Base Computer Interface

Development directions, tasks, and features being actively implemented or pursued by the development team.
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pyramid
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Base Computer Interface

Post by pyramid »

A long-time idea of mine is to make the base computer interface visually nicer than the current standard one.
Picking up on the main_menu.py, and computer_lib.py functionality, which heavily utilize GUI.py classes, I have encountered some problems on the way.

To better visualize and discuss how to overcome them, I have 2 screens included. Please note that this is a very early development version and the base computer UI will have a completely different looks once the functionality is working.

screen 1:
Image
screen 2:
Image

Before discussing the problems, some good news on what is workng well:
* Onle-line integration in base python files, i.e. substitute "Base.Comp (...)" with "base_computer.MakeBaseComputer(...)"
* animated backgrounds work just fine (compare screen 1 and 2, the background is rotated counter-clockwise
* probably animated buttons (though not tested) and button states (again, not tested)
* color codes for text (see right text with system info)

I have just tried porting missions bbs, load/save, and faction relations, no ShipDealer or Cargo trading yet, and came across the following problems:
1) When linking a base room to the base computer, still the main menu buttons are being shown. As a remedy I do reinitialize the GUI with each call:

Code: Select all

def MakeBaseComputer(...):
  GUI.GUIInit(1280,1024)
But that leads to problem 2:

2) When linking from different base rooms to different computers, some buttons tend to disappear, which I believe is the effect of the GUIInit. A better way might be to instewad of calling the base computer class from the above function, to instantiate the class directly from the base py file "base_computer.BaseComputer(...)"

3) The list picker class "GUISimpleListPicker" does not offer a handler for selection change, which makes the displaying of missions a bit annoying as the user would need to select a mission first, and then confirm with another button to display the mission text.

4) Screen 1 presents the state of the base comp after first entry. When clicking one of the menu buttons the right text screen changes its background color (screen 2) to the font color of the picker screen, no clue why as that is not programmed anywhere in the code base_comp code. It looks like the GUI class is not handling that right.

Enough for now. Any tips on how to advance with any one of the items are appreciated.
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by Fendorin »

Is interressant,

do you think in the future ( some month) we could have perhaps different background interface per faction? when we are landed/docked
(maybe just the color shemes for beginning)?
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by pyramid »

---correction mode---
It is more correct to say: it is interesting
-----------------------------
It should be possible to have per faction backgrounds for bases, and planets.
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by safemode »

Maybe with you diving into the code for the computer UI it would be good to discuss exactly what the look and feel of the VS universe level of computer technology should be.


Should we have simple themes that get interchanged between factions, leaving the basic UI unchanged?

Should we have highly altered UI's for each faction, making the various informational inputs/outputs modular so we can plug them in to faction specific computer UI's?

Should we go beyond simple frames based UI design and make the computers high tech or very low techish?
* Do we use GL effects to make interacting with the base computer feel futuristic and high tech, maybe by not even interacting with a console but make it seem like it's projected from a crystal as a hologram or something else?
* if we're going low techish, do we want to make a differentiation between the capabilities of frontier bases vs core bases?

Also, should the computers have audio accompany it? Perhaps to help the user navigate it. Telling the user perhaps of important news they should read or update the user on his stats since he last logged into the system.

The other thing the think about is the VS internet. How are the bases connected to eachother? In addition, how are the factions interconnected?
* This last one requires some additional non-base computer coding to make effective, but it's an interesting idea for enhancing gameplay. It would add more benefits and downsides to being a friend or enemy of a faction if it means you lose access to their network.


Basically, themability of the base computer is a good step towards making it more seamless to the gameplay, just as future base enhancements will make them more seamless to gameplay and less repetitive seeming. The idea that animation is possible (should be ) with the current work going on is even better. I'm only hoping that the base computer work is being done so that it's flexible.

ideally i think what modders and such would probably like to see is the base computer ui taking the form of a template with all the pieces that we put into it, being individual modules of code.
the modules would not be responsible for displaying anything. They would only provide content or provide a means for input from the UI to the game.
The UI template would be responsible for laying out the modules and formatting the output from the modules into the UI. Not all the modules would need to be used.

