Shallow Space is a 3D Real Time Strategy game inspired by Nexus: The Jupiter incident and Homeworld. Shallow Space focuses on organised mass RTS space combat in a fully 3D environment. Ships in Shallow Space are nearly always grouped into Flotillas and Wings, and orders issued to these structures cascade to the subordinate members. Rather than stressing out clicking on the units or dragging selection boxes during the heat of battle, standing orders are issued in advance leaving you to zoom around, activating abilities and arranging support and reinforcements. Should the tide turn in battle traditional control is still available.
Bit more work on the UI, now the mechanics are near enough where I want them to be I focus on making the thing flow while playing it. It's strange because I look to Homeworld and Nexus for inspiration and as things have moved on a lot interface-wise in the last 10 years, they are actually no help at all.
I'm gonna go with the flow with it I think, adjust it to feedback. Making it compartmentalised and modular in this way makes it easy to add/subtract from also, UI is not a part of this project I enjoy - all the pixel perfect nonsense
:)
omg omg I watched that episode just the other day :)
I really need more geeky friends, I'm repressed.
Looks good to me, maybe add in a drop-down/collapse button for the side-bars so they don't get in the way of things
A few UI suggestions ( I know I hate it too, and unity UI feels like writing css)
1. Check out these two games for UI Ideas, One is an RTS (Wargame Red Dragon on Steam)(Youtube Link: Youtube.com)
and the other is Limit Theory a indie kickstarted game with some really nice procedural development and its own scripting language, in this video he shows some ui examples : Youtube.com.
2. Can i make the suggestion of changing the icons of the ships in the the top corners (I am assuming they are ships) To a wire pram style of the ships themselves.
3. Also, found this really nice site a few months back for industry game debs, you might already be aware of called gamasutra.com, sometimes has some nice blogs on it.
Good luck
Hugo
1. Limit Theory UI - a number of people keep raising that to me and I'll say this: What he's created looks amazing but watch his videos closely, can you actually tell what any of the pretty glowy UI actually does? I certainly can't therefore it's not fit for purpose. I suspect that game's learning curve will likely put X3:AP to shame.
2. They are ships and I find that Unity is rubbish when it comes to resizing sprites. Go to the next image along in this carosel (<<) and look at the tooltip, see the way the right-hand border is white for some reason? Wireframe icons do the same thing and they look baaaaad so until I can work out what's going on there it's not an option but I do want to go that direction.
Beside there's not a lot of room to work with actually given the size of taskforces you could potentially be in control of, so representative icons might be the only way forward in this instance.
3. Yep heard of gamasutra.com thanks!
James
Just wanna say about point 1 that I haven't watched any of his latest videos so I dunno whether he sorted it out.
Anyways I could spend years ******* about making a UI like that, I'd rather focus on making the game and paying someone special to do it (if required.)
Still I like my UI and the game plays well now :)
Oh no, actually it looks like i've been chatting out of my poop hole - Josh has indeed made the UI much clearer in LT since I last checked! That guy is a genius man.
Honestly though, he entire game is bespoke so that UI probably borrows core C++ libraries from somewhere (probably written by a gabble of semi-autistic geniuses over in MIT) but he ultimately constructed that UI barebones specific; to that engine.
Now I'm fairly clever, but I'm not that clever!
GUI bug (White edge on tool tip and wireframe): Strange, Are you using unity's gui styles for this stuff or are you inputing images for the gui directly into scripts? (I did some unity gui stuff a while back but not sure if thats possible to do).
Yes LT is quite crisp and his game is written in c/c++ as far as I know, he has his own scripting language for the game, so that about says it all. He uses lots of glow everywhere, its probably what gives the illusion of crisp and reactive.
Hope my guess may be some help, or you may have already tried or knew about this.
Hugo