Under the graphics portion, we should be discussing what improvements should be made to the graphics to make the Civ3 environment better for those marathon sessions. I know that the graphics for SMAC generated a lot of discussion. So if you didn't (or did) like the graphics in SMAC, post here to let everyone know what you liked, what you didn't, what you would change, etc..

The interface section will deal with how the player interacts to the Civ3 world. Personally I liked the SMAC interface, but I still think some improvements should be made. So if there is something you would like to be able to do, but can't, post here and we will see if we can't get it into the game.

My job here is to present ALL the ideas posted here. I will NOT make value judgements about ideas here. I will NOT say "this idea sucks, I won't summarize it". I WILL attempt to summarize all ideas posted here in a clear concise manner. If I do (and I will) make a mistake summarizing your idea, please e-mail me and I will remedy the problem.
OK that's enough from me. Let's start generating some ideas. I'm sure that if we all work together we will be able to make Civ3 an unprecedented success.

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Frank Moore
Thread Manager for Graphics and Interface
frankjmoore@hotmail.com

A 3D globe might take some power, but it doesn't have to take too much. I really do think it can have an effect on gameplay. Maybe the first civ's explorer to reach the poles gets a special bonus or somesuch (course you'd have to incorporate attrition into the game, etc. ... but this is drifting off the GRAPHICS AND INTERFACE topic)

I think Win95/NT should be an acceptable minimum OS. I think DirectX should be taken advantage of, for smooth graphics. If you don't go beyond DirectX 2.0, you'll have NT support (is that important?).

I think the game movies could be a bit higher quality ... but for the actual game graphics, they don't really need to be. Civilization's replayability has ALWAYS been its selling point. Didn't I read it was the best selling game of all time, or something close to? Even when Civ1 was out, there were games with better graphics. I think DOOM had been out for awhile, or at least its predecessors. There were some incredibly graphically detailed games out when Civ2 came out.

People still bought Civ ... why? Because gaming addicts want games that are fun to play over and over again! Street fighter games. *YAWN* 3D space fighter games like Wing Commander. *okay for a few months, then they collect dust*

If Civ2 never came out, I would STILL be playing the original Civ. And its what, 8 years old now!? Civilization brings die-hard fans.

Graphics can be good and decent ... with the actual gameplay graphics, more focus should be placed on making them easy to understand and work with, useful (maybe there should be tabs to switch between world views ... if resources are expounded out, how about maps showing the various resource deposits?), but they can still be fun. How about flags instead of mere colors for civs? Original (13 star) stars and striped I'd like to see for the Americans.

To me, one of the most frusturating things (speed wise) about SMAC and CTP is that they seem to animate by default, even when you turn off all animations they seem to still calculate it, just not show it. I think they should be inanimate by default, then you can add on annimations if you have a powerfull enough system.

Or how about simultaneous building of more than one item in a city? There are times when you have a huge city, have just made an advance and need to pump out more than one thing at a time, and don't have time to switch back and forth with your other 20, 30 or more cities. You could devoute X shields to building A, Y shields to building B, etc., maybe building to fill to a certain point ...
for instance, build 5 mech infs, 5 stealth bombers and 2 AEGIS cruisers.

Maybe the 3 types of buildings should have 3 different build menus. The list of units, building and wonders is getting longer and longer ... that's beautiful, but scrolling through to find what you want could be easier if we had say a "Unit Production," "Buidling Production," and "Wonder Production."
Depending on how the other threads go, there may be a need for having a "Public Works" control in city screens.

Graphics I think were fine from Civ2. Zoomable and scalable.

I agree, I like the idea of being able to zoom way out to see a lot of my empire.

A 3D globe might take some power

I'm not exactly sure about what it would take to have a 3D globe, I think that the map may need changed to a hex based map. I expect this topic to generate A LOT of discussion. The 3D map would be more realistic, but it will probably come down to how hard it would be to execute.