This would be a file searched for by the game when you access a given base using the normal dynamics. Like, looking for faction specific versions of the planet_type:base_computer first, if not found, using a generic planet_type:base_computer etc.

This means mods would only have to provide their own edit of the base computer UI file to overload the search.


But most importantly, these UI's need to not have resolutions hard-coded into them. We have to take a serious look at how to design the UI's of these computers to handle multiple resolutions, and the proliferation of wide-screen monitors. The template code needs to have access to the current resolution of the screen, and all dimensions need to be in relation to this. Images, if necessary will have to be scaled to fit correctly.
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by pyramid »

The master files (python, pov-ray, images) for this rough unfinished approach have been posted to svn for those who would like to take up on the challange of continuing this development thread.

The files can be found under /trunk/masters/sprites/interfaces/base_computer/ in the base_computer.zip archive.
Last edited by pyramid on Wed Jan 21, 2009 9:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by ace123 »

Hi,
I looked at this thread earlier but forgot to reply to it. This looks really cool! Will be nice to have a system that is written entirely in python, and can even allow the ugly c++ code to be phased out.

The graphical issues can be worked around fairly easily--don't worry about them right now unless they make the interface unusable.

It should be easy to create a different look depending on which faction controls the base. Most of the base code is pretty good about not hardcoding anything about resolution. The main problem is widescreen, and the fonts, since we use a bitmap font that can't be scaled. The python code does a pretty good job at getting the height of the text font, but you can sometimes see a bit of an overlap between lines.

Widescreen is a bit trickier to deal with, especially since we have to compromise between stretching the background, or else chopping a good sized chunk of the screen off. I'm happy with just leaving black margins on either side of the screen (though maybe I'm not the person to ask because my only widescreen computer is my macbook), but we can maybe have a boolean in each Room that tells it whether to stretch to the screen, and then have Python code check VS.getVariable("graphics","aspect","1.333"), and then tell the engine that it properly handles different aspect ratios so the black margins can go away.

One thing I wanted to see in bases is a way to look at "video" of a certain event as part of the news, which will make you an observer for some battle that is going on in the background. (and it can just teleport you to a specific system with a bunch of units setup inside of it)

We can try to make some sliding effects, and we might be able to simulate a "projected" look by adding a texture either in front of it, or maybe a transparent texture behind it (of course I'm thinking of the merchant's guild from privateer -- and this one gets overlayed)

Might be interesting to have speech synthesis used for low-end bases, and maybe a real person's voice for high-end ones (for example some of the BART train stations here just have a robot-sounding voice when trains arrive)

While it would be cool to make them all different, we'll still need some sort of "default" computer for bases that we don't know about. Though I suppose we could make the player have a hand-held palm piloty thing that connects to the same "magic VS internet", or perhaps does not display anything outside of a simple buy/sell cargo interface in the case that you can't get "reception" to the galactic internet. So basically aside from the player's portable everything-device (this would likely be the same thing as the Nav Map in-flight), each type of inhabited base would have its own specialized computer (or maybe a standard computer but in front of a different background depending on the base), which would give it some character.

I wouldn't worry too much about the VS internet--considering that we already have several means of FTL travel, it is conceivable that the information would also be able to travel FTL (if not just by sticking a SPEC drive on a wagon full of CDs :-)) Not to mention the fact that mesh networks will likely have become a reality, so information can be carried on every transport and military ship with some sort of encryption/verification, so the ships will just carry these packets around as a service, which may contain things like news, and stock prices, etc. And it's conceivable that except in a few grand schemes of hackers compromising an entire network to alter stock prices, they may have invented pretty good verification schemes maybe just by taking the information that the most ships agree on (and likely most of the ships will be "good").

