Matrix Games Forums

Hi everyone,

I wanted to take a moment and put together a list of things that I noticed about the interface of Distant Worlds. Most of these points are very small (some are downright nit-picky). Most of my notes are written on the images with red text. So here goes...

Layout of table for adding other empires to the game:



Unwarranted pluralization in Welcome to Your Empire window:



The Zenox might take exception at being referred to as a rodent race. This could be changed to Feline or Felidae:



A few things regarding the Fleets screen:



Flickering text issue:



Right now when you left-click or right-click one of the ship entries, that ship becomes selected. I thought it might be a viable shortcut to also bring up the relevant context menu for the freshly selected ship. In this case the "Move here" and "Queue Next Mission->Move here" entries in the context menu would not be included in the context menu:



Text that is too long currently gets truncated in the ship entries. Consider growing the entry to the right if it is being hovered over with the mouse so the player can see all of the info:




The two previous ideas could be applied to all the other lists as well (Space Ports, Mining Stations, Construction Ships, etc.)

Small formatting bug:



A few things about the Design Ship screen:



Alternative way of expressing reactor efficiency:



Searching the Galaxy:



I thought a Search button could be added to the Galaxy Map. The player could begin typing in a name and the list would be updated with matching entries as-they-type. If one of the entries is clicked on by the player its corresponding location is also selected on the Galaxy Map. This could be very helpful when managing a large empire. Press ‘G’ to open Galaxy Map then ‘S’ to open Search then start typing the name of the location and select it from the list.

Capitalization typo:



A reproducible bug in the Designs window:




Other Things

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1. Default action for military ships when hovering mouse over independent colony is currently Attack. I usually want to Patrol them instead (until my colony ship arrives), so maybe change default action to Patrol?

2. It is currently possible to scrap private sector ships such as freighters through the Ships and Bases screen (F11). I think this is an unintended feature as the state isn’t supposed to control private ships.

3. Pressing 'G' opens the Galaxy Map, so tapping it again should close it (just like the F1-F12 keys open and close their respective windows).

4. When multiple ships are selected, pressing 'S' doesn't stop them (not to be confused with fleet selections which do respond to 'S' as expected).

[s]5. When you right-click on the galaxy map the view centers on the spot you clicked. I think it would be useful if it also selected the object you right-clicked on (if there was an object at that spot) and displayed the context menu for that object (if it has one). In the event that there are multiple objects stacked at the spot you right-clicked, an object selection menu comes up instead of the context menu. I think this would be a great feature for cutting down on the number of clicks needed to get things done.[/s]

[s]6. I often inspect the cargo holds of ships. To do this I left-click the ship to select it then double click in the selection window. This becomes a lot of effort after a while. You could add a "Details" entry to the context menus of ships (including private ones) that would do the same thing. Now all you would have to do is right-click the ship and select the Details option (assuming that the select object on right-clicks method in the previous point is implemented).[/s]

7. Consider disabling right mouse button view drags when an object is locked on (via keyboard 'L'). Or better yet, allow the right mouse button drag to proceed and have the view snap back to the locked object once the right mouse button is released. As it is right now the view keeps skipping back and forth from one to the other.

8. There are some minor typos in the Galactopedia:

Galactopedia: Combat - Colony Invasions
In this case your opponents territory primarily consists of their colonies. [opponents=>opponent’s]

Galactopedia: Combat - Ground Combat
Each two billion citizens of a colonies population are... [colonies=>colony's]

...the colonies development level will be temporarily set back... [colonies=>colony's]

Galactopedia: Economy Tips
Ships, bases, troops and intelligence agents all have ongoing maintenance costs. [see next note]

So you should carefully plan your needs for any new ships or bases. [this statement sounds like it should be combined with the sentence above]

Only recruit troops that you really need to defend key colonies. Build up more troops only when you plan on war. [to me it sounds like these three statements should all be in a single paragraph]

...and recreational facilities that make the colonies citizens happier. [colonies=>colony's OR colonies']

Galactopedia: Fleets
...for major assaults against targets like colonies or spaceports. [spaceports has been written as two separate words (space ports) in numerous other locations]

9. I think I saw both spellings of the word "defences/defenses" in the Galactopedia.

10. The mouse cursor seems to be confused about what it wants to be while hovering over the plain text (selector vs arrow) and links (finger vs arrow) in the Galactopedia. I think the finger would be good for links. I believe this is happening because both the Galactopedia window and the galaxy view in the background are trying to set the mouse cursor.

11. There doesn't seem to be much consistency concerning the beeps and boops that sound when the F2 to F12 windows are opened. Sometimes you'll get a beep when you click the icon to open one of those windows and no beep if you use the function key instead. Sometimes you'll hear one, two, or three boops when you open the Construction Yards window or Ships and Bases window. My suggestion here would be to get rid of all the beep sounds for all the buttons in the top center group. They can be silent just like the vertical group of buttons at middle left. Or settle on something consistent - that metallic "tink" sound seems to be the most common. Just a suggestion though.

12. Regarding sentences in bulleted lists: I think the convention you were going for was to never end the last sentence with a period. Some of the bullets have periods at the end.

