Campaign summary/Journal

[Zyxpsilon]

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.

 

Problems solved, AFAIC.

 

That would give us plenty of leeway to find an appropriate structure and specifically design these larger "slots" with whatever should become necessary or wished for. I'll start to work on a basic mockup_sample with that concept stuff in mind. That would account for my own vacation week.

 

My little boxy_X at the bottom with their cyan arrows would simply get clicked on more often.

 

AND -- as a bonus... should allow us to fit almost everything shown by the familiar "World-Reports"!!

 

http://s7.postimg.org/cgsrj7xnf/Monthly_Report_Items.png

 

Imagine that. :)

Edited July 16, 2015 by Zyxpsilon

[tracktwo]

Cool, thanks! If you have the time and inclination, would you be able to mock up both a colourful version and a plain cyan one?

 

As mentioned on Reddit, some of us are big fans of muted colour schemes, and some of us aren't. Personally, I'm in the former and you're probably in the latter, so I'd like to please both camps. Also as I mentioned on Reddit there is the colourblindness issue... I'd prefer to not have anything distinguished only by colour, but colour+something else (eg the icons) is good.

Edited July 16, 2015 by tracktwo

[Zyxpsilon]

Sure, i'll do both versions... but, it will all take *A* week! :smile:

 

Late afternoon EDIT;

A swift test phase result. Still some spare room to add a few more things at the bottom left side (( Well.. just edited something into that section! )).

 

http://s18.postimg.org/yvum08v95/Basic_Month_DOUBLED_May_sample.png

 

2 (s)cientists & 2(e)ngineers... 17 missions/events in total hovering above a Skyranger layer (triple dots to indicate that there might be more types (Base-Assaults, UFO escaped, etc) *NOT* shown on our row of basic 6)... 10 Research Projects completed, 4 Foundry... Satellites Launched now at the bottom.

 

The UFO-Crash (Cyan) symbol could use some kind of "Flames insert' to differentiate it from the other (Blue_Landed).

 

Currently using an area (as rendered on the Situation-Room Panel calibration *AFTER* processing by SWF) of 310x128 which is equivalent to the normal two slots ratio... only!

 

PS; I think what could be added to that empty bottom-left area are; Totals of... Elerium + Alloys + Fragments + Meld gathered ?! :wink:

 

PS2; Krazyguy75... note that the EMAF values inserted above are snapshots from the actual ingame UI where a special font is being used & sized @16 for the Satellites-Bonuses instructions text paragraphs in the end.

 

PS3; Been thinkin'. What if we used 6 collapsible slots per panel and transfer the Totals section underneath (currently having these symbols anyway) the Map screen. Right now, a fairly decent sample allowed me to still have an acceptable ratio... it's currenntly 310x84 (yep -- coincidentally stacks to 504 in height) only and i believe SWF can handle such type of "morphshapes and scripting" rather easily -- if you are as knowledgeable as XMTS, in fact! :smile:

 

The old mockup showed up three extra areas that could just be discarded; Reserved + By Category + Auto-Switch.

Back with 12 months at any given time -- On-Screen.

 

Two tiny arrows become the clickable assets necessary to process the on-screen switching (isolated) cycles. This way, anyone can inspect the remaining details (EMAF + Satellites + UFO escaped, Research, Foundry, etc) and also "push" the 17 missions circle-tags on the map for analysis.

 

http://s12.postimg.org/el6ov2cel/Basic_Month_DOUBLED_May_310x84_Collapsible.png

 

Right?!? :ninja:

Edited July 17, 2015 by Zyxpsilon

[Krazyguy75]

Part of the reason the numbers don't look right is that XCOM uses fonts with lots of right angles, and the font you are using for the numbers mockups is very curvy and smooth, which is rather un-XCOM-like.

[Zyxpsilon]

Yep -- i know.

 

This *sample phase image* is using Arial while the authentic final version should be done with AF-Carplate-Medium... it's just that i needed a sense of relative whites on grey layers. When it comes to scaling such HUD components it's always better to stick to commonly known font variations for the design steps. Trust the graphics "experts" - they normally do the right thing, the right way. ;)

[Krazyguy75]

Eh.

 

I just think that the font makes the mockup look less good, and given mockups are supposed to simply represent the potential final version, I think that misleads people into thinking it looks worse than it is. Especially for non-graphic designers, who will go "That looks off" but be unable to place what looks off.

 

In other words: I WILL BE FORCED TO KILL YOU IF YOU CONTINUE TO MESS WITH MY OCD VIA FONTS. IT MUST BE PERFECT.

[XMarksTheSpot]

I've only skimmed over the previous 8 pages of this thread, so pardon me if this has been brought up before.

 

First off, showing a detailed campaign breakdown, great idea - the fact that you successfully injected a new Flash movie into a scene is a great achievement in itself :thumbsup:

 

From the looks of it the plan is to hijack the main situation room UI to display the breakdown, cramming lots of details into the country slots. Personally, I don't think that is a good plan of attack. You have very little screen real estate available in those slots and therefore you'd have to rely on pictograms, numbers, etc. to encode information which is a concern from a readability/usability point of view.

 

If at all possible I'd suggest to create a separate view screen altogether, not unlike the XCOM Finances or Pending Requests screens accessible from the situation room menu. This way you could display one or more frames covering as much screen space as you need.

 

As for the actual contents of that screen, why not try to go full retro and create chart views like in ye olde X-Com or X-Com: Apocalypse? A graph conveys the kind of timeline information you're aiming for much better than boxes of text and icons, in my opinion. I'd imagine such a screen could contain a tabbed view containing area or line charts displaying different aspects of the campaign, like XCOM/alien activity (i.e. missions presented vs. missions taken, UFOs sighted vs. UFOs shot down) or XCOM finances plotting different types of income (item sales, council funding, mission cash prizes, etc.) and spending (facility upkeep, manufacturing costs, interceptor/soldier purchases, etc.) over time. Depending on the time-resolution of the data I could image a chart view could allow zooming in from a yearly breakdown to a monthly breakdown allowing you to track individual events down to the day (or hour/minute/second even ;)).

 

This may well be beyond the scope of this project or even nearly impossible, but one can dream, eh? :)

[tracktwo]

I think that is kind of where we are progressing... I definitely still love having the map be a key part of the ui for this, to show mission locations. The pending requests box fits nicely to the left of the map so a similarly sized box would work. An overlay along the lines of the financial report might be useful for more detailed info that doesn't require visibility to the map, like the charts you suggest. I need to think about those more, they might be cool :)

 

Even just using the available space where the country boxes were is better than directly keeping those boxes, but it still might not be enough space. Once Xyz finishes the mockup of the adjusted one with 3 boxes in the side we can see how that works out.

[bilfdoffle]

I'd love a log of all the meld/elerium/alloys I've gathered throughout the game It'd be very helpful for planning future games, as far as knowing what I can sell in the grey market early on. And the end-of-game report doesn't even track the meld (an oversight or incompatibility with statistics, I guess).

[tracktwo]

Increases in resources are already logged both in the mission summary entry and also as top level strategic entries in the journal, something like "3.15.2015 xcom gained 8 of resource weapon fragments".

 

This does seem to be bugged , possibly only in LW. It doesn't include the resource name a lot of the time. I'll look into fixing that. I also don't recall seeing if the game tracks expenditures of the resources. That could be because I missed it, they're recorded as gains with negative values, or they just aren't there. I need to look into it when I get back and make sure they're tracked correctly.

 

The other thing I'm not sure is recorded is when projects are started. It'd be good to have an entry for when you begin research or a foundry project.