It's good Alex, but maybe this and all the other little popups flavor texts over planets and the F1 tooltip expansions in campaign should be modal dialog boxes that pause the game until you press an OK/enter button on them?
To read any of the F1 texts or planet popups you would be insane to not pause campaign, since you're eating supplies and could get jumped by pirates while reading about what the terrain type does. Also you have to move your mouse over them which interferes with your ability to manuever the fleet if need be. So why doesn't the game just pause itself for you when you click on one of these things? When you mouseover a planet/hypergate a little "i icon should appear, you click on it, and then it brings up the dialog box.
As a result I don't bother reading them. So the UI actively discourages players from getting invested in the lore, because nobody wants to manually pause for what should be a dialog box.
I'm not sure how "mouse over and click button that pops up" is better than "mouse over and press spacebar". Pressing space is easier (no need to aim at a button) and tooltips are less onerous to get out of. You don't lose your current context, and there's no transition time. Yes, you're generally supposed to pause when you read tooltips, but pausing is
really easy. And then there are the cases where you *can* get some info out of a tooltip without pausing - for example, when you just want to read the name of the planet.
Also consider the UI flow required to check 5-6 jump points if to get this information you had to click on an entity. It'd be mouse-over, click, dialog comes up, switch where you're looking, read, close, repeat 5-6x. With tooltips, you pause once, move the mouse around a couple of times, unpause, and you're done. There's just no comparison.
It kinda maybe makes sense that space-time should be distorted around gravity wells (as per gas giants giving entry points to a system) so planets could manifest as slight dimples in the hyperspace map.
I think this is really the best solution - have disturbances where the planets are, and if mouseovered they give their names. No need for lists and distances, the player can just see from hyperspace where things are. No extra UI either.
Also a fan of this in addition to the tool tip.
The problem there is that the spacing of jump points in hyperspace is not done to relative scale with the system. Trying to add in these extra disturbances so that they'd never overlap would be troublesome. For example, consider a gas giant with a bunch of moons. There may not be enough room around its gravity well.
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Topic: Show list of nearest objects to hyperspace entrance (Read 10215 times)