First Impressions

[Shadowcat]

On damage bars...

It occurs to me that there's already an existing HUD display for all ships in combat. Every ship has a triangular boundary indicating if it's friend, foe, or neutral. (And I'll just diverge a moment here to remark on the beautiful way this has been tweaked in the sequel such that the triangles are clear at a distance when they are needed most, but smoothly fade away as a ship becomes larger on your screen so that you don't notice them once things get big and beautiful).

Anyways, I think this display could be ammended to indicate other things such as damage, as well, but not seem too excessive given that it leverages a display that we're already used to seeing.

If this option were enabled (and as well as a default value, it ought to be able to be toggled on and off by mouse and/or keyboard during combat), then the triangles would not fade from view (or not to the same extent), and they might look something like this very rough mock-up:



One of the long sides showing shields, the other hull strength, and the short side indicating the status of the on-board systems.

At the front I've put a triangle to indicate that the ship is in "aggressive" mode (see Hugo's ramming/auto-evasion thread).

There are probably better ways to do it, but something like this would blend in fairly well I think... not too distracting, but telling you (once you're used to it) pretty much everything you need to know.

[Hugo]

Has poll has been created on ISF (infinite space federation).
Suggestions have been made regarding the game's user interface, among other things, and now you can vote on one or more features that you would like to see in the game.

http://s7.invisionfree.com/SAIS_Foru...?showtopic=110

[ZylonBane]

Shadowcat said:
It occurs to me that there's already an existing HUD display for all ships in combat. ... Anyways, I think this display could be ammended to indicate other things such as damage, as well, but not seem too excessive given that it leverages a display that we're already used to seeing.

The problem with this is that bar graphs are most easly read at a fixed orientation. Having them spinning around with the heading indicator would make them quite difficult to read. And if you were wanting to know the status of a fighter that's only 5 pixels across onscreen-- impossible to read.

I just want some little fixed-size, fixed-orientation bars floating under each ship. Of course there'd be an option to hide them.


I also don't want my ships to flop around like fish out of water whenever other ships get near them. IMHO, the close-combat AI is currently broken. I'd rather have direct helm control than have to constantly trick the AI into not getting itself killed. The weird thing is that the enemy AIs seem to have no trouble staying on target during close combat.

[The_Lensman]

I'm with Ripcord on this one. The combat screen is perfect, in my opinion. I'm not really a serious gamer, and didn't even think about any of this stuff until reading this thread.

My first impression of the demo is: freakin' AWESOME! Simple 2d, yet incredibly gorgeous, graphics. Great music and ambient FX. And the ease of modding the game is almost enough to make me weep. Except for a snag in the combat screen, I've got the orignal Enterprise sailing through Sector Prime. Switched out Lexter(?) picture with (at different times) some admiral from ST, and myself (showing a friend how easy it was to mod).

I've got idea's for some Trek stuff and my own stuff as well. Thanks for creating such an awesome game!

[gordonstrange]

Actually, speed of light in a vacuum is -not- a constant.
Light can also be bent by strong gravitational forces (either black holes, neutron stars, cloaking devices, and sometimes a card carrying games developer can whip out his/her Artistic License & do a quick mod.



GS
-It all depends on the definition of the word 'definition'-

[ooheadsoo]

I want to reinforce the complaint about there being no fixed damage indicators. This is a major problem for those who want to play more tactically without having to pause the game every 10 seconds. With higher resolutions available, the hud would not have to take up a lot of screen real estate. With my resolution at 1280x980 on a 21" crt 3ft away, I could easily get away with a larger hud with more information . Having the option to turn it off for those playing with lower resolutions, or even higher resolutions should yield a result pleasing to any side of the argument.

I remember in the original game, you only needed to click anywhere in the window to close it. Now that the windows open in the center of the screen half the time instead of where you originally clicked the star system or info button, it's even more important that it be effortless to close the popup. I think the window should pop up near the item clicked on AND should be closeable with a click anywhere but the title bar, which is still used for dragging. It's pretty rare when you want to drag the window around. If there was an algorithm for tiling windows so that they did not overlap, I would guess that the windows would nearly never be dragged.

I also recall that double click would bring up the info screen in the original game. Is there any reason this could not be brought back?

[ZylonBane]

gordonstrange said:Actually, speed of light in a vacuum is -not- a constant.
Light can also be bent by strong gravitational forces

First, changing the direction of light is not the same as changing its speed. Second, and more importantly, nobody cares.

My POINT was that your various engine upgrades don't change the speed of light, they change the speed of your ship. Therefore that portion of the HUD is mislabeled.

[Ripcord O'Reilly]

Thanks for the comments about huds and damage indicators in the battle view. We discussed this a lot while we made the game. This is one of those infamous "tough call" areas where a risky decision may frustrate some players, especially those who expect certain "standardized" displays to be there.

The mouseover damage indicator is a bit of an experiment, and as you guys point out, it is quite different than SAIS. But I like it for two reasons:

1) It keeps the clutter off of the screen. That way I'm not reminded that "it's a game" all the time. Also, battles just look sweeter, "sort of" like you're watching them on a display monitor, which, of course, you are.

2) The idea is that gameplay in both Weird Worlds and SAIS should be intuitive, or at least based on observation in this way: graphics and sounds give clues too. The difference between the sound of a shield hit or a hull hit. The way a beam looks and sounds so when you see an alien use one that you have used, you know (you intuit) what it is.

[ooheadsoo]

The practical problem I have is that the battles go by so fast, that by the time I actually move into the range of my/the enemy's weapons, there's hardly enough time to employ any strategy or technique to overcome a disadvantage. It's difficult to mouse over a moving ship for more than a split second before it slips away from under the cursor and I don't want to break my immersion and pause the game in order to mouse over all the ships. Maybe a lot of what I'm complaining about stems from the fact that I always play on the hard difficulty and am therefore almost always at a disadvantage, but I really don't think the player should be called to pause the game just to find out if his shield generator has been disabled. It is in this case that I think that a player is being pulled OUT of a game because of the lack of readily available indicators. When I'm fighting 3 or 5 on 1, I know that with the right equipment, I actually do have a fighting chance, but I usually die in this new iteration of Infinite Space because I didn't know I was so close to dying or I didn't know I had already knocked out an enemy's weapons and could better use my time changing targets, etc.

It would be a great to have the indicators as an option, to keep everyone happy.

[PvK]

Like all tactical "real-time" spaceship combat games, I use the pause key (spacebar) a lot, to make it more like a turn-based game. Works very well in this game. I would go nuts (or not even try to master it - it'd be too frustrating for me) if I had to play it without pausing.

PvK