Graphics Development

[Elefant]

Do you think graphics development should work toward 3D graphics or animations? Or would UI improvements help the most?

[Corbeau]

Neither. It should go toward making the map as readable as possible, to get the most information with the least time looking at it. Both 3D and animations most of the time work against this. I want this game to be a complex strategy, not a Disney cartoon.

[Elefant]

Good point. In civ 4 there is a little panel that gives tile info like combat odds, percent influence, resources, and output for the tile your cursor hovers over. Something like that would be a big improvement over the current methods of getting such info. The tile info panel is a huge frustration on a laptop without a middle mouse button. Another would be the output filter that would show the outputs of all the tiles.

[Elefant]

Edited the poll to reflect this need.

[Elefant]

The main idea of the poll is to see what client improvements would be most appreciated.

[Elefant]

I would also like to know what improvements would draw new players. It seems like a lot of people (myself included) are drawn in by the 3d freeciv web screenshots.

[cazfi]

Engine development alone isn't providing those experiences to players. Now, to me there's also important question of what engine improvements tileset authors would want? There has not been much development on that front since 3.0 (meaning both already-frozen 3.1, and 3.2 far in its development)

[Elefant]

I guess I probably should have put that in the question. Mainly, I would like to be able to make any graphic animated by putting numbers at the end of the tag, like the unit selection circle and the explosion animation. I would also like to be able to set different graphics for units, depending on what action they are performing. Lastly, I would like to be able to place decorative graphics with Lua.

[cazfi]

I would like to be able to place decorative graphics with Lua.

Server or client side lua, or both? On the server side you can currently, e.g., have (in your ruleset) such extras that they provide nothing but visuals, and those extras can be controlled by lua.

[Elefant]

I was thinking things like the nuke animation that could be placed. I guess that would be client side, because it would need to exist for a certain amount of time measured in seconds, and then be destroyed.