Beerdude has been working on a zoomable research tree overview. And we were sort of discussing possible ways to expand this idea into a new and well thought out research tree that fits Empires the best. Right now, his research tree has zooming and dragging functionality. As shown in the screenshot below, it draws lines between research items, and shows complete paths in this fashion: While there are a lot of possible functionalities, this thread is not about general research suggestions, so please don't start suggesting general research things. I've compiled 3 possible research-overview layouts, and would like some feedback and input on them: Modular layout: Hierarchical layout: Combi layout: This thread doesn't mean anything will get implemented, thats up to beerdude, I basically want to have a discussion thread, to improve the layout concept and possibly make some conclusions on what works best. I'm not sure if the modular one is easy to understand, but I can explain it if it is required.
To be honest? I almost like the system we have now. Display full paths for a tree. Click on a branch. Branch opens to display stems. Click on a stem. Stem opens to display twigs. Twigs can then open to display leaves. This way it doesn't take up too much space (INFORMATION_OVERLOAD), and infoboxes can exist. Obviously recolouring/shape redesigning can be done, but I like the click->zoom system.
agree with predom, this system is too cluttered and inefficient. empires research doesnt branch out enough for this to be useful.
The modular system (first pic) is the system we have now, its an adoption that incorporates zooming and hierarchy. So its a general improvement. With the only difference that more information is visible on the screen. However, if the default zoom level of it is the 2nd tier (electric, bio, chemistry etc options) it would be exactly the same as our current system. Except that you would have the possibility to zoom out one level to see the layout as it is on the screenshot.
Except all researches are viewable from the get-go. How it is /currently/ (unless the tree has change since I played last..?) is more of an exploratory tree, and works well with any number of researches (until you get into greater than 4-5 tiers..but I don't see Empires ever reaching that). **Unless, of course, zooming out from the current tree reveals that. I might be acting a bit redundant, not sure.
Well if I understand you correctly, you prefer the current system because of simplicity. Which raises a good point. The way you've worded it is a bit redundant however as the modular system basically is the one you prefer.
id choose this one for best overview you can solve the "no info"-thing mentioned, with some dynamic text box that shows the info once you hover over an item. scrap those odd hex things right at the top, they are kind of useless - or do they server some purpose i dont get? the left one on the below picture, is good for the same reasons as the one above. additionally it would look a bit more extravagant - the above one looks kinda dull ... edit: hmm now that i think about it, the 2nd one actually looks better. maybe have a look at how it looks rotated by 90°
its a wireframe, not how it will look in the game. That's basically the 2nd tier (or first I guess if you don't count the root), so it could have text there saying "Mechanical" etc. The hovering is already implemented by Beerdude, however, the con "no info" means there is no ability to put information in the layout, in the case of the combi layout, there is no space for individual item information. It's a con of all 3, and I believe even current Empires. I noted it because someone could come up with a system that does allow you to view info of every single item, I just didn't come up with it because I don't think its very important. However, I do believe its important to have some sort of information on the screen. Where hovering simply wouldn't be good enough. The hierarchical layout suffers from this problem the most, because it requires a lot of space to have all paths expanded, there is far less space to work with, compared to the other 2.
i dont get your size issue - neither of those is bigger then the empires research menu is now and they all would be useable as they are. sure it could be a bit more finetuned to really use all available space. the one the 2nd picture on the left side f.e would leave enough space on the right to have a text-area that shows the description of the current reseach item plus time infos and whatnot. u can simply make unavailable research "greyed out", available research normal saturated and researched items marked with a yellow-goldish border. i dont see what other info youd need to provide. another option would be a popup info, but you said u didnt want popups in another thread (that was you?)
I like the first and the third. Having to click button after button to get to a certain research gets rather tedious, and is unnecessary even if this system could be added. The problem I have with the current system is that I cannot put technologies/researches in a queue, thus increasing the research time a bit. I don't see how the proposed systems are cluttered; to be exact, I find the proposals to be more streamlined then the system we have now. The third system is actualy something I wanted to propose for a long term, and of all looks the most streamlined to me. EDIT: Edited for the sake of readability.
I quite liked the first picture. Nice overview. I might start commanding if this gets implemented. :D
have tabs for the different trees (physics, chem, bio etc...) then there you show the tree. this way of showing the whole research thingy is too cluttery, and also have it like a left to right thing. I'm thinking like the type you see in age of empires.
