Author Topic: AI War 2 Alpha v0.115 "Icon Refinement, And Shapes" released!  (Read 3156 times)

Offline x4000

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The release notes are fairly lengthy, but mainly because they go into a lot of detail.  There's a lot of cool stuff in here, but nothing like the last release in terms of scale.

Keith added a couple of buttosn and menu commands to make things easier on players, and extended part of the modding interface to make things easier on visually-oriented modders.

On my end I cleaned up some various things related to the icon graphics, along with Blue doing the same.  I also made some adjustments to the overall bloom effects; it should be better-looking and more performant now.  Wormholes should also be better-looking.

Most of my time on this one was spent on the icons themselves, though.  Both in terms of making the new system look better than it did before, but also allowing for a two-version system for players to choose between (in the settings file only right now, sorry about that).  Basically the ability to see everything represented with shapes, along the lines of this:



Instead of ship-oriented (with flair for sub-types) icons like this:



Even in the latter image, you can see a lot of the various improvements, though.  The icons have more definition to them, the borders and bars are better, and so on.  Frankly I'm not sure which system I completely prefer, but fortunately we don't really have to choose between them.  Hooray options menus! ;)

Cheers,

Chris

 
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Offline BadgerBadger

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Re: AI War 2 Alpha v0.115 "Icon Refinement, And Shapes" released!
« Reply #1 on: April 04, 2017, 05:31:21 pm »
Some very solid tweaks. I like it! Though the icons are really making me want mobile squads. I see these really cool looking icons, but the flat ship groupings just look so dull by comparison. I'm sure there are other higher priorities though.

Offline x4000

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Re: AI War 2 Alpha v0.115 "Icon Refinement, And Shapes" released!
« Reply #2 on: April 05, 2017, 09:52:49 am »
That is pretty high on my hit list at this point, actually. :)

Right now working on spritefont stuff to make it so that you can read wormhole text easier, though, and so it doesn't show up past ships, etc.
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Offline BadgerBadger

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Re: AI War 2 Alpha v0.115 "Icon Refinement, And Shapes" released!
« Reply #3 on: April 05, 2017, 10:18:52 am »
Oh, that would be nice. It can be hard to see the wormhole names, especially against bright backgrounds (someone has a bug in Mantis for that I think)

Offline Draco18s

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Re: AI War 2 Alpha v0.115 "Icon Refinement, And Shapes" released!
« Reply #4 on: April 05, 2017, 10:58:16 am »
Right now working on spritefont stuff to make it so that you can read wormhole text easier, though, and so it doesn't show up past ships, etc.

Or upside down :P

Offline BadgerBadger

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Re: AI War 2 Alpha v0.115 "Icon Refinement, And Shapes" released!
« Reply #5 on: April 05, 2017, 11:02:41 am »
The upside down thing was deliberate, so you can figure out what the original orientation of the planet was. I think being able to figure out the original orientation is important (so you know which direction the wormholes go), but I concede there might be a better way.

Offline Draco18s

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Re: AI War 2 Alpha v0.115 "Icon Refinement, And Shapes" released!
« Reply #6 on: April 05, 2017, 12:07:46 pm »
The only time that should matter is if the camera has six degrees of freedom and you need to re-orient yourself.
This is a strategy game, there's no reason we need 6DOF in the camera. :P
And if we do, then there just needs to be a hot key or menu button that automatically returns the camera to the default orientation.

Offline BadgerBadger

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Re: AI War 2 Alpha v0.115 "Icon Refinement, And Shapes" released!
« Reply #7 on: April 05, 2017, 12:14:09 pm »
A compass rose on the screen to suggest "This way is Up/North" might also work.

Offline x4000

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Re: AI War 2 Alpha v0.115 "Icon Refinement, And Shapes" released!
« Reply #8 on: April 05, 2017, 01:18:29 pm »
Yep, or a hotkey that simply reorients things, etc.
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Offline BadgerBadger

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Re: AI War 2 Alpha v0.115 "Icon Refinement, And Shapes" released!
« Reply #9 on: April 05, 2017, 01:45:44 pm »
"     Several metric tons of under-the-hood sim-data-schema additions in preparation for... oh, I'm sure it's nothing."

That just sounds way too much like "Cpa incoming in 5 minutes. Nothing to see here. Nope."

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: AI War 2 Alpha v0.115 "Icon Refinement, And Shapes" released!
« Reply #10 on: April 05, 2017, 02:34:40 pm »
Well, maybe incoming in a few releases. I need to tackle the sidebar first.
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Offline Cyborg

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Re: AI War 2 Alpha v0.115 "Icon Refinement, And Shapes" released!
« Reply #11 on: April 05, 2017, 06:36:27 pm »
The wormhole graphics are still too bright.

Also, has anyone noticed a weird weapon effect in this latest build? Before I report it, wondering if it's just my eyes playing tricks on me. It looks like the weapons of the triangle ship, if they are launched at your target, but your target dies before it gets there, the munitions take a weird turn and start jumping around to the nearest ship. It's amusing, but probably not something we want.

Forget it, I posted the bug. You can close it if it's just me.
« Last Edit: April 05, 2017, 06:38:58 pm by Cyborg »
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Offline kasnavada

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Re: AI War 2 Alpha v0.115 "Icon Refinement, And Shapes" released!
« Reply #12 on: April 06, 2017, 01:29:57 am »
I really like the bicolor icon shapes. ;)