Hope I didn't bore you with this... but I think there are a lot of really cool things we could do with this.
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by safemode »

What i thought was important over the idea of information travel latency was information availability. There is no reason at all to believe that factions would be connected to enemies to share information. Indeed, you should see news stories from different factions about a singular event with all different slants.. There is no galactic AP. Each faction would spin news to favor themselves and their allies. You might only get the current faction's news at some bases. Some outter zone bases may provide all available faction's news. etc.

The news and available information in the game has to mimic the type of news you'd expect and information you'd think would be available in the environment the game takes place in. Huge propaganda schemes. huge disinformation dealing with ongoing campaigns. The player may or may not be privy to these things depending on what campaign they're dealing with and their faction alliances. Or, the player could investigate by taking in news from multiple sources and piecing it together himself. The location of stations and bases should be outdated at first in your ship, if existing at all, and only become updated when you dock at a base (and are friendly with the faction) and buy new maps for that system and possibly surrounding ones (that are friendly with that faction). These maps would have to be updated periodically to keep up to date with any changes.

war is expensive. i visualize the tech and general situation the player has to deal with to be run down somewhat. Nothing can be trusted, you have to work your way up with people in order to get information that can be trusted, or do all the work yourself. The writing of the campaign and characters is one thing, but the computer has to be a tool for the campaign. You shouldn't have totally accurate data in it, it should be a reflection of available information and that availability is directly related to when, where, and who the user has made connections to.
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by pheonixstorm »

Has this or is this getting any attention for a future release? The interfaces are a bit clunky or confusing or ugly depending on what part of the game you are in...
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by chuck_starchaser »

I think the problem here was that pyramid got no help; and instead people were just asking for more features.

It should be easy to make incremental improvements to the base computer interfaces. Check what I did in PU:
I simply took the existing backgrounds for the various rooms at the various bases, flipped them horizontally,
blurred them and darkened them, and used the results as backgrounds for the base computers; and it looks
great. The effect is almost subliminal, as if each screen is dimly reflecting an environment behind you that
agrees (and this is the most important part) that agrees with the looks of the "room" you're in. All the fancy
animations in the world won't add up to a fraction of the value of consistency.
Just doing the same thing for vegastrike would be a great start.

Then, the NEXT step, perhaps, would be to change the python code, and improve the layout; maybe make it
more 3D; scale the background to the extents of the 3D screen, whatever.

But if people jump in again and start asking for per-faction this and that, then it's just going to die again.
We need less proposals and more work. Just producing backgrounds for so many bases and rooms is like a
month of work, probably.
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by -REBEL3- »

chuck_starchaser wrote: But if people jump in again and start asking for per-faction this and that, then it's just going to die again.
We need less proposals and more work. Just producing backgrounds for so many bases and rooms is like a
month of work, probably.
I totally agree with you-up to here. I think that we need one distinctive background for the computers of the three major factions (at least at first, the other factions can get theirs in due time.) I'm not the best artist, but I would be happy to try to sketch out possible Rlann and Area backgrounds if someone else could take the concept art and finish it-make it cleaner, color it, etc.

One question-how can I show you guys the art? Should I use the "upload attachment" option?

*Edit*-TWO questions, then. :D Does the game support the clickable icons being different shapes/locations/colors? For example, if I wanted to put a round purple button in, say, the upper left hand corner of the screen, could I do so?
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Good question. I'm not sure if attachments are working or not; I think so. But in any case, you're probably better off with one of those free picture hosting places.
What I really think more people should do is get themselves a cheap hosting account. I mean, I'm a poor guy, and I have like half a dozen internet hosting accounts, plus a dedicated server. Go to 1and1, for example, their cheapest accounts are like a few bucks per month. Ridiculously cheap, IMO.
I still think that what I did for PU is the best thing; use the pictures for the room you're in as a basis. Essentially, figure what the environment behind you might look like, and make it look like the screen is reflecting that.
Packing the image for in-game use requires NVidia's free compression tool: nvcompress; but I can do that for you.
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by -REBEL3- »

The problem is, (at least in 0.50), that all the rooms for most of the bases/planets are the same. Go boot up Vega Strike, and fly to planet. Any planet will do, so long as it has a weapons upgrade shop. Then, fly halfway across the galaxy, and find to another planet, with another weapons upgrade shop that is owned by another faction. Go into it, and marvel at the same-ness of the weapons upgrade/ship upgrade shops across the galaxy!

