Erno Szabados wrote:
> supplies - show what is needed to feed the crew, repair the ship on sea,
> ammunition, etc.
And captured soldiers, passengers for special missions, etc.
> crew - status (health, morale) and listing of the crew - ranks, experience
> (if
> there will be ever such a thing)
Yes, I'll implement a crew system which controls crew members with individual
levels of experience, satisfaction etc. for about 0.5 or 0.6
> > - We'll need a menu entry for options and game saving/loading.
>
> game settings - save/load, graphics, sound, network, gameplay related things.
> There could be icons for save/load, gfx, sound, etc.; when the menu context
> changes, all the icons (probably on the left or right pane only) could be
> replaced with icons of the new context.
Yes, that sounds like a good idea.
> player status - game achievements, battles lost/won, hearts conquered, etc.
> maybe the wealth could also go here, it's up to you.
Wealth will require more screen space once gameplay evolves; the player should
be able to buy land in his home country, stock money in banks and hidden caves,
he needs to control the parts of his treasure map etc., so everything wealth
related requires some space of it's own.
> I thought the bottom bar would be useful as a quick log displayer. It could
> display information on "mouseover" events and when gameplay advances. So for
> less important events we could omit popups.
Yes, it's already used for that in CVS.
> Imagemap: Maybe there could be captions for the items, then I will add the
> shaded backgrounds, like behind the captions "2000". For a first approach on
> the imagemap then you could use these shaded areas as the active ones, so
> mouseover would be fairly easy to implement.
I was thinking about some textual hints that are displayed if the player
presses F1.
The imagemaps can be defined in two ways; either by forming some rectangles
that describe various selections or by creating an - undisplayed - color map
from the imagemap, where each color represents a selection and when there
has been a click on the map the color from the color map is evaluated.
> tavern, yard, market, These are on the imagemap already.
The shipyard should be made a bit clearer, right now the difference between
the player's ship and the yard is not visible. Maybe a kind of crane or
a half-finished ship.
> sail away - the ship (if it is intuitive enough)
> or an anchor (if its not) leave the port and sail away, I could put it on the
> imagemap's bottom right corner to make it more coherent.
I guess the ship is distinguishable enough, if the shipyard get's modified a
bit.
We could also display the ship's name in the menu graphic.
> end turn - advance game events. It could be relocated to the imagemap,
> imagemap's bottom right corner. So all these choices will be on the imagemap
It's hard to add that into the imagemap, I'd suggest a button on the right side.
The turn based system is slowly getting broken up, so it'll probably turn into
a "Rest" button that allows the player to skip a few hours or days if he has
to wait for the shipyard or if he wants to heal some wounds.
> governor - either I could create an icon (with a flag, or something, I will
> try to come up with something) or there is some place for a distant building
> with a big flag or sg. on top of the hills, near the shipyard.
That sounds like a good idea. Maybe a little castle or fortified tower?
Not every town will have a governor, so we'll need a version with and w/o one.
I think that every option reachable through the imagemap should have a
corresponding button on the right hand navigation bar. This is a clearer
way of additional navigation and it allows usage of the menus without a
mouse by cycling through the menus with the arrows. We can avoid it for
0.3, but they could be added at a later stage. Or we must find a way to
make the imagemap keyboard controllable, maybe by adding some numbered
links, as it is done in textmode web browsers like elinks. I'm not sure
yet.
> > We could either split it and have a kind of arrow that switches the
> > two parts or we could make the icons smaller. The latter one may break
> > symmetry with the informational display on the left. What do you think?
>
> I disallow resizing the icons - I tried that and they are losing details and
> does not look so good. They had to be done pixel by pixel and I'm really not
> into that.
> We could either make the panel scrollable or make it "expandable" or
> "auto-expanding" (covering some part of the imagemap when expanded ) should
> the need arise. But with all the things I suggested above I think it is
> avoidable yet.
If we include all the icons referenced in the imagemap, we can add an arrow
to switch between the two navigation layers.
> > - We'll need at least three GUI elements; a message box, a selection
> > box and an input box. How should they look like? With a wooden
> > style like the rest?
>
> I will create something soon. But yes, wooden style they will be, with
> shadings - or black rectangles, if thats simpler - for the input text.
Good, so I'll implement some stubs that can be adapted to the graphics once
they are done.
Cheers,
Moritz
