[Mark]

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!

[Mark]

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

[Blaze]

Power Wheel
What do you think about editing the power number upon the inital connection done by dragging? What I mean is that currently, you need to connect the reactor node to the equipment node, and then aim at the line to increase or decrease the power. I think it would be nice if the connection, immediately after being made, would remain "active" and allow you to use arrows or scroll wheel to quickly set it up on the desired power level. That is the initial idea I've posted, that you've quoted a few times (thanks for the shoutouts on those!).

This way, you could increase the power level to a higher number much faster, as well as cancel the connection by setting the power level to 0. The connection would stay "active" until you click outside of it, whether on an empty space or on another node.

Though, I do not know if something like this is possible with XAML...

UI scaling
When you say we'll be able to set the scale of UI manually, do you mean that we'll be able to set the scale of the UI as a whole or of each separate element of the UI?

[Mark]

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.