User Interface

from Stardock Forums

1. Although I enjoy the challenge and the play of the game, I have become frustrated with the user interface. There are too many mouse moves and keyboard actions to perform maintenance of the game, the action buttons (done, selection of projects and ships) are located on different sides of the screen and take up too much screen real estate. Having played several other games, most of them real-time, I appreciate their compact control panels. I just wished that GC had the same fast interface (eg. Use Icons to select the ship to build). I think the current interface displays a dated approach and the success of the game requires to re-think the user interface to display game information and control it's progress.
2. Ship deployement - would you implement, as in the OS2 version, indicating where a ship's is going by clicking on it, and a line would be traced between the ship's position and to it's destination.
3. Can you implement wheel mouse to move the space area of the screen.
4. Can you allow cancelling a wrong mouseclik by releasing the mouseclick off the action button, as in office and ie.
:)
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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
4 does already happen in some screens but not others.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
Arturus, I have not found the screens that behave that way.
Taking your word for it, then there is a lack of consistency in implementing mouse behavior.

Here is another exemple. On the initial panel, the player setup screen. there are 3 horizontal scrolls,
Advantage factor, Galaxie size and Habitable planets, 2 scroll min to max by going left to right
but Advantage factor goes right to left for min to max.
why the inconsistency, why not have a drop down menu to select.

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
could you explain point 1 in more detail?
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
Frogboy, I was unable to capture the screen of Dark Reign to send as an
exemple of a compact intreface, which I was refering to.
To describe the screen, divide it into 3 vertically,
take the rignt third to manage the game, provide information and all options.
Your cursor only has to move in that area to select what to do.

Of that right 1/3 of the screen, split again in 3 and use 1/3 (bottom or top,
my preference is bottom) to display the minimap of the galaxy, zoomable
and indicating ships movements.

The remaining 2/3 of the screen is to display the current space quadrant.
Moving your cursor any object would pop-up details of it. Who, What, Where, etc..
Clicking once on a ship would draw a line indicating it's trajectory, on the space screen
and the minimap.
Clicking once on a system, would popup it's planets with details. If the system is
colonized, the pop-up details would indicate projets, morale, population and governor.

Hope this helps....
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
Hmm.

The reason why the UI isn't as compact is that we want the mini map to be reasonably large and we don't want it to be non-square.

In turn, the sector map we wanted to be fairly squarish which gave us a bit of extra space at the bottom which we use for the main controls.