I am proposing that the three main factions have different computer backgrounds-and that the room backgrounds should be changed as well. I can sketch some different computer backgrounds. I'll try to make some computer backgrounds first-then room backgrounds. The computers could just be screens with some icons and text on them-color coded by faction. I was thinking that the rooms could just be a few simple colors-perhaps a metal plates and some greebles (a window, a light, etc), same colors as the computers. It might take a week or so though, I'm in IB classes, and have little time to do anything else (it being somewhat close to the end of the semester and all).
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Heck, I think you're right. I recently played vegastrike just a bit, while testing some shaders, and thought I kept seeing the same rooms over and over. Not sure what happened; I'd swear there was a lot more variety a few years ago.
Anyways, sounds like you got a plan, now. Go for it.
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by klauss »

The problem is that designing bases (sets of rooms) takes more effort than... ehem... automatically generating 2000 systems with 10 planets each.

So, there are only a handful "base types", and they're reused for units. An agricultural planet will always use the agricultural planet's base template.

Perhaps base scripts (bases are created through a base script, a python script that sets up the GUI elements in place) could be randomized, even per faction, with a little programming on the .py scripts, to add some variability without major changes on the way it works (an "agricultural.py" for agricultural planets, a "mining_base.py" for mining stations, etc...).

If only textures, locations and room availability is randomized, then every base would feel a bit more unique without requiring a huge human effort.
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by chuck_starchaser »

I'm not a big believer in randomization, myself; unless it's very well done, like the catacombs in Diablo, for instance, which were randomly generated floor-plans, combined with randomly picked wall types, combined with randomly picked floor styles, combined with.. I don't know... furniture styles?, music pieces?, sounds? But the thing with Diablo was there were dozens upon dozens of styles of everything to recombine, and it's hard to re-cognize a floor style when there's like 70 of them; so each catacomb felt different.
Doom also used recombinations of wall, floor and ceiling styles, but also had just enough varieties of them that it took a while to begin to recognize them and get bored.
Now, the big question would be, do we want each planet to feel different?
I think obviously the answer has been "no; it's just a planet", which then becomes a vicious circle. Indeed it feels like "just a planet" which reinforces the conviction that making it feel unique would be a waste of time.
How did this happen?
Well, part of it is the fact that there's "nothing to do" at planets, except buy, sell, upgrade, or take a mission. Ironically, some players complain that flying takes too long, as if they wanted to spend more time at planets than in space...
But anyhow, I think if there were less planets and more places to go in each planet, perhaps planets would cease to be commodities and get a bit more respect.
Because this is it: Just like the FED printing money is going to devalue the USD, Vegastrike's "un-judicious printing of planets" made them worthless. And since they are worthless, they get no artists' attention.
I think Privateer is something to look at, just as a neutral example. One thing Privateer got right was that although there were multiple mining bases, and multiple refineries, and so on, there was still a sense of wonder to be had because the generic planets were not so numerous, so they felt different even if just from remembering what character you met where; as well as by successive discovery of unique bases, such as newcons, perry, newdet and oxford. I think that there needs to be rules such as "no more than 16 of any given base in the full map (or 8 per faction; 3 factions maximum)"; and "no less than one totally, completely unique base for every 50"; and then enforce these with an iron fist: Make the universe generator just stop when putting any more bases would violate a rule. We'd probably get new art contributions in a hurry if we did this.
Last edited by chuck_starchaser on Wed Apr 07, 2010 12:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by klauss »

I get your point chuck, I wasn't proposing utter randomization, only a bit of variability.

So a few agricultural bases could have a ship dealer, others not. A few mining bases could have rocky walls, others could have supporting struts (is that the word?) others could have concrete walls, and that kind of limited variability.

