I don’t mind the purple, but the ‘internal illumination’ of the cockpit frame is a bit distracting during warp. It feels like I’m driving down the highway at night and someone turns on one of the dome lights.
Yeah, it looks a bit strange, but I can see why they would do that. Metres and Kilometres are very intuitive (at least for people who use the SI system), so telling someone you’re a thousand kilometres above a planet is much easier for them to understand, since their mind can already think in kilometres and can easily understand what another K would mean. And by substituting km with m and Kkm with km in your mind, you can get a much better understand of the scale involved (since in space you rarely need to consider metres, unless you’re docking or dogfighting, in which case you just switch to the metre mindset).
On the other hand, displaying something like 1 Mm would take a moment longer for people to process, since their minds are not used to it. Of course, after they get used to thinking it as 1000 km, it will be about the same, so it’s really a mater of whether or not you want it to look a bit strange but have people immediately understand what it means or if you want it to look better but have people take a while to learn to intuitively understand what it means. Either way, the player will learn to understand the system intuitively after a bit of flying (and/or crashing), so it’s not a big deal.
They could solve the problem by replacing the distance measurements with new unit (like “space metres” or “standard distance units” or something like that), but that would make it harder for people to understand the scales involved in the engine and it would require people to learn and gain an intuitive understanding about what this new unit means.
Watching the twitch stream now, since I only caught the end of it yesterday. I like the planet and moon names. Cinder seems really appropriate for how the volcanic moon looks. Rethe Prime sounds a bit harsh and alien, which I guess is appropriate for a purple gas giant.
Since we seem to be discussing all sorts of things about the prototype here, it might be good to change the title to something more appropriate. Or split the prototype discussion to another thread.
I just recorder this if it can help :
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Says that this video is private.
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Oups, it’s now ok I guess.
Most people don’t thing about prefixes every day, but still have some familiarity of the Mega prefix and how it relates to kilo when measuring bytes or bits, so I would not thing it would be much of an issue. Also, at distances around 990km and 1.01Mm, where the prefix change occurs, you are way to far from the object be in danger of crashing into it.
I suppose they could switch to light seconds or something like that as distances get longer, but as you say, It is probably easier for people to figure out how a Mm relates to a km or m, that how a light second relates to a km or m.
Using kkm is not a good solution as you run into the same problem yet again when you want to know the distance from an outer planet to an inner one. For example Neptune is over 4 Gm from our sun, so how would you show that in I:B? 4kkkm? 4Mkm? Why not just stick to proper prefixes?
Perfect! Thanks for the video clarification, Cyc. Glad my complaints where unfounded.
In the warp prototype, I switched to AU and then LY. I think I went up to around 100,000km, then hopped to 0.001AU or some such thing.
Yeah, you’re probably right. Just tossing out ideas.
Yeah, no. Take it from someone who teaches this stuff: Most people can’t translate kilobyte->megabyte to kilometre->megametre. In fact, most people, if they even think about kilobytes and megabytes, don’t know the difference, and don’t know how they relate. And even if they do, having them use that knowledge in a different sphere actually rarely works. Not without a lesson or two.
Again, I teach this stuff. To science students. At a university. Most of them don’t know how many millimetres are in a metre, nor how many metres are in a kilometre, and it takes us a full semester to get them to even start thinking about it.
You’re giving people too much credit.
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Some concepts are hard to grasps. I don’t manage to understand all of the either.
Should we get down to ISP/Telecoms tech support not having an idea of a difference between a bit and a byte, while using them interchangeably.
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Is there any chance we can get different internal ship camera angles? E.g. rear scenic window or something similar, purely to enjoy the sheer beauty and scale of it. Even if it’s just a clever camera trick.
Watching KingKongor flying along the gas giant was pretty amazing, felt like I was watching Solaris again.
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4 x 10^6 km?
I favour scientific notation, like this, for what are probably obvious reasons to those who know anything about me. It’s just as meaningless as 4 Gm for most people, but at least it’s more intuitive after a few minutes to figure out that 103 is smaller than 106. They may not know that one means thousands while the other means millions, but it’s more straight forward that remembering that T is bigger than G is bigger than M is bigger than k.
For distances over 1 x 108, I also favour switching to astronomical units (AUs), but that’s just because I like them. They’re horribly intuitive if you’re not familiar with them, and probably aren’t the best choice from a general UX point of view.
That was my initial reaction as well - until I realized that changes in power produce only trivial changes in appearance. If this was going to be done, it should include a change in size and/or color to somehow intuitively communicate the scale.
It may be that numbers are of no real interest anyway (despite the seeming obsession that people had about them in the warp prototype), and that some invented graphic could be used that allows players to quickly grasp whether they are close enough to break warp, to being intercept, to be comfortable about being far away enough from an enemy fleet, etc.
For example, ten circles arranged as two rows of five that light up as the player reaches certain orders of magnitude of distance. Light them up incrementally, and players will get a sense of more lights meaning greater distance, and know at a gut level that if they’re at three lights and the fourth is just starting to glow they’re at the right distance to break warp on their planetary approach.
That’s just a meter. Why circles? Why not a bar? Why not a dial? Why make it more complicated than a dial with a red-line for warp?
Dials stand out more?
Go ahead and put in a dial. Then you’ll find out whether it works.
Many games offer customizable or even moddable HUD. There’s no reason you can’t give the players multiple HUD choices, each with different size, visibility, intuitiveness and immersion. That will allow every player to choose what they feel most comfortable with.
Of course, some thought should be given to what the default HUD should be, since it’s probably what most players will use.
One of the goals of the game is to eventually have modding support, so there shouldn’t be any reason why anybody couldn’t make their own HUD.
I want a purple one. 
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