Beta 2. Major Screen Changes.
Designing the Galactic Civilizations 2 User Interface, Part 4:
Beta 2. Major Screen Changes. |
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I have not been keeping up with The UI design journals, mostly because I have been very busy doing screens, and because I have been doing some major changes - not all of them will be apparent to the testers - and some will not be even be implemented in Beta 2. But there has been allot of cool stuff done over the last few months. I will try and sum up some of the UI highlights.
The first and most obvious thing we did in Beta 2 is completely redesign the main screen. The choice was made to bring the convention of having the Main Function buttons visible almost all the time. I really liked the original design, so I tried to keep allot of the look and feel from it, but make it a bit more efficient. The end results, I think, were quite nice. We even made some more space for things that will not be showing up until Beta 3.
One more cool thing is we made it that if you are a power player and don't need all the details of the Main Console, you can roll it up, giving you a larger view of the star map.
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Here is the new Main UI.  |
Rolled up Main UI window.
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The change to this convention required some major changes to be made to many of the existing screens, some more difficult than others. Thanks to our DesktopX screen development system the changes were allot simpler than they could have been.
Here are a few examples of some of the re-worked window; there were many more as you will notice as you go through Beta 2.
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Updated Planet Management Window
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Updated Ship Design window
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Now much of the last few months was spent on entirely new screens, some of which will not even be seen in Beta 2, but most of the more important examples will be there. Perhaps the biggest one, at least for me, is the new Custom Race window. It is in fact more like 6 windows, but that is because of the tabs. Here are some examples.
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The Overview tab of the Custom Race Window
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Custom Colors Tab
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We also got in several new in-game screens that have been needed.
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The new Ship / Planet List
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The Foreign relations window.
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Many, many more tweaks were made and more new screens created. We also started to finish up the backbone that will make it possible for people to mod the screens. In fact, in the end you should be able to completely replace the UI for the entire game. In short there is a lot of work that has been done under the covers.
GalCiv 2's UI is starting to really come into its own, and I am very happy with what we have been able to do. Can't wait to start polishing things up.
Oh yes, in all this I have neglected to mention that we have managed to make sure every window in the game is resolution independent. And they all scale in the most useful way to the screen we could manage to pull off. To understand this you will have to give it a try. I am now quite used to playing at 1280x1024, as well as 1440 x 900. And it is nice not to worry about distortion or cropping.
Well, it looks like I'm off to work on some Object Desktop stuff for a bit. But I'll be back to GalCiv soon. See you then. |