It would at least give a few distinguishing points (combinable, which would add to the available combinations), so that you can remember "ah.... serenity was the one with the polished floor".
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by chuck_starchaser »

klauss wrote:I get your point chuck, I wasn't proposing utter randomization, only a bit of variability.

So a few agricultural bases could have a ship dealer, others not. A few mining bases could have rocky walls, others could have supporting struts (is that the word?) others could have concrete walls, and that kind of limited variability.

It would at least give a few distinguishing points (combinable, which would add to the available combinations), so that you can remember "ah.... serenity was the one with the polished floor".
Very true; I like this.
But...
I think we should just go to 3D bases, frankly.
Then we could really randomize floor styles, wall styles, furniture, everything.
To do this now... How would you do it?
I mean, for each base AND room you'd have to have a texture acting as a mask, to indicate what part of the background is "floor",
and then substitute an alternative floor pattern? What about lighting? This could get pretty crazy.
What's the main problem going to 3D bases?
By the way, if the problem with 3D cockpits is rendering to textures, I have the solution:
Render to texture in the CPU, then upload. Finito!
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by -REBEL3- »

Holograms would not violate canon in any way, would they? Since the game starts in 3276 C.E. , we would have holograms, right? After all, we can already make simple holograms today...

On the same note, does the game support *simple* animations for the menus? I was thinking that, if you clicked one of the menu functions on the Aeran_Simple computer (I've sketched 2 types of base computer so far-Simple and Complex, with Medium to follow), the hologram projector could have some animation transition between windows-example below.

Click a menu item-e.g. food.
The food text would blink, and then the other text would dim.
Then, the food category would come up with pictures-a fade to black style of transition.

or,

Click a menu item-e.g. food.
The food text would blink, and then the screen would "peel off" the other text.
Then, the food category would come up-the pictures expanding out from nothing, the text just fading in.
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by klauss »

chuck_starchaser wrote: Very true; I like this.
But...
I think we should just go to 3D bases, frankly.
To do this now... How would you do it?
For that, we need
  • 3D scenes at bases: Not that big a deal, the player's ship is already a 3D object. We need a way to add lights and control the camera, and define a nice scene XML format (yep... xml... dotscene is such a format and there are exporters for blender and maya - we can parse that).
  • Use the main rendering loop for bases: I'd propose this small refactoring (bases are using a custom loop) since we need the ability to paint the real world outside (for windows). It's just a bonus, we can do this in a later step.
  • 3D clickable hotspots: a box, sphere, or mesh should be definable as clickable in the 3D scene, and a python callback be appendable to it just like it is appendable to rectangular (2D) hotspots. This will require some usage of the raycollider and the most complex part IMO... but it's doable. OpenGL has a selection mode we could use too, but it's kind of deprecated and poorly maintained by most drivers, I wouldn't rely on it.
chuck_starchaser wrote:I mean, for each base AND room you'd have to have a texture acting as a mask, to indicate what part of the background is "floor",
and then substitute an alternative floor pattern? What about lighting? This could get pretty crazy.
I'd rather add alternative scenes with equally named 3D hotspots. Ie: if we pick the agri base, then we have a few "base scenes" - each scene could branch into randomly picked subscenes, of which we pick one and only one - but all combinations share the same hotspot names for the same functionality, which makes the script work always as expected.

Ie: we could add to the dotscene format an xml tag "choice" that makes it pick only one. So we could branch and add variability in that sense.
chuck_starchaser wrote:By the way, if the problem with 3D cockpits is rendering to textures, I have the solution:
Render to texture in the CPU, then upload. Finito!
The similar (but less troublesome) approach is to render to the screen, and then transfer the pixels to a texture, either directly if supported by the GPU, or through the CPU if not.
But this is slow, and limits texture resolution to screen resolution (not that big a deal, but...)
Again, we can start a branch and play with that.
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by chuck_starchaser »

