX]

As my memory serves, I was toying with an idea to make the tooltips nicer looking, and I can't believe this didn't dawn on me:

There are a few groups of information, no? Ship current info (health/preferred target/maybe others) Resources, Vital Stats, abilities, attack multipliers, and description as far as I can tell. Why not bucket and pretty up vital stats, resources, and ship current info? Then just leave the rest as a second tooltip below it, in its current form (to be changed later if at all).

Excuse me while I find a good tooltip to grab and re-install Photoshop.

[keith.lamothe]

* keith.lamothe grabs popcorn, wonders if this one will end in "aaaarrggghhhhh tooooo muchhhhh infooooo" too.

[nas1m]

I, for one, would like to see what you come up with RCIX - go ahead !
This screen of mine is just too small - always...

[RCIX]

So, I'm taking this:



and wanting to turn it into, roughly, this as a first draft:



Then tack the other stuff down below it as-is or find a better interface to display it. Smaller AND communicates information more effectively!

(Custom Icons are ones I butchered from google image search results and/or in game files, purely meant as placeholders)

[Hearteater]

Looks pretty good.  I'd say pull the Speed down by Engine Health, since Engine Health affects speed.  You could probably iconify engine health and put it like health above it (current, max, percent).  Ammo type might look better as a single bullet.

I've also been pondering that maybe we need short and long form tooltips.  For example, normally I don't care about the resource costs or build times of a ship.  So that whole line could be pulled, put Energy up in place of speed.  The "long" tooltip would add the extra info, but it would only appear in certain cases (such as hovering over a ship icon in the Space Dock, when I actually care about everything) or when I hold down a modifier (like say shift or control) while the tooltip is visible.

[RCIX]

I messed with removing the resource line, but it really screwed with the layout so I'm not sure how to make it look good. If you really stretched you could turn a few more into icons. Ship engines really need a unified display anyway as well.

[Hearteater]

A quick go at it.  Armor and Hull could still use icons really.

[doctorfrog]

Whatever icons end up getting used, they are going to have to be flat out incredible at communicating what they are. I'm a somewhat experienced novice at the game, by no means a noob, and here's what I'm seeing in the above tooltip, line by line:

Missile Frigate - RCIX, burns 200 energy, ship cap is 98
Heals? No health level is: 154,000/154,000 (100%), Armor: 300, Will burn a clock in 10 seconds, has a prescription for Missiles
Runs on a gas engine at 100 horsepower, has 44 beetle heads, Hull: Artillery, hits a bullseye at 10,000 yards, but will explode if closer than 4,800

Yeah, I'm being kind of a tool here.  >D Point I'm trying to make is that there's enough to learn in the game already, and though the tooltips could stand some retooling (yuk yuk), using too many icons, even quite good ones, gives users another layer of abstraction they have to cut through to get the info they need.

[Hearteater]

This can be solved by having the "long form" tooltip (which appears by holding down shift) switch from Icons to text.  If the icons are made to be very mono-color (each being a single distinct color) then the text could be made to match the icon's color and it would naturally link the two.

[RCIX]

Whatever icons end up getting used, they are going to have to be flat out incredible at communicating what they are. I'm a somewhat experienced novice at the game, by no means a noob, and here's what I'm seeing in the above tooltip, line by line:

Missile Frigate - RCIX, burns 200 energy, ship cap is 98
Heals? No health level is: 154,000/154,000 (100%), Armor: 300, Will burn a clock in 10 seconds, has a prescription for Missiles
Runs on a gas engine at 100 horsepower, has 44 beetle heads, Hull: Artillery, hits a bullseye at 10,000 yards, but will explode if closer than 4,800

Placeholder icons are placeholder

Also, you made me cough I laughed so much >.<

Yeah, I'm being kind of a tool here.  >D Point I'm trying to make is that there's enough to learn in the game already, and though the tooltips could stand some retooling (yuk yuk), using too many icons, even quite good ones, gives users another layer of abstraction they have to cut through to get the info they need.

The thing is, icons consume a lot less space visually and can easily be learned. They also lend towards visual grouping together, since they can be made a lot more consistent in size. So I probably suck at making icons but I'd bet there are good ones to be made/out there.

Those icons are energy cost, health, reload speed, ammo type, engine health, ship speed (i still say that could be made into one indicator somehow, by the way. I'd photoshop it but I'm kind of busy right now), range, and damage.

