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[nomadic_leader]

The weapons buying/selling screen has some small UI issues.

I want to browse through the weapons, or buy a few copies of a weapon to save for later- so rather than the refit screen, I use the buying/selling screen:

The problem:

• All the weapon sprites are stacked into pyramids like fruit in an Uzbek bazaar.
  
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• This makes them visually difficult to distinguish (unless you play 10hrs per day?)
• Visual recognition is critical because the name isn't shown unless I mouse-over a weapon.
• Thus I have to scroll through the window looking for it, and then mouseover the ones that might be what I want.
• To scroll the window, I put my cursor into the window and use the mousewheel.  But then the weapon description pops up, and blocks my view of the other weapons in the window, so I cannot see as I try to scroll.
• Thus in order to scroll visually through the weapons, I move my cursor back and forth, or use the scroll bar, as in the pre-mousewheel era.

A case study:
Escape Velocity weapons screen (1996 shareware game)

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Starsector screen:

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The Escape Velocity screen is easier to quickly interpret. Objects stand out from each other more.

Suggestions:

• Show the weapon name beneath it. Description should remain in mouseover popup window.

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• Have a longer delay before the description pops up? To facilitate easier scrolling through the list.

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• Show a new picture of the weapon, not the sprite. The popup could show a scaled up version of the picture+ description. This is time/cost expensive for art development, but worth it.

What I mean by pictures:

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(from Starsector concept art)

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Look: The art in SS is really good and the style is awesome too. The more of it in the game, the more beautiful and polished it will be.

Why use art instead of the sprite?

• It is more recognizable. Without clues like the shots we see in combat, 30 tiny different sprites are hard to keep straight. And the numeric info from sprite stacks isn't worth the visual confusion.
• Helps player recognize weapons they encountered in combat: The picture of the Thumper could show purple shots. The beams could be firing their particular colors. In combat a player (especially newbies) will tend to notice the ordnance/beam more than the weapon firing it. I'm still not sure which weapon fires every shot I see in battles. You shouldn't have to learn by rote memorization.
• It helps players better imagine the world of Starsector By showing the weapons in a non top-down view, players can better imagine what they look like. This fleshes out the world and makes it seem more immersive and 'real.' Look again at that SS concept art. Having an autocannon is more fun when you realize how cool it looks up close.

It would be great if the fleet screen showed ship pictures like this too. In Escape Velocity, while you watched the tiny, bland sprites fight it out, your imagination was able to supply the rest, because the game also showed ships in dialogs.

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A game has "good" (i.e. effective) graphics so long as it provides enough for your imagination to inconspicuously fill in the blanks. Games like CoD where five artists make the soles of the players' shoes  miss the point.

Since SS has such cool, original ship designs rather than boring "rocket ship" shapes, it's a bit harder for your imagination to supply the third axis from existing tropes.  But with just one sprite and one painting, human imagination can extrapolate the rest. Then the battles become less battles between sprites, and more battles between 'real,' three dimensional spaceships. Example:

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Starsector concept art

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SS only has combat now, so many players are one of the following:

• Modders- creative types making their own worlds
• API hackers- pushing the limits of the engine with recursive von Neumann missiles etc
• Statcrunchers – Want to always win combat, and in the most efficient way. Play like crashing two spreadsheets together for a few months before moving on.

So perhaps not many players care about these intangibles now. As campaign and lore develop though, there will be more people who play in order to experience a new world. Establishing a rich setting through judicious use of art, sound, and storytelling can make a game into a creative expression similar to a film or book. My suggestion is made with this in mind.

[Debido]

I see your point, but then modders have to make even more art for their faction, many of us struggle to even do the ships.

More frequently we ask for list filtering and ordering of items to help narrow down results. As much as I'd like to see lots of David's artwork, the current system works nicely - we do one art asset that is then shown in the inventory, shops, refit screen and combat. It's efficient and it works.

[Gothars]

I tend to agree on your point about stacking, not just for weapons, but in general. Makes the sprites unnecessarily hard to recognize, the slight brightness difference between uppermost and background sprites is not enough.The method does however convey the relative amount of items efficiently, better than any other method I can think of. Maybe just increase the brightness difference? Or what if the uppermost item was outlined?

...

Made an example of both effects combined:



Works well, I think.


Other than that, I agree with Debido, it would be a lot of work for little gain. It would be great to have a place in the game where alternative art can show up though, for example in the codex.

