[Mark]

Hey all,

I've been working, and making great progress, on the Technicians.

However the more I worked with the UI the more I wanted some more vibrancy in the colours.

I went back to the colour palette and did a few things:
I changed the red to match better.
I re-introduced green (which is complementary to the red).
I added more blues (removed the grays) to the UI, brightening things fairly significantly.
Tweaked what colours some elements use, especially the ship armor status (green to red now).

Here it is, I would love to hear what you think (click to view in full size):


Some elements of the UI are still a work in progress, and so are blank in this pic.

Thanks for reading!

- Mark

[Grey]

Hey Mark,
Thanks for the update.

I love the new collors. It looks more bright than it did at first. With the previous update to the collors I tought it was to pastel, but now it just clicks.
I agree with blaze that the Technicians look a bit unimpressive. I understand that there is no other option at the moment and I appreciate the work that went into them, but they are the weak link in the UI.

Love to work! Can't wait for the next update.

[Mark]

Thanks Grey.

I am particularly happy that the green is much a much better indicator for the "health" of things.

Yeah I have some skill in UI design, but I am no artist. I definitely plan to have someone create some really great portraits at a later stage.

[Mark]

Hey all,

I've tweaked the colours a bit more, specifically making the clickable items (buttons) brighter again and making the "Power to Performance" graph green instead of white.

The current selected system on the wheel is not highlighted with the white border, and I added the "System Status" title to the system status panel to make what it is a bit clearer.

[Grey]

The differences are small, I don't really like one more than the other. The performance graph however looks beter in green.

[Mark]

Yeah these are just incremental changes. I like the green performance graph too. 😊

[Blaze]

"System status" addition is a great idea.

I prefer the performance graph not to be green, since green, orange and red are feedback colours. If the graph will fade to reddish when the performance output is bad, that would be an additional feedback, but if not, I think it could confuse players since the color scheme is not uniform throughout the screen (meaning that green in other places means good, and here it doesn't mean anything).

I agree with Gray, I don't have a preference over the lighter or darker variant of the wheel itself. But adding the white line around the selected one is a neat feature. Maybe make the border a bit thicker or detailed like a frame that overlaps the blue field of the node?

Quick idea: have the whole screen darken when the ship's power is low.

[Mark]

My thinking behind making the performance graph green is that on the graph more is good. The higher up the graph you go, the better performance you get.

Having it switch colours would be confusing I think, because there is no "bad" performance on the graph, there is only the current performance out(put) at the current power in(put) level. Lower power gets you less performance, but that is not really "bad", it might be what you want.

If it really is too confusing though then switching back to the original blue colour would be the best solution.

I really like the concept of the UI visually changing when in low power. I will have to think about what triggers a low power status though! Maybe one of the Power Presets is specifically for a low power configuration (we could call it "Silent Running" ), and it has it's own low power colour scheme which gets applied to all of the station UIs on the ship (as a way to signal to everyone that the ship is in "silent running"/low power mode).

[Blaze]

If it really is too confusing though then switching back to the original blue colour would be the best solution.

I wouldn't call it too confusing. I would just say it breaks the rules of design. That's not always a bad idea, but it's such a minor thing here that either way could be fine. Perhaps just something to keep in mind when doing the A/B testing.

I really like the concept of the UI visually changing when in low power. I will have to think about what triggers a low power status though! Maybe one of the Power Presets is specifically for a low power configuration (we could call it "Silent Running" ), and it has it's own low power colour scheme which gets applied to all of the station UIs on the ship (as a way to signal to everyone that the ship is in "silent running"/low power mode).

That could be really cool. Maybe even enemies' radar would struggle to pick you up, like stealth mode. Or you simple conserve more power that way, which is useful for travelling across vast regions of space where you don't need to constantly accelerate.

[Mark]

That could be really cool. Maybe even enemies' radar would struggle to pick you up, like stealth mode. Or you simple conserve more power that way, which is useful for travelling across vast regions of space where you don't need to constantly accelerate.

Well detection is based on the simulation rules, where heat and energy emissions combine to create an "energy signature", with a stronger signature making you easier to detect.

The Silent Running mode would just be a preset which allowed you to quickly and easily reduce your energy signature, but you could do the same thing manually.