Spring RTS Engine

Argh wrote:

Try and use AF's web design as a kind of guideline for what kind of feel and textures you can use.

Well, since I painted that, I suppose I won't feel all that bad stealing from myself.

DO EET! Your UI is nice an' all, I really like some parts of it. But then, there's some real obvious repeating textures on some parts of it which give it a kind of "hmm, cool but boring" feel

Also, I'm not too keen on having all the GUI elements at the bottom of the screen. For the best GUI, make separate elements and then allow the user to move them if they want to.

as a suggestion it would be nice if the attack, move, patrol, whatever buttons would not be in the same grid as the buildicons.
Not even beginners click on a move command anyway and if they are good enough to see the use of patrol or fight command, they will use the hotkey anyway. So maybe hide those.
At least have a seperating line or something.

FWIW, I think the last bottom bar "starcraft style" UI worked the best of what we've seen.

Erom wrote:FWIW, I think the last bottom bar "starcraft style" UI worked the best of what we've seen.

The starcraft UI has resources at the top and a chat panel that is transparent and fades in and out, this wouldn't work with Arghs stated design principles in that the UI is static and doesn't move around or change/shift about

I gotta say, it reminds me how well I grasped the economy of StarCraft vs. spring games. CA's pricing is a great step, but I haven't seen a Spring game that comes close to StarCraft for "I have X resources, right now, seem to be getting it in at Y rate... I'll queue up 4 marines, and I know how much they cost". Something to be said for "pay up front" and displaying numbers instead of a wobbly bar.

Pxtl wrote:I gotta say, it reminds me how well I grasped the economy of StarCraft vs. spring games. CA's pricing is a great step, but I haven't seen a Spring game that comes close to StarCraft for "I have X resources, right now, seem to be getting it in at Y rate... I'll queue up 4 marines, and I know how much they cost". Something to be said for "pay up front" and displaying numbers instead of a wobbly bar.

Plus one. I knew the cost of over 90% of starcraft units. I'm a CA dev over two years and I can't even count on one hand the number of unit costs I could recite.

CA is still the best Spring mod for memorable unit-costs... only reason I can't name them off the top is that they've changed. Round numbers and resource unification was a huge help (although the numbers could still be rounder for easier comparison and memory). I still remember a bunch of them from the first time I read the unit guide though. CA's bigger problem with costs is more the ambiguousness of the whole economy, which is a holdover from BA. It's hard to say how much of my economy is going into factory X, how much buildpower that's getting me (and thus what's the turnaround for building a unit at that lab) vs. how much is going into morphs/construction/whatever, not to mention Overdrive.

To me, the only problem CA has with costs is simply that some units don't reflect their power in their unit size. The Jack is widely considered to be OP by Arm players who simply don't realize that the damned thing costs almost twice as much as the Zeus.

I think your UI is too large. If I where you I would put the minimap and commands in separate corners of the screen and make the chat and console more transparent.

It's hard to say how much of my economy is going into factory X, how much buildpower that's getting me (and thus what's the turnaround for building a unit at that lab) vs. how much is going into morphs/construction/whatever, not to mention Overdrive.

Don't you just select the factory and nearby buildings and check it's metal drain to see how much economy is going in to it?

Overdrive has the pylon tooltip. It will be integrated into a resource bar too.

Plus one. I knew the cost of over 90% of starcraft units. I'm a CA dev over two years and I can't even count on one hand the number of unit costs I could recite.

Starcraft has much less units and costs are usually between 50 and 200. CA on the other hand has 180 units with costs ranging from 20 to 35000. You only need to know the general cost of a unit.

Google_Frog wrote:

Plus one. I knew the cost of over 90% of starcraft units. I'm a CA dev over two years and I can't even count on one hand the number of unit costs I could recite.

Starcraft has much less units and costs are usually between 50 and 200. CA on the other hand has 180 units with costs ranging from 20 to 35000. You only need to know the general cost of a unit.

The big difference is that in StarCraft, you cannot begin construction until you have enough resources. This makes resource-counting very important.

In Spring games, you pay-as-you-go, meaning that you only need to know the general cost.

Well since some time back i tried getting a nice ui shape.

This video from 2009 the gui is from 2008 shows my latest atempt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAEH8mI7 ... re=related
My grafical skills back then were awfull so grafically isnt that good.
i think that the organization is average to say the least, well anyways its an old gui for a old mod.

See if it has anything you like