[Histidine]

I like Gothar's idea. Otherwise I really don't have a problem with telling weapons apart, they all look quite distinctive to me.
As for the "3D" thing, I can make a pretty good guess from the edges of the weapons and ships (at least for the examples in the OP).

(that said, the Uzbek bazaar analogy made me lol)

[nomadic_leader]

Gothars variant makes it look better, but since the stacks don't stack beyond like 16 (?), you use the number in the corner of the box more anyway. Then adding the weapon name would make it all pretty good.


Debido, I sympathize with what you say, but Modders could just paste in the sprite again instead of using fancy artwork. It'd stand out from vanilla, but if you care about aesthetic problems like that, then I think you also must care about the greater aesthetic benefits from more art assets in the game. It's odd to limit Vanilla's quality just so that mods don't look worse than it.

Mods are crucial to a robust community and fun gaming, but since modders are a force here, there is a big kickback against any new assets, and there's a strong vogue (cf spriting thread etc) for any and all mods to have exactly the same style as vanilla, which I find somewhat inexplicable or imitative. The notion that Vanilla and all the mods can or should maintain aesthetic parity is unrealistic and counterproductive to Vanilla.

This is about making SS feel like a finished game rather than just an engine for mods; and polishing features you have before adding new ones. I'd rather see more artwork of all the present ships and weapons than a bunch of new ships and weapons.

I don't want SS to end up feeling like those grand projects built in eccentric 3rd world countries--  like they spent all their money on monuments commemorating the president for life, so there's no money leftover for lightbulbs on any of them.

[Gothars]

Gothars variant makes it look better, but since the stacks don't stack beyond like 16 (?), you use the number in the corner of the box more anyway.

Well, the point of the whole stacking thing is not to give you exact numbers, but to inform you if something is rare or abundant at a glance.

The maximum visual stack size is six.

Supplies, fuel, and I assume the upcoming commodities are not represented at a 1:1 ratio by the sprites, but 1:50. Meaning the stack appears full at 300 units.

Weapons are represented 1:1. Since you rarely need more weapons of a kind than six, it's quite sufficient  to archive the aforementioned goal of quickly giving you a clue about abundance. Maybe small weapons could profit from a deviating ratio of about 1:5, though.

[Tartiflette]

Mods are crucial to a robust community and fun gaming, but since modders are a force here, there is a big kickback against any new assets, and there's a strong vogue (cf spriting thread etc) for any and all mods to have exactly the same style as vanilla, which I find somewhat inexplicable or imitative. The notion that Vanilla and all the mods can or should maintain aesthetic parity is unrealistic and counterproductive to Vanilla.

I'm sorry but that part makes no sense. There are many Total Conversions that radically change the aesthetic of the game. And there are many "Vanilla friendly" mods that try to stay visually coherent with the game. Both have their goals and their public, but aren't compatible. Would you play a Dead Space mod that just change one enemy type for a cell shaded angry Little Pony? Don't try to kid me, you won't. It's about cohesive universe, and matching art-style. If you want Cell shaded ponies, you will look for a mod that replace everything in that way.

Trying to match Vanilla in a mod isn't "counterproductive" on the contrary it allow to enrich the game without making something entirely new. Most of us modders like the game as it is and try to fit in, and we don't try to change it (or make a total conversion in this case). And even if you don't believe me, all non TC mods that had a radically different aesthetic but tried to play with vanilla had a short and sad life...

On the topic of thumbnails, you may be forgetting that it means double the artwork, hence, double the cost! For something that is already in the game but under a slightly different angle, it doesn't sound like a good deal to me. Gothard solution is more than enough for a such a minor problem.

[HELMUT]

I also prefer to keep the weapon sprite rather than the artwork in the shop for two reasons:

-I only know around two modders in the entire community that can properly draw their stuffs in 3D.

-Not as instinctive as the sprite itself. You see a sprite, you know what it does, you know you want it. A (badly) made artwork may be more difficult to know what weapon it really is at first, even with the name under it. It would be a headache to deal with if the station is filled with guns (like when playing with the useful yet nightmarish restock mod)

Also i think the devs have more important stuffs to do than making a proper artwork for each weapons (and possibly ships?).

Otherwise i'm all for a way to make the shopping as easy as possible, with a lot of stuff available, it quickly become messy. Gothars's idea seems like a step in the right direction.

