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[Thaago]

Wow thanks! Thats great to see how things work under the hood. I'm guessing this is called by the manager component you mentioned that limits the number of missions available.

Will we as modders be able to hook our own in into the same system, or would we write our own plugin to call the missions?

[Alex]

I'm guessing this is called by the manager component you mentioned that limits the number of missions available.

Yeah, exactly.

Will we as modders be able to hook our own in into the same system, or would we write our own plugin to call the missions?

Either, depending on how you want it to work. Or entirely custom logic for adding these. The amount of code to hook it up is pretty minimal in either case.

[Gothars]

Gave it a shot:

Cool!

I think this is alright, hmm. Main concern is that I suspect 90% of the players wouldn't know what the heck that means or even notice it in the first place. In which case the relatively low amount of clutter this adds has no upside. Going to keep an eye on this and see how it feels to use.

Mhh...You could use flashing warning colors if an icon is about to run out of time that the player actively accepted or marked as important. Would certainly draw attention in the short term and be educational in the long term.

I mean, yeah, "or" instead of "and" would be nice at times, but I'm not liking the UI/interaction complexity costs that come with that, and of the two, "and" seems the much more useful option. We're dealing with potentially lots of intel, and the goal is to be able to drill down, not show more and more of it.

Thought about that a bit: maybe hovering the cursor over a tag could work as "or"? No added UI elements, self-explanatory, no danger of cluttering the map with symbols, since you can't hover over more than one tag at a time (so display the symbols of two at most). But it would be nice to view e.g. bounties and missions at the same time to plan an optimal route.

Another benefit: Showing the entirety of two items groups (from hovering) just before showing the overlap of those groups (from then clicking) would be valuable visual information. It would immediately give you a feeling for how similar or dissimilar the two groups are, relative to their size.

[Robbie Vulcan]

maybe hovering the cursor over a tag could work as "or"?

How about left click/right click, and highlighting the boxes with diff colors to indicate which you've done. A set of transparent diagonal stripes to cross out the excluded boxes, or some similar indicator like greying the boxes out, would make it easier to visually display how the player input is affecting the filters. Hovering seems difficult to intuit.

[Nanao-kun]

Oh, I was thinking something like how the ability icons get partially dimmer, but yeah, this could work. Gave it a shot:

Spoiler

[close]

I think this is alright, hmm. Main concern is that I suspect 90% of the players wouldn't know what the heck that means or even notice it in the first place. In which case the relatively low amount of clutter this adds has no upside. Going to keep an eye on this and see how it feels to use.

That just means one more thing for someone to put in a "Starsector - Top 10 QOL features YOU NEVER KNEW EXISTED!" video in the future.

[Embercloud]

Thank you for looking at the warning beacons, I had to write down Where the level 3 ones were on pen and paper previously.

[ArkAngel]

I’m really a fan of the circular time remaining effect on the intel screen. I feel like it’s fairly intuitive to make the leep to understanding what it means after looking at it, then at the tooltip, then at it.

[Alex]

Thought about that a bit: maybe hovering the cursor over a tag could work as "or"? No added UI elements, self-explanatory, no danger of cluttering the map with symbols, since you can't hover over more than one tag at a time (so display the symbols of two at most). But it would be nice to view e.g. bounties and missions at the same time to plan an optimal route.

Another benefit: Showing the entirety of two items groups (from hovering) just before showing the overlap of those groups (from then clicking) would be valuable visual information. It would immediately give you a feeling for how similar or dissimilar the two groups are, relative to their size.

Hmm - unfortunately, that's super awkward from an implementation standpoint. The way stuff is laid out on the map depends on the set of stuff being laid out (as it tries to avoid overlap to a degree, using some heuristics), so e.g. you can't just add more icons and have the existing icons/names/etc stay in the same spots, which seems crucial for this concept.

It also feels like it might feel weird because one's impulse might be to mouse over one of the icons that just popped up to see what it's about, causing it to disappear. But mainly it's just that it's a pain to even give this idea a shot.

How about left click/right click, and highlighting the boxes with diff colors to indicate which you've done. A set of transparent diagonal stripes to cross out the excluded boxes, or some similar indicator like greying the boxes out, would make it easier to visually display how the player input is affecting the filters.

It's not really "excluded", though, it's logical-AND vs OR. Tags are excluded if they're just not checked. Having a mix of both AND and OR is ... well, it's going to be confusing to the player, and it's not very clear how it would work if you think through the details. (E.G. missions and hegemony or tri-tachyon = the desired answer is probably missions AND (hegemony or tritachyon) but that requires making distinctions between tags and trying to intuit the order of operations based on that and that's just crazy town). Plus it's asking the player to think about something that ideally they could just do without it getting in the way. I think there's a lot of value in the UI just being super simple to use.