13. In the Main Menu the text in the textbox that appears when hovering over "Start New Game" ends with a period whereas the others don't.

I'm shocked you missed the list of locations to move a researcher to - it's unsorted and a nightmare to weed through.

Zenox being listed as "rodent" is "WAD", I would suspect.

Hmmm, upon further reflection points 5 and 6 in my original post won't work because sometimes you've got a ship selected and you want to move it to another object by right-clicking on it.

Here's an alternative scheme: Double-clicking a ship, colony, or other object could bring up the same window that double-clicking on the selection panel does. However, if the double-clicked ship is part of a fleet then all ships in that fleet are selected instead (currently implemented). Then if the selection panel is double clicked the Fleets screen appears for that fleet.

So this way you would double-click on a freighter/star port/colony to see what cargo it has, instead of needing to select it and double-click the selection panel.

Here’s some more suggestions/issues:

Ability to see ship construction progress without examining construction yards:



Message to repair freighter but no way to repair it:



Ping being produced for Monetary Gift message:



More nit-picking:




Other Things

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1. I often get frustrated when trying to control my ships during combat situations. Many times I will issue orders to ships only to have them overriden a moment later by the ships' AI. This happens because the ships are responding to a nearby threat that is attacking them. To allieviate this problem I would like to propose an additional engagement stance: When damaged. A ship with this stance will take no offensive actions on its own unless it is damaged (actually fired upon) by another unit.

2. Start a New Game: The Galaxy - Yellow description text for difficulty ends with a period, whereas all the others do not.

3. Start a New Game: Other Empires - Yellow description text that appears when you change the amount of auto-generated starting empires ends with a period, whereas all the others do not.

4. Add ability to refit mining stations and gas mining stations to any valid design. A contruction ship will be queued to arrive with the necessary components.

5. If you order an exploration ship to explore a series of planets (queued orders) it will dally for a while at each one before moving onto the next. Since the command it has been given was to explore I think it should move onto the next location as soon as it has determined what resources are at a planet/moon (about a second after it arrives). That way exploration ships wouldn't have to be monitored so closely to get them to do their job efficiently.

6. When a ship is repaired a scrolling message appears "The ship <ship_name> has been completed at <space_port_name>" This could be changed to "The ship <ship_name> has been repaired at <space_port_name>" for clarity.

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The screens for Colonies, Expansion Planner, Construction Yards, Ships & Bases, and Fleets all share a similar layout. They get the job done but it feels like there's too many controls packed into too small an area. Those screens are already as big as they can get for 1024x768...perhaps things could be rearranged a bit to make them cleaner and more pleasant to use.

Here are some thoughts on the Colonies screen:



Given the similar layouts, these points could be applied to the other screens as well.

Nice work Fornax

No. We need that window on the bottom right. It is the place you manually control taxes from and as such you need to know the effects on happiness and also the population, GDP and strategic value of the colony as reference.

Perhaps it could be moves somewhere else/reformatted but we need that functionality.

Good work finding punctuation/grammar errors. I feel that game mechanics are a much more important investment of time but each to their own.

p.s. You repair a freighter by sending a constructor to repair it. As such you give the order to the constructor.

Hi feelotraveller,

I'm not suggesting that the colony renaming box or tax modifier be removed - they can stay where they are. Happiness is already a column in the colony table and could be widened a bit to also show the numerical value alongside the face icons. Value is also already a column in that table. More columns can be added if needed...

I agree with you that there's bigger fish to fry than punctuation/grammar issues

Well, you have a sharp eye and do a good job of sharing your finds… A lot of small things that need to be changed, to be sure. Still, I am quite surprised that you don't speak of all the little interface nightmares that are so much more important.
Like both design windows, so horrible and sometime buggy, that they need to be redesigned completely, the character transfer interface as stated, the troops dialog, and pretty much every dialog in fact, the buggy shift-clicks, the non-implemented classical Ctrl-click queue to add a functionality that could very well have used Alt-click instead, having to click 3 times to add an order to the queue and not being able sort or even to see the current queue, the small, tiny micro-nano, unsorted right-click menus in high res, the need for the user not to move the mouse of one pixel when ordering ships on the screen unless the game ignores it (very annoying when you use a high precision mouse), the fact that the interface does not update when paused, in the galaxy creation screen, the nightmare of setting every civilization to the same values when all I want is to have one of each race… And these are only the ones I think about without searching!
Many of them where subjects to posts, from the original Distant world release, but only a few where fixed.
I cannot deny the designer put a lot of efforts in creating a good interface for a complex game, but obviously, it was not enough. Don't take it bad, but I don't really care if there are some typos like when "their" is used every time a message is speaking about one character until I can trust the interface to acknowledge all my clicks!
I only hope this game has got enough success for Code Force to get a senior ergonomist to program a new interface instead of this, and let Eliot continue doing what he is so good at: improving the game mechanics. Unless he can draw himself from them long enough to get the interface on the same level as the game.

Hi Florestan,

Thank you for your kind comments.

