Working on armor upgrade screen

Sat Sep 06, 2014 8:23 pm

https://twitter.com/Multivrs/status/508348286458425345

My goal is to make it easier to upgrade armor/devices on the ship. You should be able to repair, replace, and buy upgrades all from a single screen.

RPC · Sat Sep 06, 2014 11:00 pm

Quick question, can modders adapt this screen for capital ships that have ~24/32 segments?

Sat Sep 06, 2014 11:04 pm

We would love to hear about these things on IRC more too.

Just saying!

FourFire · Sun Sep 07, 2014 11:46 am

Yes, we'd love to hear more on the IRC, and many people are interested in more than four armor slots for mod ships.

Sun Sep 07, 2014 3:47 pm

…Or less than four armor segments, as the case may be. Or four armor segments arranged at the corners instead of the compass points. I have a hard time imagining that he hasn’t thought about that, though, since the Manticore has six and no true “forward” segment. Out of curiosity, though, just how are you handling armor count and positioning on that screen, by enumerating armor segments and taking the center of each segment’s arc?

Sun Sep 07, 2014 4:27 pm

AssumedPseudonym wrote: …Or less than four armor segments, as the case may be. Or four armor segments arranged at the corners instead of the compass points. I have a hard time imagining that he hasn’t thought about that, though, since the Manticore has six and no true “forward” segment. Out of curiosity, though, just how are you handling armor count and positioning on that screen, by enumerating armor segments and taking the center of each segment’s arc?

Yes, that's right. I just look at segment positions and place them.

The current system won't scale beyond a certain number of segments (probably 8 or 10), but it should be possible to scale further by (dynamically) decreasing the size/shape of each armor icon. At worst we can always fall back to a different UI.

Sun Sep 07, 2014 4:28 pm

Ttech wrote:We would love to hear about these things on IRC more too. Just saying!

We need a Twitter to IRC bridge!

Sun Sep 07, 2014 8:19 pm

Can this not use the ship selection picture? I prefer less boring angles for that. I think this also would probably be a good place for a sectioned image or a floorplan.

Sun Sep 07, 2014 8:50 pm

Atarlost wrote:Can this not use the ship selection picture? I prefer less boring angles for that. I think this also would probably be a good place for a sectioned image or a floorplan.

Sorry, I'm not sure if you mean "can't this use the ship selection picture?" or "can we use something other than the ship selection picture?"

In case it's the latter: No, you can't currently override it, but it wouldn't be too hard to add that. In addition, I think we can add a way to manually specify armor segment positions.

Mon Sep 08, 2014 1:22 am

george moromisato wrote:
Atarlost wrote:Can this not use the ship selection picture? I prefer less boring angles for that. I think this also would probably be a good place for a sectioned image or a floorplan.
Sorry, I'm not sure if you mean "can't this use the ship selection picture?" or "can we use something other than the ship selection picture?"

In case it's the latter: No, you can't currently override it, but it wouldn't be too hard to add that. In addition, I think we can add a way to manually specify armor segment positions.

I mean something other than the ship selection picture. I tend to use frontal views (or in one case a quarter off the rear) rather than top views for my selection screen images. Call it vanity in wanting more than half the model to be seen at some point. This screen, though, requires a top image.

Thu Sep 11, 2014 1:58 pm

Hey george, im actually working on a screen that will allow a ship to move an equipped item to a specific pre-defined slot on the ship (this is meant for larger playerships, though the functions driving the system could be used on NPCs as well)

It probably wont be able to accommodate full-size weapon icons though so it would be compatible with larger ships, and might just need to be a customPicker or something.

As for this screen:

The size limitations to 8 segments here might be a problem with the biggest of the TSB playerships since one might have slightly more segments.
Will there be some kind of failover alternative screen?

Thu Sep 11, 2014 3:09 pm

All stock ships are playable in Playership Drones, and the largest ships have 20 or 24 armor segments. Destroyers and other medium-sized ships tend to have 12 segments.

The upgrade screen appears to have some use for linked-fire weapon slots too.

Thu Sep 11, 2014 6:32 pm

thougg if we had a function to dynamically scale images we could support big ships in this

Thu Sep 11, 2014 10:43 pm

I think there's dynamic scaling of some sort for the playership for the map display. I think it shrinks large images more than small.

Thu Sep 11, 2014 11:02 pm

There is also scaling for ships in the list of games to load, if the ships are big enough.

It would be nice if the modder can scale images easily. Currently, this seems impossible.