@Draco18s: Yes, that's probably that icon pack. No, I don't have it. Yes, I was looking at it for a reference.
@Cyborg: Awesome, glad you're happy with how things are moving, in a general sense at least.
* Classic used icons and tooltips. You could go that route. Icons without any text anywhere will lead to confusion.
Agreed. I think we felt like classic was too much on the text side and not enough icons, and the solution here was icons with tooltips on the tooltips. But we need little brief words with each icon I think, as a sort of reminder or crib sheet as we go, and then the extra tooltips for more info are fine.
I don't know if this is a little too fancy, but is it possible to define GUI elements as two-dimensional plates and the activations within those plates as being XY offset coordinate pairs that define a rectangle?
That is basically the idea, yes. Although you can also draw an image or text in there, and you have layering and higher layers blocking lower layers, etc. And it's hard to talk in absolute pixel sizes because everything is relative to something else -- for instance, the screen size, or other nearby elements, or the scale of the container plate they are in, etc.
It actually gets ridiculously complex from that one simple principle, but that is the principle at play.
* You can solve your text magnification and wrapping woes by using a monospaced font. You should be using one because you're talking about a fixed-width area on the plate.
We could, but we'd then lose even more space to actually write stuff. Fixed width fonts take up a ton more room, so we'd have to shrink the font size to fit the things in, etc. A variable-width font that is efficiently-spaced but clear should get the job done 90% of the time without any woes, and then for the remaining bits we can go in and manually say "size this down a bit." It's possible for us to automate that process as well, but doing that repeatedly is inefficient.
I suppose that the first time we draw the word-wrapped text we could make it draw the full size, and if it goes too far down then we start shrinking by 10% at a time and then stop when it fits. Then save the scale and just reuse that scale for every other frame beyond the first in that play of the game. Saves us the manual work of defining multipliers, while also keeping things efficient except for that one first frame, which might take an extra ms or so when it's rendering text for a ship for the first time (oh noes!).
* In the second video, space got darker. Liked it.
That was actually just randomization, not something I changed. Or.... maybe an old screenshot, come to think of it. At any rate, I plan on having LUTs that people can choose from for color grading to get the feel that they personally want. A number of games have done that sort of thing with success, and it seems like a smart idea to me for getting a varied feel since not everyone will be happy with things being too dark or too happy or too whatever.
* I haven't seen your galaxy map mockup. I'm assuming that is later.
I haven't made one yet, and might not need to. That's a much simpler screen in the sense that there are very few panels around.
Then again... the way that icons are being shown at the planets are something I would currently describe as "train wreck." So there is that.
Moving that into the actual GUI and not being physical objects where the planets are is something I've considered a bit. The loss of framerate would be real, but that scene is light enough it probably wouldn't be killer. I dunno, I'll have to think on it more. The at-planet pieces of info are the big issue, either way, in terms of design of what the heck they should look like.
I kind of want to see the Last Federation newsfeed show up somewhere. Something like, "10,000 ships die on Murdoch, AI suspected." "Threat buildup on Io."
That could be interesting, and certainly would add flavor. I guess it's a matter of if Keith has time to add that, or if someone wants to make a mod that does that. Modders have the exact same tools that we do in terms of creating something along those lines, and as we've shown with Badger's stuff we're certainly willing to integrate things that are cool back into the game after someone creates it externally.
Anyway, exhale. Both of those videos are both going in the right direction.
Whew, exhale on my part, too, then.
