Working out a new Economy GUI for Demo 7+

[alms66]

Politics Detail Panels:

[alms66]

Military Detail Panels:

[alms66]

Economy Details (Part 1):

[alms66]

Economy Details (Part 2):

[alms66]

I’ll do a screenshot by screenshot rundown, starting with my first post, with comments on them and how they relate to Clash.

Screenshot 1 (From this Thread)
I like trees. Actually, I love trees. They are an enormously efficient way of compacting a vast amount of data into a very small space. We must make extensive use of them. This shot in particular isn’t very detailed, but it’s a start.

What I'd do is split the panel in two, with the tree on the left and the info and slider on the right. I'd also put that top bar of info on the right side. IMO, this would be a much cleaner and rather good design.

Screenshot 2 (Chariots of War)
I’m not sure how the player will affect trading, except that he can set tariffs. This could be a good screen to model the tariff setting panel on. Have each resource listed on the left and tariff levels on the right, including special modifiers for favored nation and economic treaties.

Screenshot 3 (CTP2)
I really like CTP2’s interface. The wheel in particular and the details to the right of it (lower right-hand corner). Again, this is an excellent example of compressing a large amount of data into a small space, but this time, with tabs (Empire, City, Unit, Msg, etc.). We must also make extensive use of tabs.

The Empire Manager Screen has very little that could be used for Clash, IMO.

Screenshot 4 (CTP2)
The National Manager Screen may be useful to us. It shows how much food, crime, research, pollution, and production is produced by a city, as well as the happiness level, population, and on the Status tab, what each is building.

Screenshot 5 (SimCity4)
I like the bottom portion of the Budget window. It should be used on our highest level econ interface, though we’d use turn, instead of month. The rest of it is ok, but trees would be useful here.
I want to see a real budget tree in Clash. I want spending to go into the red and hurt the economy.

Screenshot 6 (SimCity4 Taxes)
I like the tax breakdown here. We could do it by social class and ethnicity, even religion perhaps?

Screenshot 7 (SimCity4 Utilities)
This is a good example of upkeep sliders on Infrastructure. The vertical white line indicates ideal spending, while less hurts and more helps, to a point.

Screenshot 8 (SimCity4 More detail on Utilities)
This is probably useless for us, but I wanted to show it, just in case.

Screenshot 9 (SimCity4 Transportation)
Just a second example of Infrastructure upkeep stuff.

Screenshot 10 (SimCity4 Loans)
Loans are a nice feature of SimCity, but the money comes from nowhere. In Clash, it will come from other countries, and possibly, from private banks in more modern times?

Superpower 2

Screenshot 1
These overview panels are ideal examples of what we need for Clash. In Clash, we’ll have many areas (Military, Economy, Diplomacy, Technology, etc.), each with a single button that brings up the overview window.
No player should be required to go beyond this point, if he doesn’t want to. There should be very general orders and info here. Orders such as “Increase Government Spending” for when you feel you’re raking in too much money, “Increase Military Strength” for when you feel you need it. The opposite should be possible on the same slider. That’s another gem in the interface toolkit… sliders. I like em.

The other screenshots are just detail really, and we’ll have to decide what to put on which ones, and even which ones are needed in the first place. These shots may help in the decision process.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by alms66
I'm reviving this thread again because it is nearing the time that it will be essential to have a new econ interface.

Well, it might be essential or it might not. But I wouldn't spend too much time on this right now b/c we don't have anyone to do the programming. I don't have time to code it, and lack any real knowledge of gui programming. Laurent has too much on his plate and hates gui coding. It would be a great project for someone new that was good with gui, but we haven't had much in the way of new recruits recently.

Thanks for posting all the shots, they'll be useful eventually. I may motivate myself to try some ads at some game programming sites to see if we can get someone that way. However historically such people have been very hit-and-miss and tend to consume as effort in time etc. as they contribute.

Any Java / Gui types out there interested in an important contribution to Clash?

[alms66]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Well, it might be essential or it might not. But I wouldn't spend too much time on this right now b/c we don't have anyone to do the programming. I don't have time to code it, and lack any real knowledge of gui programming. Laurent has too much on his plate and hates gui coding. It would be a great project for someone new that was good with gui, but we haven't had much in the way of new recruits recently.

