zigzag, i totally agree, as minimal as possible is the best, the thing is: i think, and i am pretty sure tourresh will agree, that this is the minimal as possible regarding the fact that each of the elements in this screen are essential and correlate with eachother so it will not help to seperate them into popups, as it canl only cluster the actuall game screen. this way tourresh can sort the mess in a seperate screen and have much more control.

tourresh - the questions to your question will be:

 how will it appear on the main game screen? if its the entire screen, then it really doesnt matter, but if you want to integrate it into the main board, size does matter. the two tabs saves you almost a third of the entire production screen.

how fast do you want the players to set up a queue? if you want the player to quickly set up the entire production simultaneously, the non tabbes version is far far superior.

i can take a shot at the resources icons, can you list them and maybe future ones?

Thanks for the space empires link, I'll have to spend some time exploring that community.

Magic I'd love any help I can get. Luckily for us both, the game doesn't require photorealism or anything even close. The unit sprites probably don't even need need to be any larger than 64x64 , which limits the quality anyways (though I guess if someone wants to make anything in better quality it's no problem just shrinking it).

Burningpet I agree with every part of your last post. For now, I really can't even comment on what I'd rather the player be doing. A lot of that has to do with the entire production and industry system not being finalized. I'm getting a lot of different ideas and I think I'm just going to have to experiment with a few of them. I can theorize and debate some of these systems for months, but until they are actually tested in game I won't really know. Therefore, I'm going to try to hold off on perfecting most of the UI stuff until all the basic components together. It's really hard to do these UI elements when their role in the overall game isn't certain.

Oh, believe me I agree. It's hard to think of a recent game that hasn't used that. Even EFS used such a system. Without so much as even a sprite artist on board I kind of feared that 95% of the units would just have a big "N/A" or a question mark there.

As for the resources most are similar to the ones from EFS, and I'm finding it hard to think of how else they could be represented besides the general way they were there (not that they need to be that different). here's the ones I know will be in:

• Food
• Energy (an atom? lightning bolt?)
• Metal (an ingot?)
• Electronics
• Chemicals
• Wetware (that skull from EFS is amazing. Good luck topping that one)

Resource roles that will be in the game, but whose form is not finalized.

• An uncommon harvested byproduct of farming. EFS = 'Exotica'
• A rare byproduct of mining, Gems or Precious Metals EFS= 'Gems'
• A second tier proccessed resource along the lines of EFS's biochems.
• An advanced processed form of metal. EFS = 'CeramSteel'
• An advanced processed energy source. EFS = 'Monopols' (that red circle thing. Lots of potential alternatives here. Antimatter, fusion cores, etc.)
• The most advanced processed resource for starships. EFS = singularities (alternatives include warp drives, anitmatter, etc.)
• An extremely rare harvestable resource used for very powerful units (artifacts? unobtanium? random made up material?

Questionable resources

• An uncommon byproduct of mining. EFS = 'Trace'

Then of course there's money and time, both of which can have many graphical interpretations.

Not a bad idea louist, but I'm saving the changes like the one you suggested to more final builds of the game as way too much could change before then.

I'll add adamantium to the list (might as well add slade while I'm at it).

Trace is the 3rd resource from the left in the last EFS screenshot in the original post.

My brain is not artistic and I tend to have to resort to a lot of user polls to help me decide what looks better. I find nothing wrong with the style itself. The sharpness doesn't fit into the default gui I'm using, but I'm going to end up replacing the gui graphics anyways. The main thing with the art style is it has to be relatively consistent throughout the game. I don't know how far exactly this would need to extend. Would the large unit portraits need to be done in a similar style? It's quite the contrast to the production mockup you made. The only thing I have to compare to style wise is the old EFS style and the style of the units I've taken from FreeCiv. I don't really know if any of them is inherently better.

On the note of the production mockup, il-palazzo suggested a pretty good industry method I think I'm going to implement which would work better with tabs.

Back to the symbols...

I asked five people what they thought each symbol meant.

1. 100% correct answer responses

2. 100% correct answer responses

3. 40% correct. Others thinking it was an arrow or wing with a shadow.

4. Got a lot of interesting ones like 'brain juice', but they all had the same theme of biochems.

5. 1 correct answer. 'A shell', 'A door', 'Armor', 'A box'

6. 1 correct answer. 'a button', 'a light', 2 'the letter I'. The guy who got it correct was literally mining in UO at the time and his entire backpack was filled with ingots.

7. 100% correct answers

8. 'A bowling ball', 'The new symbol for lua', 'the gay death star', 'pool ball', 'an easter egg'

I think 3 can easily be solved with splitting the left polygon into two.

5 probably needs more detail.

6 would be a lot more recognizable if it was represented in isometric form and/or with multiple ingots stacked.

I liked the semi objective methoed of judging the icons, although, the context here is also important, had you said those were all reources in a turn based strategy game, would people still recognise the gem as an arrow? or the ingot as a button? i am not sure. non the less, it is still important to make it as easiest as possible to recognise them in glance without forcing the player to make mental connections.

the reason why i went with such a method is because it is one of the simplest ways of creating icons, bearing in mind that you will not always get assistance from graphic men, so you could easily create icons youself that will remain in the style of the previous ones.

this brings me to what you have brought up regarding the unit portrait issue, i may have a solution, not the pretiest, but it can bring the entire interface, along with the icons into a single graphic style  that can be easily made without much of artistic skills.

louist - nice catch on the lighting

those wireframe portraits can be easily made, and it brings a militart futuristic notion into the interface.

note that we are talking style here and not neccecarily the exact arrangement of the elements.

Well, the brain-juice has grown on me, but if you are worried about it, try out something like a liquid-filled syringe, or the rather well-known biohazard symbol.

I guess electronics needs something, but I don't know what if anything needs to be done to exotica.

As far as UI style in concerned I really don't know at the moment. One thing I was considering was how the GUI style is guying to affect the maps. The latest mockup would probably look totally out of place on some of the maps that have been made. There's not a lot of maps made currently so it doesn't really matter if some maps can't be used because of the style. However, we need to keep in mind that the UI will have an impact on the style of maps. So with the more "worn" UI the maps would look quite a bit different.

The UI also is one of the parts that really hard to implement piece by piece, unlike the unit portraits/sprites. So I guess working on vehicles would be great for now and should give you a lot of freedom. For a general list of units you can look at http://website.lineone.net/~rwein/nova/unit2-3.htm . Although the names will change and some of the units won't be there the general roles the units fill will probably still exist. You can be pretty certain that if there's a vehicle, there is probably a later more upgraded version or two, a heavy variant, a scout variant, and one that hovers. I'm also not above using the same model and just replacing treads with some hover doodad.