klauss wrote:
chuck_starchaser wrote: Very true; I like this.
But...
I think we should just go to 3D bases, frankly.
To do this now... How would you do it?
For that, we need
  • 3D scenes at bases: Not that big a deal, the player's ship is already a 3D object. We need a way to add lights and control the camera, and define a nice scene XML format (yep... xml... dotscene is such a format and there are exporters for blender and maya - we can parse that).
  • Use the main rendering loop for bases: I'd propose this small refactoring (bases are using a custom loop) since we need the ability to paint the real world outside (for windows). It's just a bonus, we can do this in a later step.
  • 3D clickable hotspots: a box, sphere, or mesh should be definable as clickable in the 3D scene, and a python callback be appendable to it just like it is appendable to rectangular (2D) hotspots. This will require some usage of the raycollider and the most complex part IMO... but it's doable. OpenGL has a selection mode we could use too, but it's kind of deprecated and poorly maintained by most drivers, I wouldn't rely on it.
It doesn't sound like a whole lot of work; but probably integration would be the killer, as usual.
Some of it would benefit 3D cockpits, such as using raycollider for selecting or actioning items.
chuck_starchaser wrote:By the way, if the problem with 3D cockpits is rendering to textures, I have the solution:
Render to texture in the CPU, then upload. Finito!
The similar (but less troublesome) approach is to render to the screen, and then transfer the pixels to a texture, either directly if supported by the GPU, or through the CPU if not.
But this is slow, and limits texture resolution to screen resolution (not that big a deal, but...)
Again, we can start a branch and play with that.
What I meant is this: The stuff we're showing on mfd screens is text, lines, dots...
Heck, we could render that to a texture from Python if we wanted to. And, most screens are seldom updated. And uploading a texture to the videocard is a common operation; no need for new features of dubious cross-platform-ness.
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by klauss »

chuck_starchaser wrote:What I meant is this: The stuff we're showing on mfd screens is text, lines, dots...
Heck, we could render that to a texture from Python if we wanted to. And, most screens are seldom updated. And uploading a texture to the videocard is a common operation; no need for new features of dubious cross-platform-ness.
Yep, but... who's going to program all the required raster ops?
Text drawing, line drawing, circles, texture blitting, scaling, filtering, antialiasing...
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by chuck_starchaser »

Gottcha; I'm not sure what I was thinking.
Anyways, I think I'm going to write a few ambitious trac tickets and try out the milestone feature.
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by -REBEL3- »

Can the engine support different types of docks (e.g light ship docks vs. capship docks.)? I thought up a couple of nifty designs for the ship upgrade "rooms/computers" for the Area. One is a capship-style dock where the ship is in a berth outside, while one is inside a berth inside the station. However, for this to work, we need A-the engine to realize if you are flying a large or small ship,and direct you to the correct docking slot and B-the engine to then display the right upgrade room once you are docked.

I figured we could have a base consist of half a dozen drawn/rendered rooms, all linked to each other with clickable icons.

One note-we need to make things like Star Fortresses much larger-or reduce the size of the ships drastically. The scale seems to be way off, with the ships being much larger then they should be. Of course, this leads into the whole "size of ships" discussion... :roll:
chuck_starchaser
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by chuck_starchaser »

R.E. Ports: No; no way to distinguish them. Would be a good feature to have. Please re-post it to the Feature Requests forum, so it doesn't get forgotten here.
R.E. Scales: The ships need to get smaller, and the accelerations reduced. The problem is not that the station is small; the problem is that the ships are gargantuous; but they "feel" small, because they move quickly, because the accelerations specified in units.csv are completely insane, like I think there's a few ships that can do 40 G's ... :roll: ... and even the slower ones can do 10 G's or so. The plan is to cap the small ships to about 1G, and the bigger ships to fractional G's. THEN you'll be able to feel their size.
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Re: Base Computer Interface

Post by Neskiairti »

capping small ships to 1 g is a bit odd i think.. capping at say 5Gs (but penalties for long distance over say 2G) would be more realistic.
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