UI Suggestions for the ship editor

Gratuitous Forum Gratuitous Space Battles
1

Greetings. I have been messing around with the ship editor, and I had a couple suggestions to improve the usability.

  1. For the ship select thing, have two drop down menus on the top and and a grid. The drop down menus let you select race and ship class. Instead of viewing one ship at a time, have a thumbnail of each ship on the grid (like scrolling through a photo gallery). Below each ship, put the number of weapons and the number of modules, so we can see at a glance. These are much more important than things like cost, bonuses, etc. Have the cost and bonuses pop up when you hover over a ship. This way, I can say “I want a Rebel Cruiser”, see which ones have the most number of weapons, then mouse-over the two ships to see which one I want to build off of.

  2. For some reason, modules are sorted in a weird way. For example, left to right, I have Power Generator II, Power Generator III, Power Generator, and Power Generator Light. Right now, all objects for a tab are grouped together in a random clump. I recommend separating them into lines. So, say I want a shield, I look at the shield line, and it ranges from light on the left to Heavy Shield III on the right. Then I look at the line below it and see the modifications to shields, such as hardeners or rechargers. There is plenty of blank space in the tabs to allow lines.

  3. A bar chart would be very helpful to show weapon range, so I can tell at a glance if my weapons will work together or not.

Also, I updated to 1.01 and I still don’t see the differentiation between modules and hard points on the ship descriptions.

2

I think it’d do well with a more “spreadsheet” looking mode, perhaps with damage and range displayed as bars for easy comparison. I think that, instead of iconic representations, it’d be more useful to have it more list-styled so that the information is more at your fingertips. Once you get used to the differences it’s fine, but for new users it’s difficult to get a grasp on which weapons have which advantages over others.