After launching v3.2 we went back to triaging small and medium improvements to start the v3.3 series. Here's the work in this area for the past week.

New fleet visualization in galaxy screen: "ship bubbles"

A major eye sore in the galaxy screen is the ship panel or toolbar, located in the lower left area. It also has UX issues, with duplicating the ship avatars and being a limit to how many ships can be in your fleet unless some complicated scrolling is introduced. But not anymore!
The new fleet display concept is "ship bubbles". In the zoomed out galaxy nothing has changed. It will still display all the ships next to their current system or en-route in a wormhole. But the zoomed in system view now displays far away ships in a circle around the planet orbits, in the same overall direction the ship is relative to the star system. This new visualization also has automatic layout code to handle ships in the same system or close to each other:
This is a practical and more usable solution to the problems posed by a static toolbar, and is flexible enough to also support NPC ships in the future. Finally, to make the screen even cleaner, a new mode that displays only the galactic bodies and ships has been added:

Civ clustering and influence areas

Civs are now distributed in clusters, and own the entire system. This radically simplifies the civ structure in the galaxy and feels a lot more natural. To support this a new visualization mode has been added to display the extents of civs domains over the star systems you've discovered:

Random patrols for robots

Robots will now have a new idle system that compels them to patrol much further than they currently do. This is still compatible with the patrol point, so you can combine both for optimal patrolling behavior.

Ongoing work: map interaction revamp

The big item for 3.3 is revamped map interaction and combat, plus the initial implementation of skills. Work has been started in this area with the interaction revamp. Now right click is devoted for giving direct walking orders (by popular demand, no more walk key!), and when the target area has multiple options, a neat popup menu is displayed:
It's easy to go overboard with this and start adding too many things to the context menu, so special care will be taken to only add options where it makes sense. In particular actions that have a subject-verb-object structure are prime candidates, as in the example ownership action. Combat actions will be better served by the dedicate action bar, which has been improved to display key bindings when they exist:

[ 2016-09-15 15:33:20 CET ] [ Original post ]