Fleet GUI Expansion

[MacThule]

According to the Roadmap, GUI improvement round is coming in the not-so-distant future, so I thought it might be a good time to look at what ideas are out there regarding fleet interface.

Obviously, a big one is that we need to be able to hotbar specific commands for specific fleets (so drag "Move Fleet: 2 2 2" for My New Fleet 1 onto the hotbar for fast withdrawal, or have "Carrier Recall" on single buttons for each of your fighter wings) to make fleet command more fluid and intuitive. Personally, I think we need something more expansive than that as well. I think that trying to squeeze fleet control into a single window as it currently is will prove insufficient to handle the scope of what is being implemented (bigger player empires, more fleets, more stations, NPC crew & faction members). We currently can't even transfer a ship from one fleet to another unless it's loaded in locally to us.



My Notion
I see a trend towards tabbed windows in our GUI for handling complex aspects of the game. Think "H"(diplomacy & faction management) and "B"(trade network & shop management). I think Fleet command would benefit a lot from its own tabbed window. A tab for fleets, a tab for ships, a tab for stations (including planets), a tab for systems, a tab for crews.

Fleets Tab
Incorporate the current, sortable fleet list into this. Allow easy transfer of ships between fleets. Allow setting of fleet dispositions here; like give Fleet A standing orders to fall back to Home Base at -80% total shields or -15% total armor. It would be nice to be able to filter the list in various ways (names, locations, min/max total members or mass, damage levels, crew morale, etc). It would also be nice to be able to get thumbnail info on crews and their status and effects here and be able to transfer crews or crew members between fleets.

Ships Tab
A sortable list of all owned ships (so Personal, and any Faction ships within your permission range) with filters. Make the data chart customizable. This way if we are looking for a particular ship and can't recall which of 8 fleets it is in, or where it is patrolling, we can find it on the list, and see from here where it is and what it's doing.

Stations Tab
Like ships, except only lists stationary entities we control. It would be nice to be able to hit logic or switch factories and shipyards on/off from here and access faction modules, as well as obviously see information regarding damage, crew morale & effects, etc. Being able to see and filter a list of docked entities would be nice here as well.

Systems Tab
This one I'm less sure about because it's a larger step towards embracing the 4X & RTS elements developing. I'm sure some will see it as unnecessary, but assuming that as complexity emerges within the game players will specialize in their focus, I think that players focused on managing factions, large industries, or empires will really want this sort of GUI functionality, and perhaps many players will never have cause to look at it much. Based on what I'm reading in the roadmap and development direction releases though, and with the map being a bit of a chore to work with for comparing large numbers of systems in detail. I think it would be nice to be able to sort and filter a list of systems based on exploration status/extent, planets, asteroid belts, resource richness levels, stations present, fleets present, crews present, etc. It would be nice to be able to filter this to see our own systems, as well as explored NPC systems and systems owned by other player factions. This seems like it would be important for being able to assess things like reconnaissance and intelligence from scouting with shared FoW, as well as planning expansion based on economic needs and what is present in known systems.

Crew Tab
This one I'm least sure about, because I'm half guessing that Crews/NPCs may need their own tabbed window in the end. When crews are implemented though, we should be able to review them in list form with sorting and filtering based on location, occupation/duty station, morale, skill levels, etc, and the ability to search on individual crew members. Lots of stuff here, and crews aren't in yet so we can only speculate, but since they will be having a direct impact on fleets, ships, stations (and planets? and systems? will we have mining, refining, manufacturing, and leader NPCs helping improve FP generation, mining results, industrial output, etc???), it seems like it would be nice to have access to as part of managing fleets, ships and stations unless/until it gets its own dedicated interface.



This is a bit of a brainstorming I'm hoping might feed practical ideas to our dev team... Thoughts? Hopes/Fears? Related Ideas? Tangents?

 

[Ithirahad]

Stations Tab
Like ships, except only lists stationary entities we control. It would be nice to be able to hit logic or switch factories and shipyards on/off from here and access faction modules, as well as obviously see information regarding damage, crew morale & effects, etc. Being able to see and filter a list of docked entities would be nice here as well.

Just one thought... Doing something like this with a station that isn't loaded would require an entity virtualization/devirtualization system, which would be at least a large update's worth of work on its own... You would need to simulate the logic, factories, and shipyard capacity (number of shipyards, max blueprint dimensions in each shipyard) of a station, along with anything else that might be necessary to simulate a station's functionality. This would be cool if it worked, though, as you could autogenerate some really nice stats with a system like this and be able to integrate those stats into blueprint data, so that you can look at a station blueprint and immediately know what its capabilities are without even having to load it into singleplayer or a creative server. Also, NPC and player factions alike would be able to use their non-loaded stations in a way that is more accurate to how they were constructed.

 

[MacThule]

Just one thought... Doing something like this with a station that isn't loaded would require an entity virtualization/devirtualization system, which would be at least a large update's worth of work on its own... You would need to simulate the logic, factories, and shipyard capacity (number of shipyards, max blueprint dimensions in each shipyard) of a station, along with anything else that might be necessary to simulate a station's functionality. This would be cool if it worked, though, as you could autogenerate some really nice stats with a system like this and be able to integrate those stats into blueprint data, so that you can look at a station blueprint and immediately know what its capabilities are without even having to load it into singleplayer or a creative server. Also, NPC and player factions alike would be able to use their non-loaded stations in a way that is more accurate to how they were constructed.

I think enhanced off-screen virtualization (like the planned, unloaded mining) as you put it - of entities and larger processes - is actually one of the only productive paths of major expansion for this game. I'm sure we will continue to see optimizations of the core system, but because it's so calculation-intensive, I think there's probably a point of diminishing returns. Barring some major breakthrough in computing technology, physics itself is actually a limiting factor. However, the game can be broadly expanded in other directions, like deepening and expanding its RP & 4X/RTS potentials because these are less dependent upon raw, instantaneous calculation streams than block generation and interaction processes attempting to recreate a virtual, voxel physics.

Building opportunities for expanded play styles around the existing sandbox is going to be a lot more productive than most attempts at trying to make the sand in the box better at doing what it does at this point (other than refinement, balance & fixing broken features - polishing work).

The recent NPC empire expansion is rather along these lines - most of the really interesting stuff is not happening onscreen. Instead players can interact with small elements and aspects of very large-feeling, complex virtual interactions happening off-screen between NPC empires. The steps towards a live in-game economy, as well, are not near as heavy as (e.g.) collision calculations, and have potential to bring a lot of play opportunities to the game as they continue.

 

[Lone_Puppy]

I wish we could add these sorts of things to the Display block functionality, to then connect to logic.
Perhaps feed the internal ship remote descriptions from a Display block, as well as using the internal ship remote to trigger a command using a Display block.