Getting ready for the Beta.
Designing the Galactic Civilizations 2 User Interface, Part 3:
Getting ready for the Beta. |
This week we made a few new screens and some major tweaks to several of the existing ones. One of the coolest new features in GalCiv 2 is going to be ship design. At first we were going to have ship building and ship designing done in one screen. After a little play testing it became obvious that we were going to have to break them in two separate screens.
The thought is that after the player has gotten a bit deeper in the game, they will have designed the ships they want to use over and over again. So most of the time you will just go, "Hey I need a Super Death Ship Mark 1" and you will jump into the "Star Port" screen and queue one up for construction and you're done. Now if you decide that you have to build a "Super Death Ship Mark 2" you can simply upgrade the ship; or for that matter create an entirely new type of ship with the Ship Design Screen.
 
Both of these screens are still being tweaked, but they are coming along pretty well. A nice thing to note here is that as with all the screens in the game they are resolution independent. If you are running a larger resolution the list will get longer, allowing to you to use the newly found space, and in these two screens the 3D view port of your ship will grow to fill the space available. This is very cool for checking out your ships. This will be even cooler when we get the new texture system implemented.
One of the bigger things to occupy me this week was the re-opening of "the great ship texture and lighting" debate. My part in this is mostly as the primadonna/deva/artist/drama queen. Joe would work really hard to get the ships to look good, and I would say, "ah, that's not quite right", or "We're screwed", but I have to say my constant bitching paid off and in the end once again Joe seams to have pulled the preverbal rabbit out of the hat and got it working. For more on this check out his Journal this week. https://www.galciv2.com/Journals.aspx?AID=66480
Next week I will be spending some more time tweaking the existing screens. The thing I am looking forward to most is that I am going to get to spend some time working on a new, and theoretically very cool, texture techniques for our 3D models.
Until next week. |