256

Development & Discussion / Re: Multimonitor support

« on: February 21, 2016, 12:28:47 PM »

I will render to each extra screen directly, fullscreen at the screen's native resolution.

Because of the vectors and UI scaling, it should "just work".

257

Development & Discussion / Re: Multimonitor support

« on: February 21, 2016, 12:22:01 PM »

Pirates will pirate. The people DRM affects the worst is paying customers, and that is just silly.

258

Development & Discussion / Re: Multimonitor support

« on: February 21, 2016, 12:20:17 PM »

Yeah no DRM, even if bought on Steam.

259

Development & Discussion / Re: [Progress - 16th Feb] Power Wheel UI Operation and Damage Animations

« on: February 21, 2016, 12:19:50 PM »

Brilliantly put.

If you so have any suggestions for the animation, do let me know. Maybe a differentry colour would make the difference, or the length of the animation.

260

Development & Discussion / Re: Multimonitor support

« on: February 21, 2016, 12:18:28 PM »

The design of this feature wI'll be done at a much later stage (after the main screens, of course), but it is definitely on the cards.

We will have secondary views, like you have described, and these can be enabled on other monitors from within the game. You will also be able to load UNION on another computer, join a crew as an Observer, and display secondary views on other screens.

261

Development & Discussion / Re: [Progress - 18th Feb] Power Wheel UI Connection Improvements

« on: February 21, 2016, 12:12:03 PM »

Adjusting power during a drag is definitely still on the dev plan. I could literally work on the Power Wheel for weeks, tweaking and refining, but I also really need to build out the rest of the UI.

When I come back to the Power Wheel your suggestion will be one of the first things I do.

UI scaling will be for the whole UI only. To create a visually integrated and interesting design I had to build the UIs as a single unit, and this is then scaled up/down based on your screen/window resolution. Because the UI is built with vectors, the scaling works very well, and is very clear at any resolution from 1366 x 786 up.

262

Development & Discussion / Re: [Progress - 16th Feb] Power Wheel UI Operation and Damage Animations

« on: February 21, 2016, 12:02:45 PM »

Yeah feedback on the UI is so so important, in any game but especially a sim like this. Not only does it engage you in the game more, and give you a better feel for what's going on, it also makes the game better to play over the internet. These visual cues help tie you into what others on the ship are doing.

What has surprised me is how quickly the wheel becomes too busy when adding animations, which is why for now some of them like operation may be too subtle. I will work on that.

263

Development & Discussion / Re: [Progress - 14th Feb] Engineering Power Wheel UI Valid Node Animation

« on: February 21, 2016, 11:57:05 AM »

I still feel a colour revision would be good at some stage, but it is good for now.

I feel I am good at shape and form, but not so much on colour design.

264

Development & Discussion / Re: [Progress - 13th Feb] Power Wheel UI Node Animations

« on: February 21, 2016, 11:55:17 AM »

Yeah, I think it is quite subtle but in context it seems to work.

265

Development & Discussion / Re: [Progress - 18th Feb] Power Wheel UI Connection Improvements

« on: February 20, 2016, 10:26:39 PM »

Hey all,

When I'm quite, as I have been for the last few days, it's simply because I'm working away. I'll do a new progress post when I have something visual to show.

In preparation for next Tuesday's video DevLog I have been working on implementing the power connections preset buttons, which allow you to create and switch between pre-configured power connections.

I've also implemented UI scaling. All of our UIs are entirely vector based, and we create them at a native resolution of 1600 px x 900 px. The UI will scale down if you have a smaller screen, and still be entirely readable at 1366 x 768 (our lowest officially supported resolution). On larger resolutions the UI will scale up.

In the game settings you will be able to control the scaling by leaving it set to automatic or you can set the scale manually.

We'll be showing the automatic scaling in operation on our next DevLog.


Thanks for reading!

Mark

266

Development & Discussion / [Progress - 18th Feb] Power Wheel UI Connection Improvements

« on: February 18, 2016, 05:40:24 PM »

Hi all,

Over the past few days I've been working on the power wheel connections, being able to hover over them with the mouse cursor to see their power, and using left and right mouse clicks to increase/decrease power (up until now connections could only have their power adjusted by dragging and dropping to and from power nodes, which still works).

And here it is in action:


As with all of our UI work, the connections, and the power wheel, can be modded to a huge degree. Making this possible slows development down somewhat, but I think the cost in time is worth it. I can't see what kind of changes people mod into the UI.

