Hey Blaze,
Thanks for the excellent feedback, all of your points are spot on.
After Engineering I am redesigning a lot of the Tactical screen as I feel like it just became too busy. I will take your points into consideration when doing that.
Text alone isn’t clickable on the UI, everything clickable is a shape of some sort. I leave enough room between these clickable elements to allow for touch based control.
You were right, the “Forward Left Turrets” was a typo. Turrets do need to be recharged if you have power them down.
I’ve already begun work on highlighting valid nodes when you start dragging a connection. There is going to be way more feedback added to the UI over the next week, with animations when things happen, like when equipment is used (it’s icon pulses yellow) or when it takes damage (it’s background pulses red).
I really like the idea of using the keyboard and scrollwheel to adjust the power while dragging, that is totally in. You will be able to click on already-created connections and adjust their power using arrows (and how using scrollwheel or the keyboard also).
I currently intend for the position of the reactors and equipment to be fixed, however there will be a number of variants to choose from for each ship, to suit your play style (more/less power available to particular systems etc.).
Each equipment section on the power wheel is actually an equipment slot. Each slot has a type (turret, engine, sensors, shield etc.) and a class (which designates the power requirement of the equipment).
Each piece of equipment has it’s own performance graph, and can have different behaviours. Like directed energy vs ballistic turrets.
In early releases you will have a selection of equipment to install on your ship before a mission, however we have detailed plan for a persistent dynamic campaign, where you will purchase equipment at stations, salvage them from wrecks, and get them from missions. These equipment will be generated procedurally.
Clicking on equipment will give you a detailed view of it on the top left of the screen, including the graph. The graph picture above is actually a graph from the game (albeit an earlier test version).
Good call on the operational heat (dark red) being hard to see, I will experiment with the colours.
On the subject of maps, ours will support a maximum size of just over over 17 billion x 17 billion kilometres (using a chunk system, similar to Minecraft’s).
Early versions of the game will have single missions, set in it’s own map, which you can load and play. The size of the map will be up to the mission creator.
As I said above we have plans for a dynamic campaign map, with procedurally generated missions and events, where the gameplay is much more like Elite.
I hope I have covered everything, and thanks again for the response.
Mark