[Alex]

A few quick notes:

1) Had already made most commodities only show one item. The ones that still show multiples are crew/marines and weapons. For crew, it just looks right; for weapons, it's very useful. (That screenshot in the OP doesn't look that great, but it's also an extreme case you're not supposed to encounter much, if at all. And won't, in this release.) Made the background copies dimmer, though - good idea, I think. An outline might be nice, too... hmm.

2) Always showing names: that tends to look cluttered. Tried it at various points in time for various things, generally with the same conclusion. There's also the matter of fitting the name in the cell using a reasonably sized font. As trifling as such UI concerns might sound, they usually add up to being most of the work of designing something.

3) Regarding custom artwork for weapons and ships - it would be great to have, no question! We're also talking about, what, 50+ detailed paintings? It's not very practical, and modding aside, it adds a barrier to internal content creation. (You might say it's "worth it", but it's not like the extra effort can come out of nowhere. Something else has to give.)

[Debido]

@ Alex:

On point 2 for showing a name for the weapons. Sure, I can see it being cluttered and difficulty in sizing the text for the name (which can be a variable).

Perhaps another alternative is to have each weapon/item have a 6 Letter/number 'code' or 'SKU'. When the player holds down the 'Alt' button the SKU code is shown for the items at the bottom of the tile.

The SKU would be something like, the first 3 letters are the manufacturer and the last 3 characters are the weapon/item identifier.

Or alternatively you could reserve 6 x 2 Blocks of characters. The former being manufacturer (faction), and latter being weapon ID again.

This time when the player presses alt, you no longer render the quantity of items but instead render the manufacturer at the top and the weapon ID at the bottom.

Anyway you would now also have a couple of meaningful ways of sorting/filtering weapons. People can sort by manufacturer (faction) and see all the weapons of a given faction lined up, or alternatively filter by product code which would be alphabetical and remembering the name can sometimes be easier as we have an idea how far down the search results it would show up.

[Gothars]

I'm not sure what the benefit of a code number would be, but more sorting options would be nice.

 Now they seem to be sorted by mount size>quantity>name. That's often not very useful, especially the changing quantity of a weapon shifts it around, so you have no real way of memorizing its relative position.

I'd like it if hitting the sort button more than once would toggle between different sorting methods.

For example sorting them by mount type (ballistic, energy, missile) first, or by price.

Made the background copies dimmer, though - good idea, I think. An outline might be nice, too... hmm.

Cool

[Debido]

Well if you have a unique identifier for each weapon, you can positively identify the weapon faster, in theory.

[Gothars]

But... you already have a unique identifier in form of a picture. Which is memorized much easier and recognized much faster than a number.

[David]

3) Regarding custom artwork for weapons and ships - it would be great to have, no question! We're also talking about, what, 50+ detailed paintings? It's not very practical, and modding aside, it adds a barrier to internal content creation. (You might say it's "worth it", but it's not like the extra effort can come out of nowhere. Something else has to give.)

Yeah, basically. I have a full time job and all that comes with that. I've got only so much time to invest into Starsector, so it's best that I put it where it advances the game the most. Doing a unique painting per weapon would increase the art time required per weapon by perhaps a factor ten or more; paintings take a lot more time than tiny weapon sprites. They're probably the most expensive single asset in time-cost (though with that said, I probably enjoy painting the most of any part of art for Starsector).

So while it'd be cool, it's better that we have all the assets required for a trade & event system than paintings for each weapon. Game development is a process of choosing where to invest limited resources (and even expanding labour pool isn't linear expansion of production capacity - work needs to be coordinated, managed, directed).

[Debido]

But... you already have a unique identifier in form of a picture. Which is memorized much easier and recognized much faster than a number.

Not necessarily, quit a lot of weapons, especially mod weapons look the same. There are many many many weapons that need to be categorised, no one can remember them all by look since they share so Many similarities.

Are number easy to remember? No. Why is someone using a number identifier?

It would be like
Vendor: TRITACH
Model: TLANCE

Or

Vendor: HEGMNY
Model : VULCAN

Something like that is easier. You may not be able to remember the picture of the weapon, but you may remember who made it, of the tech or whatever. Knowing that you can look for the vendor, then the weapon. Weapons usually have a similar style or tech amongst a certain vendor.