Engine Builder: Show Certain Stats Before Testing

[ioScream]

It would be nice to see the following PRIOR to testing the engine.

Weight
Size
Service Costs
Total Cost
Man Hours

The rest make since to have after testing as you wouldn't know the Economy nor Power before testing, but you could EASILY know the dimensions, weight, and service costs before testing.

Just my 2 cents.

EDIT
I do understand the main UI becoming too crowded, so it could just be set to either another sub-menu or even updated live within the Test sub-menu (purple color (or something other than red/green) after dimensions have been updated due to bore/stroke/header/fuel system changes then red/green after testing for comparisons sake).

[pyrlix]

You can see some stats like Weight, Man Hrs and Total Costs when choosing it But only for the individual parts, maybe not that optimal, but its better than nothing.

The other stuff.. well the UI is really crowded right now, and stats like the service costs or size can be dependent of the car you make in future. A small I4 can still make huge service costs in a mid engine car, although it has low ones in the car designer.
Maybe the Stats Dialog on the right could be reused for this. Its not used on normal designing tasks anyway

[ioScream]

After playing for a bit I sort of feel like the UI isn't really optimizing the available screen real estate. There's plenty of room for improvement there. Even some of the scenario descriptions seem to move outside of the available space without any sort of over-flow detection aka auto adding scroll bars.

The UI itself doesn't seem to be resolution agnostic.

Though, I'm sure I'm just being a nit-picky douche.

[Daffyflyer]

Yeah, getting UI text to work properly and fit nicely at different resolution is an utter nightmare, and something we're going to work on further before release. (there will probably be a fairly major UI overhaul at some point, maybe using something like Autodesk Scaleform)

[ioScream]

I understand with the endless resolutions that there are going to be some issues. I'm also glad to hear that there is a tentative plan for a UI overhaul. It's actually one of my only "reasonable" criticisms being that the game is more of a simulator and there's going to be constant movement in the mechanics. In other words I'm looking past some of the build/car design issues knowing there will be or have been changes in that area.

I was a bit surprised to see that the UI is image-based being that there are a ton of ways to build a UI that are much more modular and flexible. I can't claim to know more than the designers [or yourself depending on who is reading this] as it's not how I make my money, but maybe consider using a modern HTML ["WEB 2.0"] based design? I, admittedly, have no idea what it would take to implement that, but I do know there are a ton of technologies that could help with screen resolutions and modular-ability with the DRY [don't repeat yourself] ideology in mind. Seems it would be easier to call a style versus make a new graphic for every menu element.

I wish I could offer more than criticism, and I don't mean to come across as an insulting know-it-all because I'm ignorant to game design with moderate technical knowledge.

Though, a modern, flexible UI could do a lot for this game and as it stands you are relying on assumptions of resolution when designing menu elements. Not to mention the size on disk or in memory that could be saved.

[Daffyflyer]

What you mention above is pretty much exactly the point of Autodesk Scaleform

The current UI is just a roll-your-own sort of hacked together solution that was the best we could do at the time.

[ioScream]

Thanks for the sharing that - I'm definitely going to look into that technology just for my own need to know.

EDIT: Just a quick glance at the site and I saw "leverage the power of Flash".. please reconsider basing the game's UI on Flash.

[ioScream]

For the record - I'd be willing to help research technologies to keep you from basing the UI on Flash - unless you've already decided and have invested in this path - in which case, Godspeed.

[Daffyflyer]

EDIT: Just a quick glance at the site and I saw "leverage the power of Flash".. please reconsider basing the game's UI on Flash.

I don't see how that's a compelling reason not to use it, it seems to have produced decent UIs in Mass Effect, Borderlands, Civilization IV and V, Every Unreal Engine game ever etc.
Plus we have access to a good UI artist with Flash skils. It is quite literally the industry standard for UI middleware and there is massive amounts of support, documentation and developers with existing skills using it.

If you have some good reasons that another UI middleware is likely to do a better job for us, please do tell

[ioScream]

EDIT: Just a quick glance at the site and I saw "leverage the power of Flash".. please reconsider basing the game's UI on Flash.

I don't see how that's a compelling reason not to use it, it seems to have produced decent UIs in Mass Effect, Borderlands, Civilization IV and V, Every Unreal Engine game ever etc.
Plus we have access to a good UI artist with Flash skils. It is quite literally the industry standard for UI middleware and there is massive amounts of support, documentation and developers with existing skills using it.

If you have some good reasons that another UI middleware is likely to do a better job for us, please do tell

I want to refer to my previous post that said basically that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. As a tech it was a knee-jerk reaction to Flash due to the problems I've had with it and the web seemingly moving away from it. As long as it scales properly and has some level of modularity then I'll shutup [not likely ]

[Daffyflyer]

Oh I agree Flash is a bit of a horror for web stuff, but it's very much the standard for games work these days, and Scaleform is very good indeed for making resolution responsive UIs it seems

[ioScream]

Come to think of it I've seen the Autodesk© many times when loading popular titles. I knew that name sounded familiar.

[Daffyflyer]

Come to think of it I've seen the Autodesk© many times when loading popular titles. I knew that name sounded familiar.

Yeah, they also make 3ds Max (the 3d package we use) and Beast (a lighting solution), but indeed loads of games will have the "Uses Autodesk Scaleform(tm) technology" on the loading screen

[ioScream]

I don't get along with 3DS, but I do imagine that's other place I remember seeing that company. The last time I played around with a 3D rendering program with any level of seriousness it was Maya.

Regardless a UI design would do a lot for statistics shown in this game as it attracts a lot of stat-loving people.

Sidenote: You show a lot of interest in this area - so get to work!