sorry, i'm not trying to be aggressive. you and others might want to lay of hillbilly, people are aggressive to him and if you don't like it he won't either. currently the labels are burried under the thing they're under. in other words, if you want HE, you have no idea where it is unless you do the silly mouseover thing you described. whats more, labels are no faster or easier to use than pictures, except that labels only work in one language, take up a lot more space and technically take more time to recognise as instead of recognising the shape you actually have to read the word.
language is easy enough to fix. just make replacement research trees in dif languages, people did that for 1.071b
I like this a lot. Like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Nothing like seeing the entire tree in one glance, with icons mnemonically representing the research items, and items already researched in a different color/tint. This could even lead to partial queueing. For example, if you wanted to research the Lvl 3 turrets, you'd simply need to click its icon, and the game would start researching at the highest unresearched item in the tree, and when that's done - pick up the next child in line, and so on until the final item is done researching. Of course this system would present some resource management problems. You could make it require the resources necessary for all queued up items up-front, which wouldn't be useful since in most games resources are tight (emp_money aside). Alternatively, you can have resources deducted when each leg of the queue starts researching, and pausig or stopping when there are insufficient resources (with an appropriate message to the Comm). There could even be some indicators right on the tree as to which items are queued up. An arrow going through from the top tier to the chosen destination, or simply numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) inside the hexagon denoting the current position of the research item in the queue. Also, as a visual representation of the current item's research status, you could have the block gradually fill in with whatever color/tint as the time goes on. The timer on top would represent the time to completion of the entire queue. Oh man, the possibilities are endless!
This is already planned. That is what I promissed to show you if the majority likes it. I tried it: brown for completed researches + green for available researches works quite well.
Meh. The biggest issue I have with this is adaptability. If you add new research, you need a new icon, and you need to fit it into a fairly compact screen area. really, it's not that hard to figure out where research is. Nor is it difficult to get to. If you can figure out how to dl the game, you can figure out where research items are, and if you com often enough, you'll know without asking. Otherwise, if you are waiting for a 3 minute research item, it can't hurt to ask a team where a certain item is in the research tree. I just personally like words better than pictures. 1 word says 1 word whereas 1 picture says 1 thousand of them >_>
As promised I made a demo picture that shows how it could look in game. >>> CLICK <<< As you can see 3 phase has been completed (top left), medium tanks are 50% ready (bottom right) and the info bar shows info for 'advanced machining'.
the "accessable" ones should be a different colour to ones that you will need a research you don't have in order to research. at the start of the game, the research branch options would be the only ones in the other colour and that gives you the standing outness. I'd say: allow people to stack, definately, but only one line at a time. for instance, you click heavy tank and it starts researching all the things you don't have in order to get to heavy tank. if you'd only completed up to advanced chassis and were working on heavy tank, and you now clicked the nuke icon, then all the researches you dont have up to and including nukes would get queued, but the current research DOESN'T cancel. if you wern't researching anything, you clicked bio weapons but didn't have enough money (so the researches became queued until you could start biology), but then you click back to nukes, all the biological researches are now "unqueued". Thee's no point in allowing people to have more than two lines of queues as it just gets confusing, and you'd also then need a way to remove things from the queue... it would just get messy. also, definately start the next research if you have a queue and the money for it. commanders that don't want the next research doing right away and want more control shouldn't be queuing. most commander would rather the research started first anyway, and in the worst case scenario where you do start a research when you need the cash you can just cancel the research in one click anyway. my thoughts on colours are that there should be 4: normal, unaccessable researches (blue as now) researched (grey) unresearched but accessable (requires no research for you to start researching it) (light blue) queued (green colour as currently used for accessable) sound ok?
make unresearched items dim, and they light up once researched, similar to the current system. seems the least confusing to me. and just to add clarity to the trees, have good thick lines separate different sub trees, so its clear that one item doesnt lead to another.
I made a mistake in the demo. Of course the top level items of the other three branches should have been green as they are accessible without any prerequisits. All of your suggestions are very good and I'll try to do my best to include them in the next version. ps: what font does the empires gui use?
One thing I would like to see: Make it so the player can click on something with prerequisites they haven't researched yet, hit the 'research chain' button, and the game will automatically research every item in succession needed to get it. Having to drop what you're doing every minute or so as comm to confirm research continuation along a chain is fairly annoying. Of course, sometimes you might not have enough res left when you reach a point in the chain. At that point, I'd just give the comm a bright-red-text warning message and halt research. (Also, a bright-red-text notification when the current chain of research is complete.) Actually... 'queueing' research like that, in general, would be very nice, not just restricted to chains. (If the comm runs out of res, just pause the queue.) That might be something worth bringing up in a different thread, but it also relates to the research interface, so it's worth mentioning here, too.
no need to have a seperate "chain" button, just have it so clicking a research and hitting research automatically starts the chain. also, research doesn't get paused in the middle, you pay for the bulk sum of the research at the start of the research. if you didn't have enough money for the next research it'd just remain as queued until the money came in.
Here is the next try. Grey means completed, green ones are in the queue. All dimmed items are not available. Hovering the mouse over nukes shows the cumulated time and cost for physics + nuclear fission + nuclear warhead. >> CLICK <<