I've sort of got my hands full with the tech tree, tutorials and graphics. Once the tutorials and first run of the tech tree are out though, it should require much less effort to keep up with the tech tree changes than it requires to set it up, and graphics can progress at whatever slow pace they progress at*, so I'll look into it then. I did lots of custom GUI stuff for EIT, which wasn't too difficult, and I did some stuff with MFC for the tools while developing EIT, and that was even easier. So if Java's Swing stuff is along the lines of MFC, I suspect it's not really that difficult to do. I'm with Laurent though, I hate doing it.

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Thanks for posting all the shots, they'll be useful eventually. I may motivate myself to try some ads at some game programming sites to see if we can get someone that way. However historically such people have been very hit-and-miss and tend to consume as effort in time etc. as they contribute.

I know what you mean. I posted several ads on those sites, and got mostly flakes. It's best to just post a general help wanted ad and bump it every few weeks or so, if you're going to do it at all.

*I've also placed ads for artists in a few spots (Gamedev, Garagegames, deviantArt, etc.) I have nearly 30 tiles (mostly units) which could be drawn for the game, if we had someone, so there's plenty of work for artists.

[alms66]

I'd also like to add here that it would be a good idea to incorporate the idea of 'Ranking' into each area of the game. Thus if the player has the largest and best military He is Rank 1 in military, if his economy is the best, Rank 1 Economy, if he has the most allies & treaties Rank 1 Diplomacy, etc. This would be the player's (and the AI for that matter) overall indication of where their empire is in the world stage.

[alms66]

Here is a very crude mock-up for the Economic GUI, similar to the one I did for the Technology GUI:

The top blue bar is the typical windows bar.
The left-hand pane is the “Budget Tree”. Note that what is displayed is what is currently used in most scenarios as of demo 8. The three tabs across the top allow the user to switch between the three economic levels, Civ, Province & Square. Each level in the tree must total 100%. So Advancement + Infrastructure + Military must equal 100%, while Food Tech, Manufacturing Tech and Military Tech must equal 100%, for example.
The Province/Named City drop box allows the user to select a Province by name if the Province tab is selected or a city (only named city tiles) if the City tab is selected. When the Civ tab is selected, the box is non-functional (this is the easy way out, ideally you could select another civ and see whatever information your spy network gives you). This box is merely a convenience. The user can still click on the main map to select his target City (tile), Province or Civ.
The right-hand pane is the “Information Pane”, and is liable to change depending on which particular node in the Budget Tree is actually selected (Note that the pane is grayed out when no nodes are selected). I’m going to describe this pane, “row” by “row”.

Row1: This row consists of the “Taxes” slider (1-100), an edit box and the number display. This sets all tax categories to the same level. The “Taxes” button can be clicked to bring up a more detailed popup window with further tax level breakdowns. The button to the far left is either gray (meaning the slider is active and all levels are equal) or red (meaning this slider is inactive since some or all of the tax levels in the detailed popup are not equal). Clicking that button when it is red, changes it to gray and resets the tax levels on the popup, while clicking it when gray does nothing.
Row2: This row consists of a number of buttons. Currently, they are unorganized, due to there being a rather large amount of space to fill here. I felt it was pointless to lay them out, until I can find more things to include here. Maybe you guys can help me out with that?
Row3: This row consists of the “spending” slider (1-100), an edit box (to enter an exact number), and the number setting display (displays the actual number set). This controls the % of money put into the selected node in the Budget Tree.
Row4: This space will be filled with the current “Econ Stats” popup window.

Again, feel free to ask for more explanation, and suggestions are welcomed.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi alms:

Your shot at it looks decent, although I can't say for sure whether I prefer Lee's cascading windows to your tree. Probably the tree is better.

I must apologize, but I'm really not interested in discussing something like this that has no coder that's going to do it. My Clash time is too limited to spend it discussing things that aren't likely to happen soon. So, if you feel driven to work on things like this, that's no problem so long as you don't get frustrated if I (and perhaps others) don't say much. I'm trying to focus on the D8.1 things with my limited time.

Cya,

Mark

PS If a coder should show up that would change the matter completely, since this is an area that really needs improvement!