For these tool tips, are you proposing they appear when hovering over the fleet indicator on the galactic map (one per empire, per sector) or when hovering over an individual fleet in the task force popup?

If the former, then the tooltips could get quite long when there are several fleets stationed in a sector. However, this could be an opportunity to try out my new "InfoTip" implementation. It's sort of like a tool tip, but it's interactive and can be expanded to display more information. If you've ever used Outlook 2010, it's inspired by the "contact card" tips that appear when you hover over a contact (i.e. a name in an e-mail's recipient list):


You can ignore the fact that the "Scrap" checkbox sticks out like a sore thumb. I haven't gotten around to creating new widget styles for use within InfoTips.

Yep, I meant the former (fleet indicator in galactic map). If fleets of more than one empire are in the same sector, each produces its own tooltip.
The expanding tooltip looks good! For multiple fleets in a sector, each fleet could be expanded individually - if possible to implement.

Yes, this is exactly what I was thinking: a two-level "tree view", much like what you have in the left-hand side of the Research screen's "Encyclopedia". You could expand a fleet to get a very basic overview of each ship: name, type, little health bars.

Okay, now I'm getting excited. This is all starting to sound pretty cool. Unfortunately, I really need to tear myself away from these forums for the afternoon so I can get some actual work done .

Hehe.
BTW, is there a limit on how many fleets (ships) there can be in a sector

The only limits are intrinsic; you can put as many fleets in a sector as you want until your PC runs out of virtual memory or it takes longer than 60 minutes to download a new game state at the end of a turn (at which point the game will time out). But really, those limits would be the same regardless of where the fleets are located and are impossibly (or at least impractically) high. And, of course, you cannot have more fleets than you have ships, as a fleet is "destroyed" when the last ship is removed. And even if you did spend the remainder of your natural life playing Supremacy (god help you), I'm sure your ships would start succumb to maintenance shortfalls and blow up long before you reached the limit.

Was wondering if, when you have more than one fleet of yours in a sector, they shouldn´t automatically merge. In case of battle they´ll have to fight as one anyway.
It´d make the tooltip display easier at least.

We could do that. Or we could make it an option, or even display both views in separate 'tabs', like "Grouped by Fleet" and "Combined" (note the tabs at the bottom of InfoTips in the screenshots above).

Yeah, that could work. I didn´t mention the option because that produces another choice\window\clicks, which could be more annoying. Shouldn´t happen too frequently though.

Well, it could just show the last view that the player had selected when such an InfoTip was displayed. We could track that value globally (instead of on a fleet-by-fleet basis). Still, it does seem a little redundant/excessive.

You might want more than one fleet so
you could use one to delay while the
other runs away. This could just
be the job of the combat engine though.
Something to think about.

Right, but I think Iceman was talking about grouping them together purely for display purposes in the galaxy map tool tips. In other words, suggesting that we could just all the ships together rather than breaking them down by fleet. This wouldn't affect the actual organization of the ships or how they are displayed in the Task Forces list.

Correct. For battle purposes it doesn´t matter which fleet individual ships belong to. In the hopefully few instances that you might be interested to know the exact breakdown, you can use the fleet deployment panel; for instance, if you want specifics about fuel and range and speed.

Or, even more importantly, if you want to move a fleet or issue new orders .

...and speaking of which, in case you couldn't tell from the mockups, I want to get rid of the "click a fleet to move it" behavior. I never liked the idea that simply clicking on a fleet automatically sets you up to plot a course. In many cases, the player may simply want to view the ships within the fleet or issue new orders. So I was thinking we could just add two little buttons outside the selection brackets: one to set a new destination, and another to issue new orders. That would eliminate the need to right-click a fleet in order to bring up the order menu, which isn't as discoverable to new players.

I completely agree.

So that's what those are!
I have no problem clicking on a fleet (in the starmap) to issue movement orders. It gives you perspective on how the movement path will be - which you don't get on the fleet deployment panel. Actually, the opposite is more logical IMO - fleet deployment to issue new orders and check stats, starmap to plot moves. In fleet deployment you might even not know where the fleet is in the starmap, or where the intended destination is relative to the fleet; not sure how to select destination from there either.

BTW, this is completely off topic, maybe breaking the therad down in 2?

Well, you wouldn't have to go into fleet redeployment mode to issue a move order. It would work pretty much the same way that it does now, except that in addition to clicking on the fleet in the "Task Forces" list, you would also need to click the little arrow to indicate that you want to set a new course. The Task Forces popup would then fade out to "unblock" the map while you set your waypoints/destination.

It's not really off-topic--the issue came up because of the way the Task Forces list is presented in my latest mockups. Since the Task Forces popup obscures the map, I wanted to make it fade out while the player sets a destination. Well, if I kept the current behavior in place, merely selecting a fleet from the list would activate the course plotting mode. So effectively, clicking on anything in the Task Forces popup would make the popup disappear. Kinda confusing, no? I figured we could just add an extra step (clicking the 'move' button) to avoid this problem. Given that I found the original behavior annoying anyway, I figure we can carry over the change to the Fed UI too.