Next up I am moving on to doing the power pre-sets UI, which allow you to create your own power connection pre-sets and switch between them instantly.


Thanks for reading!

267

Development & Discussion / [Progress - 16th Feb] Power Wheel UI Operation and Damage Animations

« on: February 16, 2016, 01:07:55 AM »

Hey all,

Today I worked on the animations for when equipment is operated and damaged.

The equipment's icon flashes yellow when the equipment is operated (used/fired) and it's background flashes red when it takes damage. These are to help keep the Engineer clued into what's happening.

Here's a rough video showing this in action:

Keep in mind that all of these animations are a work in progress, and will probably go through many changes before launch. The important thing right now is functionality.

Next up on my dev list is:

• Selecting existing connections by clicking on their lines, allowing their power to be changed with a keypress or the mouse scrollwheel.

After that I'll be moving onto the UI for saving and loading power configurations (the functionality has already been programmed, I have to build the UI for it).


Thanks for reading!

268

Development & Discussion / [Progress - 14th Feb] Engineering Power Wheel UI Valid Node Animation

« on: February 14, 2016, 09:35:47 PM »

Hi all,

When a player is dragging a new connection (from a reactor node to an equipment node) it wasn't obvious which equipment nodes could be reached by the selected reactor node.

Today I added an animation to make that clear. When you click on a reactor node all of the equipment nodes that it can reach (which aren't already at max power) will flash yellow. When you click on an equipment node any reactors with active connections to that equipment will flash orange.

Here is the new update in operation:


I'm not completely happy with the (flashing) yellow colour, I had to darken it so that the number over it would stay legible. In the UI so far I've used a very light yellow to denote increasing and max power, and orange to represent decreasing and low power.

Next items on my dev list are:

• Animations when equipment is used (the icon pulses blue) and when damage is taken (the background pulses red).
• Selecting existing connections by clicking on their lines, allowing their power to be changed with a keypress or the mouse scrollwheel.

As always feedback is very welcome.

Thanks for reading!

269

Development & Discussion / Re: [Progress - 13th Feb] Power Wheel UI Node Animations

« on: February 13, 2016, 11:34:16 PM »

Here are the finished node power change animations. I also added in the ability to right-click, or double-left-click, on a reactor or equipment node to kill all power from/to it.

270

Development & Discussion / [Progress - 13th Feb] Power Wheel UI Node Animations

« on: February 13, 2016, 07:56:50 PM »

Hi all,

Every few days, as I have something new to share/show, I'll be posting my development progress here. This will allow those who are interested to follow the dev process more closely, to give feedback and discuss game design.

Right now I am working on animations for the Power Wheel, in order to give feedback to the player.

These will include animations for things like equipment being operated (used/fired) and taking damage, but I have started with something simpler, and that is a small animation on nodes when you change their power levels.


Before when you added or removed power from a connection, only the numbers in the nodes would change, and that is easy to miss. The short white flash on the nodes gives the player that little extra feedback, letting them know that the change was made.

As we spoke about before, mod-ability in UNION is of huge importance to us. That animation above was done using XAML, an XML format not unlike HTML, and here is the code for it:

Code: [Select]

<Storyboard x:Key="NodeRingChangeAnimation">
    <ColorAnimation
        Storyboard.TargetProperty="Stroke.(SolidColorBrush.Color)"
        From="#00000000" To="#FF999999" IsAdditive="True" Duration="0:0:0.15" AutoReverse="True"/>
</Storyboard>


In brief, this animation changes the Stroke (line) colour of the node's ring (the outer circle). It changes the colour of the ring (from invisble to a visible grey), but it is set to "IsAdditive" true, so instead of replacing the node ring's colour it adds to that colour. The AutoReverse setting means that the animation goes into reverse after it plays once, this gives the appearance of the node ring flashing.

It is all enclosed in a Storyboard. Storyboards allow you to mix lots of different animations together into a timeline.

We will have robust documentation available on our UI closer to launch, but it is all based on Microsoft's WPF. You can read more about it here.

Next up on my list of dev items are:

• Changing the power being added/removed while dragging a connection, using the mousewheel or by pressing a number key on the keyboard (thanks to Blaze over on the Terran Stellar Navy forum for the suggestion).
• Highlight valid nodes to connect to when dragging a connection.
• Animations when equipment is used (the icon pulses blue) and when damage is taken (the background pulses red).

Thanks for reading!