Fresh ideas after the demo

[Killrob]

there are very few good games of this type out there..

Is there any? If so, I'd love to know about it.

[Drake]

there are very few good games of this type out there..

Is there any? If so, I'd love to know about it.

Well, the best one IMHO is Grand Prix World, but it is getting a bit old now. Its quite a deep management game that can be very difficult if you choose one of the lesser funded teams.. My only real complaint is it doesn't simulate the fact that some teams also manufacture engines.. So you can end up with odd occurrences such as a Ferrari - Ford and a Mclaren - Ferrari after a season or two... There is a bit of a modding community as well, so there are some mods for other seasons.

There are no decent new management games of this type that I know of.. There are few others, but they are older and hard to run on a modern computer. While DOS is easy to emulate, those early windows games are a real pain to get working. I heard that Grand Prix Manager 2 was also good, but I never could get it to run..

[Tangelo]

Glad to see my merciless ranting has started some discussions

de-clutter and then add detail or vice versa, add detail and then de-clutter

Do you have any specific examples? That is not a very specific statement.

Ok now I see how bad I was at phrasing that statement Here, I just made a screenshot of the engine designer to explain this best I can...


First thing you can do, is to close the info box (top left) by default, rather than open it by default. This already clears up a big part of the screen. Another option would be to make the info box a pop-up overlayed window, should the player click on "Info" or some icon. That would also allow the small arrow to be deleted forever from the left side there (you see for my picky bastard eyes, every little detail counts).
Second, the same applies to the limitations/specifications box (top right), maybe leave the arrow there for opening it and also the "visual" slider.
Third, the expanded menu at the bottom often gets me so confused and this is the place I spend most of the time wondering what the hell did I leave unselected... So to make it more compact and take up less of the screen, you could actually put it to the left of the screen and make it an expandable drop down menu, just turn the sliders sideways and make the whole menu scrollable with the mouse wheel. To prove the point here, the selection areas that you have for each component (ie the lists like "pushrod, overhead cam etc" for Head & valves is rarely "full", so it's the sliders that are using up most of menu height at the bottom and wasting screen area.
Little things, like the "Current Year" at the top of the screen could be an option somewhere inside the menu, rather than a separate element dominating at the top there.
This all allows for the semi-transparent bar showing component specs to move way low, right against the "step bar" at the bottom. And by the way, love the new step bar!!! Do not even sneeze on it !
Ok so I visualised all this in this image here (sorry for the lousy photoshopping, it's just to illustrate this post. And I also apologize for the Exhaust Diameter which is 6.00'', I know... promise it will never happen again.)


EDIT: Reading over my post, I realized this is pretty much the design geek inside me complaining about a design they didn't create themselves. So again, I want to be clear that I'm in no way trying to offend anyone, despite seemingly expressing myself in a rude way. If I didn't respect all the work that you have done, and hadn't fallen for the game, I wouldn't be here posting suggestions from my free time, so I hope everything is still cool.

[Killrob]

Kudos to you for backing up your writing with something not only tangible but also thoughtful. I can see why you would design it that way, it has advantages and disadvantages. As you have illustrated the advantages already, I would like to point to a potential negative with what you propose: no longer being able to see everything at a glance as information is less readily available. It would be much more time consuming to look over choices made and get the big picture when you load up an engine or car for example.

I do agree on many of the things you say though. A massive redesign won't happen at this point, we are fairly happy with the UI as it is right now, apart from a general lack of polishing. The "info / description" area will change latest when we move to a new game engine, and the semi-transparent info area is completely changed to become proper tool-tips that give stats and can compare options head-to-head.

Thanks for sharing your ideas in the way you did!
Cheers!

[Tangelo]

Yes, you're absolutely right about the disadvantages and there might be more. Can't remember where but I think I've seen two UI sets in a PC game. Might be wrong, disregard that statement... but generally speaking, is that a hard thing to do? A kind of customizable UI?

[Daffyflyer]

But generally speaking, is that a hard thing to do? A kind of customizable UI?

Yes, it is pretty hard. Making a good UI is a lot of hard work, making two different good UIs is at least twice as much work, if not more as they both need to work with the same gameplay flow, so you can't make gameplay changes to help make the UI make sense. I think that time would be much better spent perfecting one UI, rather than making multiple ones.