I think the game movies could be a bit higher quality ... but for the actual game graphics, they don't really need to be.

I expect this to be quite a hot topic also, personally the graphics don't make or break a game for me. I prefer to have great gameplay over graphics, but since this is the graphics thread, we should discuss it. I like the SMAC way of including both high-res and low-res graphics. This allows players with blazing fast machines to crank the graphics up to 11, or players with minimum system requirements, to minimize the detail. I think that the idea should be to make the detail on the graphics user definable so that the players system specs are taken into account.

I definitely want to see build queues for cities.

For sure, build queues were included in SMAC and they work preety well, except for a few annoying little bugs. I think that this system should be expanded upon.

Or how about simultaneous building of more than one item in a city?

I think that this should be a topic for a general discussion, the topic definitely has some merit, but it is a major change.

Maybe the 3 types of buildings should have 3 different build menus.

Maybe instead of this, filters could be included. So that the player could click a tab to just display military units, or just city improvements. This could be taken a step further to filter military units so that only naval units would be shown. I think that this system would eliminate scrolling through 50 or 60 things to build.

Maybe an "All Cities Build" control that will order all cities to produce something, maybe a new defensive unit.

A way to implement this would be to allow the player to select multiple cities from say the F1 screen, and to be able to change what every one of the selected cities is producing, or even change all the selected cities production to a queue of items.

there may be a need for having a "Public Works" control in city screens.

I believe this is a C:CTP concept (correct me if I'm wrong). I don't have C:CTP, could you explain the concept. Would you recommend getting this game, for official purposes only.

Ember,

To me, one of the most frusturating things (speed wise) about SMAC and CTP is that they seem to animate by default, even when you turn off all animations they seem to still calculate it, just not show it. I think they should be inanimate by default, then you can add on annimations if you have a powerfull enough system.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, could you elaborate?

Sorry for the long post, but I think that it is necessary in this case.

More than one type of tile for the same terrain. For example decidouse forest vs. coniferouse. It would have no effect gameplay wise but would make the map more attractive.

Wrong ! Gaming addicts want a game that you can play, change completely (or have someone else change it for you) and then play it over and over again, when it's essentially a completely new game! That's why Customisation is so important.

All graphics need to either (a) be in a simple file format or (b) have the added option (for slow players and customisation) to be in a simple file format. For example, It's OK if firaxis uses CAVIAR files for the units, as long as those who want to customise (or those who have slow computers) can use Bitmapped units intead.

Frank Moore: What about sound? Music and Sound effects are an essential component of the presentation, you know...

Templates: These were cool in SMAC, I use 'em all the time! but, whenever I start a new game, I have to input all my templates again. You should be a able to save templates to a savegame indepent file, so they can be used on several games. (of course you will run into problems based on stuff in the template that is not technologically possible, but maybe a downgrade/upgrade algarythm could be implemented.... for instance... I design a template that builds musketeers then setlers then Calvalry.. Then, in a diffrent game, I load this template, but its in the middle ages. so then it converts it to Pikemen the setlers then Knights. If I load it in a future game, it will build Infantry then Engineers then Tanks. It wont be fullproof, but it'd be sufficient.)

Also, as I tend to use Governers A LOT when I get huge empires, I tend to switch large parts of my empire from Build/Discover to Conquer. At present I have to go to the city summary screen and right click every city and change it to conquer. It'd be much easier to hold ctrl, select 10 city's, then set them all to conquer in one click. I know, its really minor, but it'd help.

"Someone will, if you make sure to post it in the Graphics thread of the Suggestions for the Wish List forum."

So here it is! I will leave to others whether we should commence the debate here, but I suspect we should not. I would volunteer to do the summary, but I spend too much time on these threads as it is.

Also check out the summary for this thread over at the summary forum.
http://www.firaxis.com/ubb/Forum8/HTML/000016.html

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Frank Moore
Thread Manager for Graphics and Interface
frankjmoore@hotmail.com

Diplomatic graphics should be better.