That just means one more thing for someone to put in a "Starsector - Top 10 QOL features YOU NEVER KNEW EXISTED!" video in the future.

but also

Thank you for looking at the warning beacons, I had to write down Where the level 3 ones were on pen and paper previously.

(Haha, nice.)

I’m really a fan of the circular time remaining effect on the intel screen. I feel like it’s fairly intuitive to make the leep to understanding what it means after looking at it, then at the tooltip, then at it.

Thank you, that's very encouraging!

[steelwing]

E.G. a color change in the rim would be tiny, but is still seems like it would be helpful:

Spoiler

[close]

Oh, I was thinking something like how the ability icons get partially dimmer, but yeah, this could work. Gave it a shot:

Spoiler

[close]

I think this is alright, hmm. Main concern is that I suspect 90% of the players wouldn't know what the heck that means or even notice it in the first place. In which case the relatively low amount of clutter this adds has no upside. Going to keep an eye on this and see how it feels to use.

This would suit me perfectly.

[Torch]

What about working the "time to get there" into the "time left" on the mission icons by putting another bar on? I made a couple examples.

Image

Spoiler

[close]

GIF example

[Alex]

Hi, and welcome to the forum! Starting off strong, with an animated gif *thumbs up*

Hmm. My feeling is that it might be a bit too much detail/meaning to try to cram into such a small visual element; more could be less here if it ends up adding more clutter than clarity.

Not that it couldn't work, necessarily, that's just my initial thought. Might be worth a look, but I'm also pretty done with that section of the UI and working on other things, so I don't want to go back and start messing with it again, if that makes sense, unless it's for something essential.

[vivalas]

New to the forum too, but love this game.

Apologies if this has already been suggested or asked for, but since we're on the topic of faction commissions, I always thought it would be neat if faction commission got more gameplay.

It would be cool to be able to search ships and basically do the same things faction ships do now. Confiscate contraband, take bribes, mark people as criminals etc. Not many space games out there let you play as the navy/police and actually do the things they do, so it would be pretty neat.

[Alex]

New to the forum too, but love this game.

Apologies if this has already been suggested or asked for, but since we're on the topic of faction commissions, I always thought it would be neat if faction commission got more gameplay.

It would be cool to be able to search ships and basically do the same things faction ships do now. Confiscate contraband, take bribes, mark people as criminals etc. Not many space games out there let you play as the navy/police and actually do the things they do, so it would be pretty neat.

Hi, and welcome to the forum!

So, hmm. This is the sort of thing where you could literally add an endless number of things kind of like it, just different directions to flesh things out in. My feeling is that it makes sense to flesh out things like this when they're solving a particular gameplay or design problem or just tie into a bunch of mechanics.

So, for example, I probably wouldn't want to go very deep into this in particular, since the game really isn't about that - it'd make more sense for a game focused on trying to simulate that aspect of things.

On the other hand, I could totally see adding a mechanic where you can intercept a smuggler and have certain options for dealing with them. In fact, was just thinking about this the other day, in the context of a specific difficulty one of your colonies might be facing, which is really the crux of things.

If this kind of thing is the glue that helps build something else that's design-critical, then I'm all for it. If it's just for its own sake, then I'm very much hesitant to do that - building out a system like that with depth is a lot of work (and a lot of complexity, potential for bugs, and for generally bogging down development), and it needs to play a critical role in the design to be justified.

Not to say it's a bad idea, per se! It is indeed neat

[xenoargh]

If scanning a fleet worked and freighter fleets carried good cargoes instead of nearly-always-junk, it'd make piracy considerably more interesting.

Problem here is largely UI; writing the code to get the fleet's cargo manifest is trivial, pushing that to the player, not so much.  I've thought about how I'd do it in a mod; have "Scanning" be a Skill, open a Dialog that displayed the cargo to the player after it completes, with a possible rep penalty if you're not running with your Transponder down (after all, scanning a fleet looks pretty suspicious).

[Gothars]

Or you could display a partial cargo manifest on the fleet mouse-over, when you're close enough to a fleet. Basically, introduce another sensor status level that comes after "unidentified - just symbols", "unidentified - hulls visible" and "identified".

Like so:


I think it should only show the few most valuable/numerous goods in their cargo holds.