tracktwo Posted July 15, 2015 Author Share Posted July 15, 2015 Fantastic! Tonight is probably the last night I'll have to work on stuff before I leave. I'll try to get the mini-mod set up tonight, I'm still missing the fix for LW class names suggested by Amineri but it has the coordinates and location name. This mini-mod will be completely invisible until the actual mod that reads the data is ready, of course. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zyxpsilon Posted July 15, 2015 Share Posted July 15, 2015 (edited) Last evening to play with (or examine) such "assets" ?? Fear not -- i was able to deal with the USA & Russia in a swift manner after a good lunch. Soooooo....Here are the last major TWO! USA needed a tricky calibration to fit Alaska & Hawaii but ended up fairly balanced visually. I took the liberty to glow Porto-Rico as well, just for fun. #15) NE_UnitedStates(1024X512_WG) ... Scale == 1.25/1 -- Clip Range... T=200 L=40 B=840 R=1320 (Source image was 1280x640) http://s18.postimg.org/i6556dba1/NE_United_States_1024_X512_WG.png As you know already, Russia was a big juicy gamble with proportions. Doubling the source image made it clear enough, i think. East & West geographic elements were inserted in the available space. Siberia peninsulae is "transferred" back to the integral width... as a result, there's a 32 (divided by 2) pixels column to the far right that won't really need to be accounted for by the code calculations. It's a precision zone - indirectly. That squishing solution you suggested is perfectly fine, AFAIC. #16) NE_Russia(1024x512_WG) ... Scale == 2/1 (Although this is after a necessary 50% correction) -- Clip Range... T=80 L=2176 B=592 R=4096+128(Source image was then a composite of exactly ... 2048x512)*** But, it's the indirect illusion that counts for this beast of a wide reality area! http://s7.postimg.org/uyqwzyrp7/NE_Russia_1024x512_WG.png DONE! :D 16 / 16 !! I will also eMail you the Zip package of WG-S versions -- in about 15-20 minutes. ((( EDIT... comin' your way! ))) You'll have plenty to dream about during your time-off -- if the Bears can stay away! :smile: Edited July 15, 2015 by Zyxpsilon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tracktwo Posted July 16, 2015 Author Share Posted July 16, 2015 Latest update: http://i.imgur.com/h8Dq3Nc.jpg This is a little hard to see, but look in the top left just above the text string for United States and you'll see a panic bar. It's badly placed (I just dropped the symbol on the stage at a random position as a test), but I didn't create this myself, I just imported it at runtime from one the vanilla flash movies. That's great news - it looks like we can import any exported asset from the game as long as it has a name. Not everything is exported, though, and some things are exported as bigger sprites than we might want to make use of. For example, the country info box that appears on the left and right of the map is exported, but as a single unit containing the button, text, panic bar, satellite image, etc. Some of it may be able to be enabled or disabled through actionscript, but this will be a case-by-case basis. At any rate, access to a lot of the existing art work is now ready to go, and this does not need to be embedded in the new swf or redistributed with the mod - it just loads from the user's copy they already have. All that said, I'm not entirely convinced that re-using the existing country bar is the best UI for displaying this stuff. We could use the panic bar UI to represent something else, like the # of missions, but is that really the most obvious thing to use? Also we wouldn't be able to re-use it exactly as it is as an imported symbol - the existing animations don't allow you to control the "fill" of each of the segments independently, they're arranged in a smooth animation from completely empty to completely full, and the colours are fixed for all elements according to the panic level. We'd basically need to re-implement the UI anyway, so why not use something that is a simpler to understand representation? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zyxpsilon Posted July 16, 2015 Share Posted July 16, 2015 Latest update:We'd basically need to re-implement the UI anyway, so why not use something that is a simpler to understand representation? What would you suggest then?Simple numerical values without any attached panic bar elements? I really thought it looked cool to have five differently colored "boxes" and supply an indirect growth meter to give hints on the approximate ranges. The basic idea was that (for the individual countries at least) the Mission-boxes (of 8 colors) would actually supply the facts in numbers. Thus, the generic placeholder underneath each names only required simple stuff. I'd have to agree that it's a doubled-up feature though. If i had a choice -- i'd want both... but if we must use one only... the Mission-Boxes might do the trick. And probably re-design the individual slots with some other conceptual assets -- for the Monthly screen. