UI tweaks

Some thoughts on UI that I’ve had while playing NP. Overall it’s pretty slick, but a few things stuck out:

  • In the galaxy list view, it would be useful if you could restrict the list to just visible stars (I think this used to be an option in the original version). Sometimes you want to fortify a front, but with a big list of stars it’s often hard to pick out the handful that you want to upgrade. (Yes, you can use the quick update thing, but it’s hard to tell with that what the cheapest option is). This might make sense for bulk upgrade, too.
  • In the quick upgrade bar, greying out options that you can’t afford, and perhaps highlighting the cheapest 3 of E/I/S, would make it a lot more usable. At the moment, it’s fairly ‘noisy’, in that it’s hard to pick out the numbers from each other.
  • In Intel when you’re mousing over the graph, it only shows one player, even if there are two or more there, which makes it hard to tell where people are (currently I’m clicking on and off them). If it’s easy to do, offsetting a player’s graph by a pixel or so would also make it easier to tell where each player is.
  • Dates and times are a bit screwy too - sometimes it’s a stardate/tick and sometimes there’s a normal date along with it too (this seems to be only on tech trades though).
  • In turn-based games, would we be able to see the minimum time until the next turn tick over?
  • It would be handy/faster to have something like the escape key to get back to the ‘main screen’, much like clicking the ‘X’ does.
  • Having some sort of mouseover/tooltips for each of the various hotkey options would also help speed things up. I know some of them, but only from banging on keys semi-randomly. I’m thinking something like: Stars (S) when you hold the mouse over the stars tab in the galaxy section. The letter choices seem a bit odd too (I for Inbox instead of D for Diplomacy, G for Graph instead of I for Intel, etc.)

I’m pretty sure there were a couple of other things, but I can’t remember them off the top of my head. I’ll add them if I remember.

Cheers,

KriegEm

In relation to your second point, did you know you can sort the columns in the galaxy screen by clicking on the headings?

The intel screen is using a plug in module, I believe it can’t be changed.

Hi Dave,

The quick upgrade bar is the one with the lightning bolt icon (as opposed to the galaxy/star table). It’s not sortable, it displays E/I/S over the top of the star map.