In the deserts, a few palm trees would probably be good.

Queues, on the other hand, are a great idea. I agree with Destructor that the first item on the queue should be with all the others... It's a little thing, but it gets bothersome.

In response to the 3D globe suggestions above, this is much more complicated, check out the discussion in the maps thread.

Also, I agree that we need customizable graphics to go with the 3D ones, if there are 3D ones.

I agree with you about saving build queues, but I think upgrading the queues automatically would be tough to implement. One possible solution would be to give the player more than just 10 queues to save to. If the player would have 50 for example, it might be possible to make a queue for just about every situation.

Gordon the Whale,

I agree with you about the building multiple things, it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
As for the queues, there is a small interface problem with the item being built, it should be the first item in the queue. I do use the queues in SMAC and there is not much doubt that this is a big improvement over civ2.
The graphics (i.e. color scheme) in SMAC is designed to look like an alien landscape so I expect (and hope) that the landscapes for Civ3 will follow the SMAC idea, but use different colors which will look much more appealing to the eye.

meanwhile,

<------BUMP!

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Q Cubed
Renaissance Q • Q-of-all-trades
Thread Discussion Facilitator for Wonders

It's not necessary that I see all units when see a world overview until I zoom to a greater size. So it will need not too much ram or graphic card memory.

At least always remember that the most used screen resolution is 600 x 800, not more, and most users don't have more ram on graphic card than 4-8 mb

What I general don't like (unfortunately all newer games have it) is that only a full screen modus is possible.

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Best, Dreifels
http://1st-euro.net/AC

(1) Take up less screen real estate! Smaller fonts, less useless border frills, etc.

(2) Echoing sentiments somewhere above, less modal dialog boxes, or at least dim or stipple the controls you can't use while they're up.

(3) Consistent keyboard shortcuts, including modal dialog boxes.

(4) A better way to move units one square in a given direction. Click-dragging takes a little while to do for laptops with touchpads to tap and drag, maybe a nicely drawn compass rose that moves when you click on the octants or something.

(5) Right-click options, but less than shown in Alpha Centauri (why do I have to pick Action... when I just right-clicked o nthe units?)

I think Sid Meyer should revert to the way it was done in CIV2, with a menu at the top with many different options (though I don't remember them all).

Included should be:

* FILE (New, Save, Load, Exit, etc...)

* CHEAT (:-))

* VIEW (Empire status, Top 5 Cities, etc...)

I don't remember any others right now, but you get the idea...

ALSO:

I think the interface should be bright and out-of-the-way, also make it easier for you to move pop-up windows.

I also looved the "View City" thing in Civ2 and 1, which they got rid of and added that weird thing with Who did What When (they should keep that, but have it under the VIEW menu.

However, my #1 thing of all time in CIV was the upgrading of your Throne Room, or your Castle itself. WHY DID THEY HAVE TO GET RID OF THAT?? Plus, it gave you an idea of how well your empire is doing...

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CtP Interface:

There were no menus, just a little "scroll-up" thing around where the comm menu is in SMAC. From there, they expected you to easily access the entire game. E.G. All the menus normally at the top, were little incomprehensible images (5 of them!!) However, they did save lots of space for the main screen (which was good).

SimCity 3000 had something (in my opinion, anyways) that was really cool, a little ticker bar at the very bottom of the screen which told you important info (and useless-but-sometimes-funny junk). I'f that could somehow be incorporated into SMAC, it'd be great!maybe a couple of lines (hyperlinked to corresponding screens) with information like

quote:

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"Lady Deirdre wishes to speak with you"

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quote:

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"U.N. Humanity Base has been infiltrated"

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Although, it should be a couple of lines high (5 or 6), and the texzt should just sit there, not move around the screen (though it should be able to scroll vertically - NOT automatically - if there are more than 6 lines of news)

That's about it...