Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Wing Commander Saga => Topic started by: Tolwyn on November 17, 2003, 11:33:36 am
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looks like that our interface v. 1.0 will die before being actually released. It was planned to be some sort of an interface a la Babylon Project. Now, however, we are working on a completely new interface art. I think it should look more like a real computer interface instead of the original Freespace one with background pictures and metallic looking buttons.
I am attaching a wip of our new main hall. Comments are, as always, welcomed.
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Damn jpg compression. These things look 2,3452 times better without it.
As Tolwyn said, We're going for new interface graphics in our mod and decided to replace the FSish interface we had before with something that real men would use. It has no nice renders in the background, shiny metal buttons and other crap that plagued the interfaces of most of the recent space sims, I tried to make it feel like a real computer interface; it should feel as if you're accessing some panel at a WC warship ans not like the standard FS menue screens; the style is somwhat a cross between the Homeworld interface and the WC4 ship selection screen. It's not ready yet and the buttons are still the old FS ones, but shows the directon I want to go: Tell me what you think, and give some advice how to make it better. ;)
Though still too big to attach, it's already compressed into jpg format, so it's more blurry than the original. Otherwise you'd have to download a 0,5 mb pic everytime you open this page :p
(http://www.scifi-3d.de/wcsaga/Lynx's stuff/interface1.jpg)
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The tech room is looking nice. I see what you're trying to do with the main hall, but honestly I think it'd be better to have the mainhall have a layout like the tech room does, and the select pilot screen at the launch of FS2 having a fancy WC render.
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I like using renders in the interface it can be very cool but it can also be interesting to do it other ways. I can't seem to load the JPG put up (either that or the server is slow) but the first one I can see and is good. Couple of things that bother me about it:
1) The composition is really interesting and the artwork is good but it has some things that sort of stick out. One is that the faces are very bright and use very intense colors while other elements on the image are much more dulled in color. I like the dulled in color and I don't think the really bright high opacity stuff works. But it'd be a simple matter to take the layers of the faces and dull them out in Photoshop to match and make the composition seem more smooth. The other thing is that you've got this sense of conflict between the Humans and the Kilrathi but the two ships are both human in origin and fighting each other. I guess there is symbolism in that too but it probably may have worked better with a Hellcat being the target of a Dralthi or something along those lines.
2) The text seems a bit squished although the buttons seem like they are just the right size.
Overall its quite well done and aside from the things that I pointed out, its artistically excellent and more to the point its usability is very high (which is important for interface).