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Monday, May 14, 2012

Equipment Selection Overhaul

Since I've changed the ship's internal mechanisms to be more data-driven, I've started overhauling the ship design screen. First up is the equipment selection where you choose an item to add to your ship design.

Everything in the old screen was hard-coded, including the icons. Since the game changed to use data-driven icons, I had to change how it displays information. It now use the new icon system, and I've started adding special kind of icons that allows users to modify its value. For example, if you want the player to decide how much bullets to store for a weapon, you add a special icon in the technologies.xml that tells the game to include that icon.

Here's the new equipment selection screen:


The top right box is list of custom icons that the player can modify. I plan on adding sliders and drop-down menus in this field. Drop-downs allow you to specify a certain value rather than a numeric value. For example, if you want to add an firing arc option to your mod, you can add a drop-down with different arcs. Right now I'm working on hooking up the controls to the actual data stored in the equipment.

Bottom right box is list of custom statistics. Again, you can specify which information to display. If you have a colony base selected, it could display a list of planets it can colonize for example.

Bottom left box is list of available modifiers for the equipment. Some examples include shield penetrating, increased range, or armor piercing. This is based on list of available technologies. What do you think of the new layout? Is it more clear than the old one? Here's the old version for comparison:


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