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):


contact_card_normal.png [ 12.16 KiB | Viewed 10349 times ]

contact_card_open.png [ 21.41 KiB | Viewed 10348 times ]

infotip.png [ 69.89 KiB | Viewed 10348 times ]

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

...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.

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.

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:


collapsed.png [ 1001.62 KiB | Viewed 10273 times ]

expanded.png [ 952.84 KiB | Viewed 10273 times ]

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.

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.