19:24 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: looking at that thread 19:25 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: from the perspective of someone who would actually have to do the research for this shit 19:25 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: I wanna throw a few things in here 19:25 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: firstlyt 19:25 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: firstly 19:25 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: it's important that I can have dual pre-requesite research 19:25 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: if you can somehow link 2 researches, regardless of the tree they're in, that's a bonus, but being able to link 2 in the same tree is ideal 193 - =[BSID]= 1LT Beerdude26: linking in same tree is prolly trivial 193 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: dizzy is just going 193 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: "I don't really think we need dual pre-reqs" 193 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: I take offence. 194 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: I know I'm not coding it, nor am I helping design it, but I still have to implement the usage of it, and I'd rather not be arbitarily limited because one person didn't think something I wanted to use was really needed 194 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: especially something that's been discussed for so long 195 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: regardless of whether or not it would benefit the game, that's entirely irrelevant in my opinion 195 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: because it's not something that could be decided without testing, and to test it, it needs to be an option 195 - =[BSID]= 1LT Beerdude26: Well that's his opinion 195 - =[BSID]= 1LT Beerdude26: And his designs don't really hold against dual pre-reqs 195 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: they make it a bit more difficult 196 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: i also said I'd rather still not be limited to 6 researches either 196 - =[BSID]= 1LT Beerdude26: Yeah I was wondering about that too 196 - =[BSID]= 1LT Beerdude26: I wonder how many researches you want to put in then :p 196 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: well 196 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: also having them next to eachother can be confusing for new players 197 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: in terms of displaying them all on screen at the same time 197 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: if you start merging lots of hexagons together 197 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: it looks like a mush 197 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: you can't see the paths or the centre 198 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: basically 198 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: if you want to display it all at the same time 198 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: if your 2nd level has any more than 3 options 198 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: which, all of ours do 198 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: then it starts to mush together 198 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: you start connecting to shit you don't want to connect to 199 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: if you connect it by lines then using hexagons is pointless in the firstp lace 199 - =[BSID]= 1LT Beerdude26: Well the tree would be laid out differently if we would keep the current implementation 19:41 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: out of the 3 pictures 19:41 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: the first one is cool but having pre-requesites would really start to get messy with lines 19:41 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: so a solution to that is a button to show said lines 19:41 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: that can be turned off 19:41 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: a toggle 19:41 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: the 2nd one is basically the current design 19:41 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: only you can zoom out 19:42 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: but again my point stands about how many researches you can have there 19:42 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: it would start to get cluttered very quickly 19:42 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: 3rd one is shitty for the most part but the top right part of it with the circle that almost looks like a human nervous system, that's interesting 19:42 - =[BSID]= 1LT Beerdude26: You could also just have an info box that shows exactly what you need to get a certain resarch 19:42 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: yeah ofc, and hovering over it not only shows the info, but it makes a line appear to the other research 19:43 - =[BSID]= 1LT Beerdude26: Yeah possibly 19:43 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: but having a button you can press would help people visualise where they want to go more, but it wouldn't be used by newbie comms, allowing a smoother learning curve 19:43 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: so really imo 19:43 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: first one and the top right of the 3rd one 19:43 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: middle one just has the same hexagon problems 19:43 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: look at the 2nd group on the 2nd picture 19:43 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: like 19:43 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: anything outside of the starting researches 19:44 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: if you wanted to add anything further than the 6 in the 2nd group 19:44 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: it would get really really messy 19:44 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: or rather 19:44 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: even worse if you wanted to add more than 2 19:44 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: so say you went 19:44 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: chem 19:44 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: then improved det 19:44 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: then upgraded nades and HE 19:44 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: as it is now 19:44 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: that would get really messy in this tree 19:45 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster |CiC.|: one of those 2 researches would either be connecting to HEMG or UML Too lazy to retype that as a proper reply.
I'm not sure if you noticed flasche, but none of those pictures actually have the full research tree displayed. The other thing that takes up a lot of space is the way they have to be layed out, since its a hierarchy, they need space to be seperated for better readability. Look at the first ingame screenshot, and look at the 4th research tier. Tell me if you can tell which research belongs to which, without having to follow the lines for each item. It takes up a lot of space. The items are also very small, while that might not matter to you, from a usability point of view, they should be as big as possible, which also takes up more space. Comparitively they take up more space which I've noted as a con, don't see what's wrong with that, its true afterall. There is a lot of info and meta data that could be displayed, how much is displayable depends on the space we can work with. I can't really do much with your comment that you can't see what info is needed, since I can. It's all comparative, one layout allows for extra info, the other simply makes it harder to do so. @ trickster The first isn't restricted to 6 necessarily. For simplicity it's better to restrict to 6, but you have to imagine the black hexagons as a branch group, if the branch consists of more than 6, there would either be ngons or multiple hexagons with items. Just like a fractal, the amount of info that is displayed is dependent on the zoom level. Other than that, I can't be bothered to read a text wall either. That's how I roll.
As I said, my point was that using hexagons is pointless (as opposed to using circles for example) if you're not going to tessellate them. And you can't tessellate them if you're going to do an overview rather than the current system, because they'll start to mesh together.
One could use squares instead and use a scrollable research tree. I tried to make a concept, but when using hexagons it quickly get's cluttered and I don't think it will look that pretty to most people in game. While I like hexagons a solution could be squares with nice icons. You could also use something like this: If you use square icons instead and make it look nice then I would preffer that anytime over the current system. (I am glad someone is revising the research system)