I'm relatively new to Distant Worlds having purchased it just before christmas. Soon after I began playing I realized that it was a game with great concepts at its core but also a user interface that was struggling to keep up.

I too have noticed some of the things you mentioned, most notably the mission queuing system and the awkward dialogues (my 'favorite' is the Ships and Bases one with the different sized buttons).

It seems the developers decided "okay, let's just get the interface functional so that people can play it and see what this game is about" and then focused their efforts elsewhere and haven't revisited the issue. I don't know how many people are actually on the development team in terms of coding, if it's just Elliot or what. He's obviously very talented but one person can only take on so much work.

I suppose what I've been doing with my posts so far is addressing what I consider to be the low-hanging fruit. Most of the things I've documented are trivial and wouldn't take more than a few minutes to fix. To tackle something like the Design screen or the mouse interface scheme will take considerably more effort - you really got to sit down and think about it for awhile. I would like to put forward suggestions for the meatier issues but I just haven't gotten there yet.

I also hope that Code Force is generating decent revenue from their Legends expansion so they can have the resources to bring in additional talent like you mentioned. As with most games there's probably a huge potential for code optimizations that would make the game run faster as well, but that's a whole other story.

You have a point when you say it would take minute to fix most of these, but they are quite numerous… Take a day or two, and it's done… A boring day.
The potential for optimization isn't so big as it may seem, without heavy rewriting of the graphical engine and maybe the data storage choices. But a lot has already been made in both areas since the original release, and I'm not sure it would be worth it in terms of investment and benefit for such a niche product.
As far as I know, Eliot (don't even remember his surname) did all the original code for the first release, but may have hired programmers since.

ORIGINAL: Fornax

Hi feelotraveller,

I'm not suggesting that the colony renaming box or tax modifier be removed - they can stay where they are. Happiness is already a column in the colony table and could be widened a bit to also show the numerical value alongside the face icons. Value is also already a column in that table. More columns can be added if needed...

I agree with you that there's bigger fish to fry than punctuation/grammar issues

Sorry I got the wrong end of the stick. [:)]

Many more columns would have to be added if your suggestion is followed - size (that's the one that bugs me from not being in the table top left), compliance, corruption...

I'm still not convinced though. I think one reason that the display is done in this way is that the lower two boxes are game resources which are just replicated from somewhere else. I'm guessing this could be good from an efficiency point of view codewise, but admit I am no programmer.

Thanks for making the suggestions. It is sure to bring it to the developers attention whatever the outcome is.

ORIGINAL: feelotraveller

I'm still not convinced though. I think one reason that the display is done in this way is that the lower two boxes are game resources which are just replicated from somewhere else. I'm guessing this could be good from an efficiency point of view codewise, but admit I am no programmer.

No performance or code gain (assuming it's done properly).

Elliot is probably trying to keep the interface from being cluttered - which is also a real concern.

About the columns: it would be very convenient if we could add and remove column by right-clicking like in the windows explorer and many other apps, so we could sort things better. Like, sort by design (choose which ships gets to be retrofitted), by size, by the origin of the ship (to quickly retire all those feeble but technologically interesting pirate ships) and so on.

I’m starting building cloning facilities everywhere in my empire, and I’m tired of disbanding those ridiculous teekan hunting parties one by one… A multiple selection in the troop tab would be so much better…

I like the idea you mentioned of using the alt key instead of the ctrl key for bringing up context menus for ships. Then the ctrl key could be used for mission queuing instead, which is consistent with a lot of other games. It would definitely make exploration less cumbersome.

I agree that allowing the player to view and sort the queued missions would be a welcome feature. Here's an example of how it might be handled:

We have here, one of the most comprehensive and well constructed bug reports I've yet seen...

And no response from Matrix or Code Force.

Someone at Matrix and/or Code Force needs to wake up.

I'm sure Kayoz that Erik and Elliot will review all of the posts from this Tech Support
area upon their return from vacation this week. They deserved the break! [:)]

Some more suggestions/issues:

Another spurious ping:



Pluralization of Zenox:



Missing space between sentences:



Other Things

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1. Selection rectangles don't appear on the main galaxy display when zoomed out to a certain level.
2. Lowercase 'c' cycles through colonies so maybe capital 'C' could select your empire's capital colony.
3. It would be nice to be able to toggle Automation for ships that are under construction.
4. Clicking on a 'System Colonized' popup currently brings up the F2 Colonies dialogue. It would seem more consistent to instead select the colonized planet and focus on it, as this is the behaviour of most other popups.
5. Oftentimes when you tell your exploration ships to explore a sector the whole lot of them will go to the same target, which isn't efficient. Exploration ships that are carrying out sector exploration could check first to see if their target is already being moved to by another exploration ship. If so then select a different target in the sector or stop if no others are available. I'm not positive but I believe automated explorers do this already.
6. It would be nice if ships that are escaping from pirates would abort their escape sequences as soon as those pirates cease being a threat (you paid for protection) and resume whatever mission they were previously carrying out.
7. There was an instance where I moved to the capital ship in the Pozdac Weapons Testing Range with an exploration ship and nothing happened - I wasn't able to take control of it (1.7.0.6).