Regarding Hover vs Click, I am definitely on team Click. Hovering is nice and quick, but it also can be super frustrating at times. Imagine if you will hovering over the Multiplayer button to join a new game with a friend, but because you didn't stay perfectly aligned up and down when scrolling you fell off the menu's edge and the menu collapsed on you.
Or depending on how sensitive the box for making the hover show up is, when you start moving the mouse point up from "More" to "Wiki" the menu vanishes because your pointer spend just a little too long in the white space between buttons.
Yes, I am definitely a click supporter, have the player make the conscious choice that "yes I do in fact want to look at the Single Player sub-menu". They will need to 'click' regardless for the sub-menu button and the "Exit Game"/'Settings" buttons so i say be consistent throughout them all.
Good point. I was imagining it would never deselect until you hovered over another valid option, but I could see someone being annoyed that the popup didn't go away while they admire their pretty ship.
Will we see our First Officer's picture within the game at all (or very much) aka do we 'care' what/who our FO is? if so I think rv5 fits better than rv6. If not then rv6 as it is cleaner and quicker.
Two words: voice acting.
1. Did you intend on having the patch notes / game version in there twice? if so why? if not, disregard...
Whoops, nope. Actually the patch notes/etc. is just going to disappear from the profile screen and only be visible from the main menu I think. (For a brief period patch notes were on the top but they got moved back down to the bottom and I didn't clean up after myself.)
2. Is the intention that when you click the 'change profile' button it would bring up the small menu to the right and then you can select / edit from there?
When you hit change profile, it either brings up profile rv 5 or profile rv 6 and you can change/edit from there.
3. Would the edit profile bring you back to a screen similar to rv5 newedit only with your current ark and FOPortrait already selected as opposed to empty which would be on the new version of the screen?
Exactly.
3a. Would it make sense to have one generic screen for both? and just change the title from "New Profile" to something more generic (e.g. "Profile" or "Manage Profile")
I was just planning on it being one generic screen with a wildcard to dynamically fill new vs edit... but just calling it "manage" is even better!
4. I don't recall, but I think there was talk to the various arks being more than just cosmetically different. Is that the case still? Does the same apply to the First Officer?
The "current"(tm) plans are for it to just be cosmetic/fluff differences for now. There's a bit of talk about that changing, but whether that is before 1.0, after 1.0 or at all is uncertain.
5. By Starfield, do you just mean the background galaxy art that plays during the main menu or is this something different?
Exactly that. Basically all of these screens are windows that pop up onto the existing backdrop. The advantage of rv 5 is it hides the Ark effectively and we don't have to come up with animations of it transitioning unless we want to.
6. Is it possible to shorten (External Browser) to (Ext. Browser) or some other phrasing to make those buttons' text not so long. Maybe even just replacing them with an icon (e.g. the square with an out pointing out of it that steam uses to denote external sites)
Yeah, I was wracking my brain to figure out a better way of phrasing it as well. Not a huge fan of Ext. Browser, and I'm not familiar enough with Steam's icon to know which one you are referring to, so I doubt I'd understand what it meant if I saw it in a game. Would just "browser" get the point across? Any other ideas?
7. Should we need to say Multiplayer in all the multiplayer sub-menu boxes? again in the interest of saving text space, would it make sense to shorten them to "Join Game", "Host Saved Game", and "Host New Game" since they are all under the multiplayer section to start, and really none of them use the same language as the Single player sub-menus.
+1
8. Lastly, the Credits, personally I think these should be an in game thing. Have the galaxy flowing in the background, music playing, and having people enjoy the credits scroll by. As opposed to going to a website that will just list everything out. It does take more time to do it that way though, so I could understand this being one of those "if we have time" items.
Yeah, that's why I put a question mark there. Not sure what the plan is.
Words of caution... if the idea of having player profile names appear on the ship is on the table two things to consider.
1) Special Characters... the 'easy' ones like é or ñ may print out okay in the fontface, but as localization comes in we'll start getting more and more various of letters (I can only imagine Chinese traditional or simple trying to print)
2) Be prepared for inappropriate / silly ship names to appear on the internet. e.g. Shippy-McShipface because well.. internet's gotta internet, heh.
Good points, I'll pass them along. The name on the ship is going to be less emphasized than the current AIW2 logo is, but I think Chris should consider it a bit. I didn't include on the mockup that Chris is planning on doing a big AI War 2 logo floating at the top of the screen.