[Diazo]

I'm certainly not against a redesign of the tool tips, but perhaps you could outline exactly what you see this accomplishing?

The reason I'm asking is I don't see the Abilities, Immunities or Attack Bonuses anywhere. Those things are very often why I'm mouse-overing units while I decide how to approach something.

I'm not going to go as far as to say those 3 things are more important then what you have listed, but I have a lot easier time remember a units speed and attack range then I do it's Ability/Immunity/AttackBonus so it's probably 50/50 what I'm looking for when I mouse over something.

D.

[keith.lamothe]

If it came down to it, that window could just always display a "legend" above it with all the icons and the names of said, and a helpful note that said legend can be disabled in settings.

[RCIX]

I'm certainly not against a redesign of the tool tips, but perhaps you could outline exactly what you see this accomplishing?

The reason I'm asking is I don't see the Abilities, Immunities or Attack Bonuses anywhere. Those things are very often why I'm mouse-overing units while I decide how to approach something.

I'm not going to go as far as to say those 3 things are more important then what you have listed, but I have a lot easier time remember a units speed and attack range then I do it's Ability/Immunity/AttackBonus so it's probably 50/50 what I'm looking for when I mouse over something.

D.

Because this

is a buttload more wall of text like than either of the examples. And walls of text are horrible at notifying players of statistics. Tell me what the damage is on that frigate? Now how about hull type? Unless you went from memory (I suspect you could) it would take you several seconds to find that information, and doing that over and over again for hull types and other dry stats like that gets annoying fast.

Oh, and, I didn't list those 3 because they're a lot stickier to prettify. They'd be present in either current form or some other below a solidified version of one of our mockups. I plan to (pretty soon) add in the multipliers, but abilities and lore are probably infeasible to condense to this (unless you'd like to see about 50 icons, which while cool is probably overkill).

[Radiant Phoenix]

I would group the expressions like this (example is the Spire Railcluster):

• Damage: "Railgun 5500 [+ X armor damage + Y engine damage + Zs paralysis] x 20 / 4s @ 2000 range"
• Multipliers go right under the damage expression
• Health: "3,350,000 Composite HP with 600 armor"
• Engine: "64 speed (10,000 engine health)"

I would thus have the main tooltip area look like this

Code: [Select]

Ship: Spire Railcluster Mk I -- Player 1
Cost: 8000m, 10000c, 2000e, 84s x5
Attack: Railgun 5500 HP damage [+ X armor damage + Y engine damage + Zs paralysis]  x 20 / 4s @ 2000 range;
Damage x5 vs Close-combat, x5 vs Light, x5 vs Swarmer, x5 vs Ultra-light
Defense: 3,350,000 Composite HP with 600 armor; Engine: 64 speed (10,000 engine health)
Immune to: Reclamation, Paralysis, Automatic death
Other Special Abilities: None
Description: [blahblahblah](not sure if this would actually be easier to read, but it seems more sensible)

---

As far as icons go, there are 16 armor types:

6 Weight classes:

• Ultra-light
• Light
• Medium
• Heavy
• Ultra-Heavy
• Command-grade

6 Purpose-based:

• Scout
• Swarmer
• Close-combat
• Artillery
• Turret
• Structural

4 Exotic:

• Composite
• Neutron
• Refractive
• Polycrystal

And about 27 ammunition types, some of which have the same name, and few (if any) of which have intuitive effects.

Notable homonyms:
Beams:

• Human
• Zenith
• Spire

Energy Bomb:

• Bomber: "normal"
• Plasma Siege: AoE
• Zenith Autobomb: Suicide bomb

So I think the icons might not be as easy as some people seem to thingk.

---

The game could also stand to lose at least two zeros off the ends of all the armor, HP, and damage numbers, and possibly a zero off the end of metal, energy, and crystal income and costs, but that's another thing entirely.

[Diazo]

At this point I know where to look for those stats so no, I don't have to hunt for them. I do understand what you are saying however.

It is why the color differences between the lines is so important on the current tool tips, I find the color for the abilities/immunities/attack bonuses without thinking at this point.

The 'easy fix' for me would to just turn the first white line another color (red?) to represent the fact that it is the offensive statistics of the unit.

I'm not sure text itself is a bad thing in and of itself, especially if the color is done right so you look for the colors, not reading the text.

Or are people have screen real estate issues? I've got a giant monitor so the current tool tips take up quite a small portion of my screen.

D.