User Interface Suggestions (Image Heavy)

[feelotraveller]

More good points. To play devils advocate...

3. can be done from any of the ships and bases screens (the ones on which the ship in question is listed).

4. I like it this way. One of the things you are likely to want to do on colonisation is to adjust the taxes - only available from the colonies screen. All the other information is shown. The disadvantage of the current setup is that you take a couple of extra clicks to get to the system the colony is in, but that is not normally an immediate priority.

6. I suspect that this is working as designed. We don't have to like it. [:'(]

[Fornax]

Thanks for the tip, feelotraveller - that works well. It would be nice to be able to do the same thing without those extra clicks though.

Something I haven't yet covered in this thread is the flickering that can be seen in parts of the interface when they are being created or updated. Judging by what I've seen in youtube gameplay videos this flickering isn't unique to my hardware setup.

It looks like the forms that make up the GUI are being drawn to screen while they are being created/updated instead of afterwards.



The practice of buffering suspends all drawing operations of a form until it has been completely constructed and then draws the finished form to the screen in a single pass. This means the user will only see completely finished forms and no intermediate drawing will be visible:



It's almost as if the default buffering that is provided by the windows forms and controls that make up the Distant Worlds interface has been disabled in some cases.

I have no firsthand experience working with C# or the .NET framework so the best I can do here is point to the following articles which provide more information on the subject:

http://windowsclient.net/articles/windowsformspainting.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/3t7htc9c.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/tdk2485d.aspx

The unbuffered drawing isn't just unsightly, it's probably slowing things down - not in terms of gameplay speed but in the amount of time it takes to invoke dialogues. Fixing this would make the interface feel snappier and less glitchy.

Also, I would like to emphasize the advantage of creating dialogue windows once and then showing and hiding them as needed, instead of destroying and recreating them. If you open the Colonies window (F2) and adjust the table column widths, then close and reopen the window you will notice that the table column widths have reset themselves to their initial states. This is because the Colonies window wasn't merely hidden when you closed it, it was completely destroyed and then recreated, which is a lot more work than is necessary.

[Kayoz]

ORIGINAL: Fornax

I have no firsthand experience working with C# or the .NET framework so the best I can do here is point to the following articles which provide more information on the subject:

This is an old and well-trod path. Optimization of DW code has been brought up several times - for each and every version.

To date, I am only aware of one of the suggested optimizations that has been implemented.

[Fornax]

A few more:

A lot of tables have an 'Empire' column that displays an icon of your empire's flag...is it worth having?



Missing '[R]' in 'Refuel and Repair ship' yellow info text (same thing for 'Refuel and Repair Fleet'):



Missing apostrophes:



Minor font spacing issues:



Other Things

---

1. If one ship in a fleet runs out of fuel then the speed of the entire fleet is reduced. This is likely done to help fleets stay clumped together but makes little sense when the lagging ship is nowhere near the group. Maybe the move-as-fast-as-the-slowest-ship rule could only include ships that are within a certain radius of the fleet's nucleus (center of mass or however it might be determined).
2. Ship designer could give warnings when you have excessive life support or habitation modules.

[Fishers of Men]

Good observation concerning point number #2. When Life Support and Habitation Module techs have been improved, the number of them on board each ship will remain the same when using the upgrade button even though there might be fewer required for the crew. It is a waste of space and credits to build ships like these. I would need to manually test each ship in the design screen to find out the actual amount needed. The improvements in shields, engines, reactors, warpdrives, etc. might be be more desirable if the number of conponents on board would stay the same, but not for some other types. The autoupgrade option should do this for you.

FoM