Geez, the SeasonalCycleEditor UI control has well and truly gone through a its fair share of iterations now. The goal here is to provide an intuitive interface for customizing the duration, magnitude and offset of seasonal temperature/fertility cycles, which themselves follow a straightforward sine curve. The first version of this control utilized a straightforward 2D texture of a sine curve, which I figured I could stretch, tile and crop to create the cycle graph. As mentioned in a previous post, that attempt failed because frickin arithmetic, how does it even work, science cant explain that. So I scrapped the sprite-based control and made this shader-based control instead:
Technically, this is two controls: the temperature and fertility curves are rendered separately on top of one another. Its a somewhat prettier result, but it lacks polish and isnt exactly intuitive: 6 handles on a single surface is way too many, and if it wasnt labelled seasonal cycle itd be quite difficult to guess at its purpose. Not good enough. Try again:
Better. Separating the curves was a good call. Their units (Celsius and percentage respectively) are unrelated, so sharing graph space only makes it more difficult to label the Y-axis. Labeling the seasons was also a good call. I originally considered Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter, but Wet/Hot/Dry/Cold are more descriptive and less tied to real-world seasons. Also, theyre shorter. Easier to fit on the UI. The result is still non-optimal, however. I dont like that the hot and cold season bars overlap with the wet and dry seasons, a) because thats not accurate (hot shouldnt start as soon as cold ends!) and b) because its not how we *think* about seasons. Sure, were aware that in reality one fades into the other, but in our minds, the concept of spring is distinct and separate from the concept of summer. To be maximally intuitive, a graph like this should reflect the mental model the player has of the thing being graphed. One more try:
Much better. Still could use some tweaks, labels, and a brighter season description bar (my laptop has a very bright screen, which makes it hard to see how dark some parts of the game are until I export the screenshots to a different machine), but its very much getting there. Im happy to leave it here for the moment and make progressive tweaks to the design as I push forward to 0.13. Cheers, Quasar Cross-posted from: https://speciesdevblog.wordpress.com/2019/09/27/tis-the-seasons/