Clicking on a fleet in the starmap to issue movement orders doesn't work that well, because a fleet indicator on the map does not necessarily represent just one fleet. However, I have recently changed the code such that clicking on a starmap fleet indicator will open the task forces list and pre-select the first "owned" fleet in the sector. That at least makes it easier to select a fleet based on location and quickly issue a move order.

Best post ever

I take it you share my distaste for the current behavior then?

Man, you guys need to start busting my balls more about usability problems. If something seems clumsy, tell me .

With a single fleet in a sector, a simple solution would be left click on source sector to select fleet, right click on target sector to move. For multiple fleets though, a selection box would be required.

edit: or drag and drop (don't think I've ever seen that in any game though)

Updated mockups:

Perhaps, for multiple destinations, left click fleet, right click first destination, right click next destination, final destination (not the movie ), then release left clicking to end your route.

Just a thought...

Btw Mike, those are looking great!

On a side note, Mike I didnt know you are out of Atlanta, I am right down the road from you in Lakeland, Florida

Yes, the new ones are great. Also will there be a feature when you go over the ship with a cursor you get a tooltip about the current status, fuel....
I know there were some talks about it but I don't remember what you decided.

What does the broken Trade Goods icon near the bottom-left in both of the images mean?

Does the screen expand based on available info as well? The space where is says "Sector (25, 17)" looks a tad on the small side, and some of the system names are quite long. They might not fit correctly. My current copy of the StarNames.txt file has 1362 Star names, and the longest one is "Alpha Trianguli Australis" at 26 characters long (Counting spaces).

As a suggestion for an extra tooltip as well, perhaps there could be an explanation of what your scan strengths mean, eg. "Our current sensor resolution is being reduced by the effects of a nearby Neutron Star. Enemy vessels may be able to pass by undetected." etc etc.

I'll probably add some little status bars to the ship view--I just forgot when doing the mockup. I was thinking of putting the stats in the tool tip like .Iceman suggested earlier in the thread.

Unassigned trade route . The translucent ones are just there for filler at the moment to reserve space in the mockup for systems with more trade routes.

In the latest mockup, the sector name and controlling civilization are in the lower panel. I'll need to deal with long names in some way, but that's not finalized yet. Expanding would be ideal, but the UI really can't get any wider, or else it won't fit onto a 1024x768 screen. Some names may have to get trimmed w/ trailing ellipses (on lower resolutions at least). That said, some of our star names are just too long anyway. I'd have to check, but I believe "Alpha Trianguli Australis" would get trimmed on the star map anyway.

Yeah, a tool tip on the Scan Strength indicator might be nice--one with a breakdown of how it's calculated. But at the moment, only the effective scan strength is stored for a given sector. I don't store any of the source information, and doing so would be impractical because of the sheer amount of memory required. But I suppose it could be reverse-calculated each time a new sector is selected.

Ah, I thought the translucent ones were the unassigned routes and that the broken ones were something else...like trade routes that had been raided by pirates recently or something like that. Actually we've got some random events that affect trade routes. That might be one way of displaying problems to players.

I used Excel to arange the Star Names by length. That shows that only 12 of the names are more than 20 characters long. Give me a character limit and i'll trim the Star Names file to whatever you need. We can make up some names to fill in the blanks created. The Star names list is so long to ensure every system has a name even on Giant maps. Previously the game used to generate maps mostly composed of numbered systems because the list was too short.

Interesting. One of the structures we've got in the game is a Subspace Jammer - it's meant to weaken enemy scans within a limited area, and is a late-game structure. Have you taken structures like this into account with the system?

A character limit isn't a very good guideline, as the game does not use fixed-width fonts. Thus, "Gamma Eridanis" appears longer than "Alpha Centauri" by the approximate length of two characters, even though they are the same length.

The system considers all manner of sources, including structures like the Subspace Jammer; but it only stores the final scan strength value for each sector.

Re Scan Strength. It could be nice to have a hotkey that would display the scan strength in all visible sectors as an overlay in the starmap. So that you don't have to be clicking in each sector individually when you want a global view. The hotkey would toggle the overlay on/off.

Re Trade Routes. The broken icon could be used to signal that the trade route is discontinued (no income) in the other end due to a blockade. When viewing a blockaded system all trade routes would have the broken icon of course.

Re Star Names. Completely agree, the star names are way too long. And (some of) the "constellation position" names are repeated/redundant with common star names anyway.

The repeated Starnames is one of the things I tried to fix during my last update of the Star names file. I'm not saying i've removed all of the duplications, but there are certainly fewer than there were.

The purpose of the constellation names was to add some authenticity to the map. The sheer number of stars on a giant map made it necessary to add a whole ton though as you noticed. We'll need to find more names for stars to get around this issue.

Are you sure about this?
On a Huge map (the largest, 80x80), Dense Stars, a guesstimate (from me) would be <1000 stars.