Scripts and Computer Play Aids?

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OneMadOgre
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Re: Scripts and Computer Play Aids?

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Fall of Night - Year 3, Turn 6 viewtopic.php?f=38&t=1827#p10557

Represented the pirates at Barnard with red. Also the supply lines they've disrupted as red. Trying a quick SVG blob for a space station and a time ship icon for a fleet. Kind of want to get this a little more settled before I do the transformation from the data to the json the map will need.
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Re: Scripts and Computer Play Aids?

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I'm not sure how practical it it, but I could see having togglable UI overlays that would pop up the icons for the additional data, such as for resources (CAP/RAW), population (CEN/MOR/PRD), etc. I think the best way to do those resources would be to have an icon for each and then color code them. Something like this:

Capacity = Globe = Blue
RAW = Pickaxe and shovel = Yellow

Census = Playskool style meeple guy = Green
Morale = check mark or head? = Brown
Productivity = factory = Orange

Then would reinforce the visuals and give you better "at a glance" recognition with the interface.

I am current using basic shapes as indicators as I've found more detailed icons to be harder to read on the map. Right now I'm doing Triangle = Convoy, Circle = Supply Depot, and Square = Shipyard. Then I'm color coding based on faction ownership. I'm really inconsistent with how I use that, but my attempts to use other iconography has proven too busy or difficult to parse when zoomed out.

Fleets could follow a similar concept, using like a Trek-insignia style Chevron with a number in it as a unique identifier to tell you wish fleet it is? Or a mouseover effect that gives a tooltip with that information.

I like having disrupted jump lanes showing in a different color. That really helps to highlight that fleets can no longer draw supply over those routes. I think the Galaxies changes to Supply cleans this up, so that it's now explicit that you can trace supply into our out of a contested system, but not THROUGH the system. Before there were some weird exceptions that cropped up in cases and this is just simpler. Just like now the "extended supply routes" I'm working with get rid of the whole paired Supply ship idea and replace it with Total Supply in System = max length of supply route, and extended supply routes CAN cross restricted jump lanes. As a player doing this by hand, that has really made play speed up for me because it seems more intuitive.
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Re: Scripts and Computer Play Aids?

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I love these ideas. Overlays are a great idea. Keeps you from having to click in and out of each system. I'll work that out today.

Although, I worked for LEGO as a model builder once in my career, so I can't do PlaySkol. :)

Me then and now.
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Re: Scripts and Computer Play Aids?

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It seems like one of the big advances in UI design with games the last few years has been finding ways to do those kinds of intuitive overlays so that players can turn on as much extra information as they need, and remove those that they don't, rather than searching through tabular data on another screen or drilling down into the content.

Neat picture! I can only imagine what it was like being a model builder for LEGO. I have containers full of them down in my closet still. Some day I may break them back out and burn an afternoon playing with them again :)

As for the icon I was thinking of, it might be better to call them the pawn icon that you see a lot? Basically a circle head and a half oval/rectangle shape for the body. I am not having an easy time finding a picture of one via GIS, but I think that most game boxes are going to have something similar on the "number of players" area.
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Re: Scripts and Computer Play Aids?

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I like the ideas. Not sure I like how I implemented them, but I'm a big fan of little increments in code with lots of feedback.

Left this one as just an attachment. I've noticed, you have to right click and view the other images on a new tab to see them at full size.

Edit: Looks like it still puts in inline. :) I used colors for coding. Green for you, Blue for ally, Red for enemy. I'll have to think about giving each player a flag so that I can display those too to give you an idea if some political tomfoolery would help a player.
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Re: Scripts and Computer Play Aids?

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Looking at the latest screenshot, one thing that jumps out at me is that maybe the neutral (non-controlled) systems shouldn't have the grey circles around them signifying control? I think that might make it more obvious at a glance which systems are neutral and which aren't.

I am living in a glass house here, as I colored my own hexes grey to signify the same thing, but you've got the black starscape for contrast where otherwise I have a blank white canvas in Illustrator.

The bar graphs for resources still seem a bit hard to parse on the fly. I think numeric representations with the iconography and colors is going to make that easier to read.

