I'm guessing there's some reason you don't want to simply move the icons to the other side of the bars?

Oh! But there is another option! Look at SFA's interface for Starfleet ships. The bars are vertical and behave as such, draining downward. You could put the icons beneath them. Especially since the NDC has horizontal bars, vertical bars would be just the thing to separate them.

@darthkev, on 27 December 2013 - 04:05 PM, said in EVN - Delphi:

I'm guessing there's some reason you don't want to simply move the icons to the other side of the bars?

Oh! But there is another option! Look at SFA's interface for Starfleet ships. The bars are vertical and behave as such, draining downward. You could put the icons beneath them. Especially since the NDC has horizontal bars, vertical bars would be just the thing to separate them.

I considered that, but no matter how I place it, it always looks awkward when the rest of the display runs from right to left. I have a subtle gradient in the background and on the edge of each piece to make them "run off" the left edge with a bit of a curve, to simulate false depth.

I've touched it up a bit. It's not terrible with the bars draining to the left, so I'll just leave it be. I did, however, properly fit the target display and the navigation panel. However, it runs up just a little south of 800 pixels tall. Is anybody still using 768 or 720 as their vertical resolution? I would think most people's displays can run 900 or 1080 by now, but if you guys tell me it's a problem, I'll shrink it.

Even my old MacBook was 1280x800. My new iMac now has an even larger screen. I don't think it's gonna be a problem.

New target picture style. Keeping in the vein of the updated outfit rendering style: a sort of "holographic" glowing look, color-coded by ship manufacturer. Note of course, this will not reflect ships made by one empire but flown by another. An Enclave-piloted Versatile shuttle will still appear in blue. When there is no target selected, just a blank glowing "plate" at the base of the hologram is visible.

Excellent.

Question: you said using vertical bars didn't look good alongside horizontal fields for everything else. Have you considered placing the symbols/labels beneath their respective fields?

@darthkev, on 28 December 2013 - 03:39 AM, said in EVN - Delphi:

Excellent.

Question: you said using vertical bars didn't look good alongside horizontal fields for everything else. Have you considered placing the symbols/labels beneath their respective fields?

I gave it a shot, but the results weren't desirable. Because of the angular pieces and the general horizontal layout of the interface, the whole thing has a sort of hexagonal series of lines: diagonals and horizontals. Adding verticals into it just looked... wrong.

And I suppose rotating the hexagons is out of the question? That is, using vertical lines everywhere in place of horizontal lines.

I'd probably be playing under 1024x768 on my iMac. Sorry if this input is a bit late.

@scratskinner, on 29 December 2013 - 06:07 AM, said in EVN - Delphi:

I'd probably be playing under 1024x768 on my iMac. Sorry if this input is a bit late.

Not late at all. I'm looking at the sidebar graphic right now and realizing I could really shrink those shield/armor/energy bars vertically, to save space. They're pretty huge as-is. Likewise, I can shrink the navigation bar (it stands about three lines tall when it only needs two), and I can remove the lower purple bar separating the displays from the bars. I'm still keeping the top one, though. It really helps de-lineate the whole thing.

Here, try this on at 1024 x 768 and see if it fits better. I've cropped the updated status bar from an in-game screenshot to simulate the 768-pixel height of your monitor. For all others, the rest of the bar will still spill downward off the edge of the screen with added details (though they're just eye-candy).

Oh hey, this is kind of cool. Last night, I blitzed through a bunch of target graphics, to test for immersion and see if they worked out alright amongst the various factions ship designs. I was adding each of them through the ship editor itself, so I hadn't yet delved into the PICT resource folder and seen them all laid out side by side. I think the effect is wonderfully uniform and really makes them glow.

Also, it makes me feel good to see this. When I batch-made the target graphics, I did so using the list of functional ships already in the plug, just to test with existing assets. What that means is that if there's a target graphic in this screenshot, then the ship itself is rendered and flyable, albeit likely not balanced/outfitted yet. Seeing so many target graphics makes me feel better about things on the whole; there is far more done than I thought. I just might find the motivation to finish this TC (finally).

This post has been edited by Delphi : 30 December 2013 - 04:54 AM

Sweet! Maybe our plug-ins will release at the same time

I've been doing a lot of my ship testing in the Sol system and I've grown tired of the old, crappy graphic I had for the earth. So, thanks to Wikimedia commons, the fair use act, and a little time in Photoshop, I've got the graphic looking the way I really want it, and best of all, matching the graphic style of the game's other planets, which were generated procedurally in Flaming Pear Software's "Lunarcell" plugin.

New on the left, old on the right.

I chose a graphic with the eastern hemisphere facing, just because I'm tired of the earth always being shown America-centrically. I'm Canadian myself, but it seems like people often forget there's a whole rest of the world that sees the sun, as well.

This post has been edited by Delphi : 30 December 2013 - 09:14 PM

I think both are exceptional O_O. Perhaps use both?

@sklent, on 30 December 2013 - 09:21 PM, said in EVN - Delphi:

I think both are exceptional O_O. Perhaps use both?

The right one is too reflective and "marbley", and since it was originally captured as an HDR image, the oceans are too dark. It's not bad, but it doesn't look right amongst other stellars in the game.

Pictured, an NDC "Monolith" cruiser guards over Earth. Sampled from an in-game screenshot, at full scale. I'm a fan of big planet graphics, when necessary (though the 512x512 I used for Earth is pretty damn big; I'll probably shrink it).

boioioing!

PS if you have more planet graphics you don't want I'd probably be happy to use them.

This post has been edited by Sklent : 31 December 2013 - 01:43 AM

For any of you using LunarCell, the Photoshop plugin that Ambrosia SW and myself use to create the planet graphics for EVN, I created a preset file based off of my earth image above to create other earth-like planets with very realistic colours and climates. You'd be surprised just how dark the oceans actually are. It's attached to this post, just in case, along with this comparison. The photo earth (with minor artistic adjustments) is on the right, while the simulated planet is on the left.

Realistic Earth.q1q.zip (37.94K)
Number of downloads: 0

I'll have to keep this in mind in case I ever actually buy LunarCell.

What's a shipyard without shipyard graphics, right? Here's the Versatile shuttle, sampled at 400 x 400, before I shrink it to the appropriate size.

I'm torn about doing something nifty with the background or just keeping it the same for the sake of simplicity. All the weapon outfits with their holographic style use the same simple gradient, color-coded according to their respective empires.