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tracktwo Posted July 16, 2015 Author Share Posted July 16, 2015 (edited) Probably numbers beside icons? Or maybe boxes beside icons, but the thing about the boxes is the panic had a fixed bound from 0 to 5 (or 100 in LW), but there is no upper bound for mission counts. What would a full box mean for UFO crashes? If full just means the mission type with the most missions and all the others are scaled relative to that, it might look funny... Abductions and crashes would be "full" and the base assault and defense boxes would always be basically empty. Edit: something else to keep in mind is that we don't have 8 little boxes on either side of the map, we have one big box on either side :) these can be divided up however best makes sense. Edited July 16, 2015 by tracktwo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Krazyguy75 Posted July 16, 2015 Share Posted July 16, 2015 I don't understand why we're even bothering to show missions by country. Does anyone even give a damn about mission by country for anything other than panic? I suggest we just show missions using their icon type on the globe. Then you click on a mission to see that missions information. The bars on the side show the panic changes per country that took place this month. Much simpler to read. Another neat feature is if each mission summary (the one for after you click on the icon) came with forward and back buttons to access missions chronologically. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tracktwo Posted July 16, 2015 Author Share Posted July 16, 2015 I kind of like the idea of seeing per country info, mostly because what often happens in my LW games is one particular country will become a real battleground with the aliens trying very hard to take it and me trying to keep it from going down. Being able to see that in an isolated way would be kind of cool, I think. Also I'm thinking that the mission density for countries that are small on the map might make them hard to see unless you can zoom in to a particular country. The forward and back buttons is something I definitely want to add, though. A barely fleshed out idea in my head is to have no just forward and back buttons, but a play button too. This would continuously walk through time, showing missions and other events pop up on the map, with a brief delay between each one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zyxpsilon Posted July 16, 2015 Share Posted July 16, 2015 (edited) Okay... i just made a sample with theory inserts of values only. Totals, June, July & August "boxes" with alternate methods. Some with the Mission Icons greyed out and re-sized to fit... we could even waste the "Base Assaults" as they occur much less often like you recommended. The essential observation here is that all of these numbers would feel crowded on the HUD while the panic bar estimates (as before in May) could appear more familiar and follow through the usual Vanilla principles. http://s21.postimg.org/tq8tg9zg7/Panel_Test_s.png If we can keep the "growth bars" design... it's always possible to just use an overlay to drop the Numbers (probably smaller in size though) in white for clarity. The artist in me certainly likes fancy graphics, given. But when it comes down to functionality -- there's a big difference between (too) ugly & absolute minimal efficiency (be it code related or User friendly that provides relevant details). At the bottom, the Red shape is the actual extent of each slots area as used (per container) by the SWF dispatcher... 381x75. Edited July 16, 2015 by Zyxpsilon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tracktwo Posted July 16, 2015 Author Share Posted July 16, 2015 Hmm. Yeah I'm not really feeling the numbers-on-top-of-icons, agree it looks crowded. But every time I look at may I still think to myself that I have no idea what that is trying to tell me. My brain just doesn't remember what the yellow box actually represents. I am starting to suspect that we just have too much information in too small of a space. How about this for an idea: Reduce the scope to 6months per "page" instead of a full year. This gives us far more vertical space per box - 200px if we use the whole thing for 3 entries instead of 8. Have the panic bar as you have it, and below the bar, scaled down icons. The bar fullness would be the ratio of missions of that type that month. So if you had 10 missions in October and 2 of them were terror, the terror box would be 1/5th full. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zyxpsilon Posted July 16, 2015 Share Posted July 16, 2015 ... This would continuously walk through time, showing missions and other events pop up on the map, with a brief delay between each one. Gosh... i really like this idea! An awesome "Campaign Simulator" that goes through the cyclic nature of events for us to witness as need be.Please -- let it be. ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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