I like the fleet markers there, and the fact that they are color coded to faction.

I'm not quite sure why phpBB does that with images. I'll try and take a look the settings this week and see if I can change it so that image attachments appear as downloadable files rather than inline images.
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Re: Scripts and Computer Play Aids?

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If you spend anytime on the forums, look at discourse. http://www.discourse.org/ I swapped over to this for my site and I can't tell you how much more I like it. https://sih.onemadogre.com/

I was just debating with myself if I wanted to use the borders to show control, limit of the circle (which is now keyed to the system stats), or maybe supply. So much to convey. Better suited to a UI guy, which I am most certainly not. I think it might be stable enough however, for me to start tying it to data. Once I do that, I should be able to get it up on Azure and let people play with it a bit, including building a random map on request. (Those are laid out on hexes. I just tweaked the database here to make it look like that.)
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Re: Scripts and Computer Play Aids?

Post by Tyrel Lohr »

Thanks for the recommendation! I'll have to download that and test it out on my local environment and see how it runs and what features are there.

The sysgen stuff I've been fiddling with in Galaxies and in my Fall of Night campaign are still pretty close to the original VBAM, so whatever rule set you adapt should be fine as long as it can spit out the system importance and special traits. You'd probably want the # of special traits to be a variable, as Galaxies and FoN are both using a single special trait (barring the 12 "Roll Twice") whereas old VBAM is still doing 1 Unimportant, 2 Minor, 3 Major.

If I get some time tonight I'll try to do a quick and dirty mockup of what I think the info display might look like with the numeric values and icons.
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Re: Scripts and Computer Play Aids?

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Biggest problem I've had so far with system generation is that system importance is decided at the Star level, not the star system level. Since systems can have multiple stars, it gets a little loose.

Got the Angular UI now correctly talking to the API. Big step for me, since that's the first time I've tried that. Sadly, my hair has been pointy for some time.

Next up is figuring out how I'm going to handle the jump lanes in a random universe as well as working out how I'm going to model settlements. Current detail page still looks like this one:
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Feels like it needs to have an understanding of how it would handle multiple fleets, shipyards, supply depots, and ground troops. Probably going to focus there now for a bit. That will allow me to have the overview map and the system detail screens scaffolded enough that I can let people click back and forth between them.

Very happy to have design input.
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Re: Scripts and Computer Play Aids?

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Retooled the system detail screen so that it has the planets from the galactic companion document.

Rethinking the ships.

Thinking clicking into a planet activates the middle panel.

Feedback most welcome
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Re: Scripts and Computer Play Aids?

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Nothing really to show tonight, just a frustrating night with Angular. Got back to basically where I was, but now it's more of a single page app. Going to need to figure out how to tag <SVG> elements with ng-repeat for anchor tags. Experiments to date have been unsuccessful.
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Re: Scripts and Computer Play Aids?

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Little more progress this evening.
* Stars now randomly name from a list of 350 or so stars. Thank you Wikipedia.
* App now correctly transitions between star map and individual system.
* Foundation laid down for settlements.
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Re: Scripts and Computer Play Aids?

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Discovered today that chrome will cache angular template html files that I really wish it wouldn't. That and I don't get as much done when Internet is out and I'm left to only my own smarts.

Current status of a star system detail page. Ships are static and not pulling from APIs, Shipyards and Depots are also statically defined in the API as true, so they plot on every planet. (Settlements aren't ready yet. When they are, the Shipyards and Depots will connect to settlements, and the control circle on the planet will get colored.)
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Re: Scripts and Computer Play Aids?

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The system importance modifiers I think should only apply for the primary star in the system when using those expanded system generation rules. I'm still tempted to just get rid of the multi-star systems entirely because it adds an extra complication that just isn't all that interesting. But I'll hold off on making any snap judgements on that.

The progress looks good.

I like the shipyard graphics next to the planets showing that there is a base there.
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Re: Scripts and Computer Play Aids?

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oh, I like that. Then I don't roll planets on every star, just the first one.

But if I want to setup the rolls for close/far neighbors, I could set up a far neighbor to have it's own planets.
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