Start up - Too slow. Granted, I'm running it on a late-2010 MacBook Air, but it took minutes for the OS just to tell me that the app is made by an untrusted developer. After re-running it, it still took a long time to get to the *menu*. Isn't the menu UI just a WebKit rendering? Main menu - Videos/Updates scroll bar is hidden by the user/notification/clock widget. - The tutorial video pop-up close button is just a white square. Maybe put an X in there? - The commander image is slow to load when returning here. Game settings - Graphics/Headlights: Off, Low, High option names would make more sense to me. - Camera/Edge Scroll, UI/Show Unit Icons, UI/Show Stat Bars: Drop down is too narrow and cuts off some option names. Replays - There is no sound when hovering over or clicking the Back button. - The main menu item for this section says 'Replays and Videos'. - The View Replay button is visible/clickable when no replay is selected and does nothing. Armory - There is no sound when hovering over or clicking the Back button. - There is no image showing for the Beast commander. - Commanders I don't have and badges are clickable, yet do nothing. - Selecting my default commander still shows the 'Set Default Commander' button. - With just two tabs, it isn't very clear which tab (Commanders or Badges) is selected. Maybe add a thin horizontal bar beneath the tabs having the same color as the selected tab to make this clearer? - The text 'My Commanders', 'My Badges', and the labels for the commanders and badges use some serif font that doesn't match the rest of the UI. System designer - Recent/My Planets do nothing, yet are highlighted when hovering over them. - Tried using the Earth template. There was a chunk of the orbit missing from the right side. - The Starting Planet checkbox uses the Mac native checkbox widget, which doesn't match the rest of the look and feel. I would expect the checkbox to be vertically aligned with the other values in the table. - The X and Y text boxes aren't wide enough sometimes to fully display the float values in them. - It isn't clear what Engines means in this context. Can a planet start out with Halleys? Should this be a slider instead? It's not clear why the 'E:' label is useful here. - It's not clear why Mass is useful. - Maybe a Back button would be more consistent than a Close button (the Close button in the upper-right of the screen)? - Without having clicked these yet, it's not clear at all what the difference between Preview All and Simulate is. - 'Starting Planet' seems like it should be in all caps to be consistent. - Showing and hiding the Properties panel is jarring, and the positioning of the Show button seems weird and arbitrary. Maybe just start it in the upper-right with an option to collapse the panel to just the title bar and the ability to move it around out of the way when needed? Or maybe just always show the panel, even if no planet is selected? - The Properties panel Close button (when in solar system view) seems unnecessary. Just click off the planet. - The middle mouse button click-and-drag scroll is too fast. - 'Edit Planet' vs. 'Remove' is inconsistent. Maybe rename 'Properties' to 'Planet Properties' and change the buttons to 'Edit' and 'Remove'? - I expected to be able to scroll the view by dragging with the left mouse button on unoccupied space. Through experimentation, I found that middle mouse button does this. This isn't clear. - The zoom when clicking Edit Planet is jerky. Maybe add an ease to start and stop the zoom more slowly? This could aid spacial awareness and keep users oriented. - Why was Random Name not available in the solar system view? - 'Radius' is not in all caps. - When previewing an Earth-like planet with height range 100, a couple dark regions remained: Zooming in made them go away, but caused some trees on the periphery of my view to become discolored and disfigured: Zooming in all the way on those disfigured trees fixed the problem. - Biome Scale goes as low as -1.37392e-7. This doesn't seem correct. - When previewing a Desert-like planet with Water Height 0, Biome Scale 1, Height Range 100, and Radius 407, I observed a thin piece of terrain sticking out (see by the crack in the terrain): - The black bar on the bottom looks weird when it cuts through the Templates/Recent/My Planet buttons. - When you hover over the planet template categories (Earth, Desert, etc.) it displays the temperature. It isn't clear why this is useful. I don't see how I would consider the other numbers either, though. I would care about the biome type first and foremost and understand what that implies: moons mean craters, deserts mean canyons, earths mean oceans, etc. Game lobby - There should be a button to let me design a system on the fly and return straight to the game lobby with that design plugged in. - It should let me quickly select single-planet solar systems by biome type and planet size. - The Friends button under 'Open To' highlights when hovered over and animates when clicked, even when it's not an option (I guess if you currently have no friends, like me). - Password value should be unhidden and have a separate 'Password' label. Is password stealing actually an issue? - Clicking the commander image next to my player changes it to another commander's image. It isn't clear if this changes the commander I'm using. If it does, this is a bad way to do it. Let me view the full image of the commander. Also, this would seem to conflict with my choice of commander in the Armory. Let me choose my commander in one place. - Nit pick: I'd like to be able to play a game by myself without AI to practice. The game forces me to fill a second player slot. Maybe AI Sandbox is for this purpose? That's a guess at this point. Will the AI Sandbox built out its base, and just not attack? Or will its commander just stand there? Again, not clear. Play - I would expect the reverse colors for the pole labels N and S. Usually north is red and blue is south. (Do a Google image search for 'magnetic poles'.) - The build version is hidden by the action panel on the right. - The middle mouse button sometimes gets stuck on and I can scroll the view around without holding the button down. I have to click it again to stop scrolling. - I commanded a fabricator bot to build a string of walls between a rock and a point far off into the ocean. I did this using a single command using a mouse drag. This is what happened: I'm sure my enemy will overlook that. Doing the same command again near to the first wall produced a contiguous, correct string of walls. When doing the wall build command, the green spots extended partly into the water and trailed off in size into nothing. However, the number of walls actually built didn't seem to match the number of spots I counted. In one experiment where the wall string showed one full spot and the rest were trailing into the water, I could only count five spots, yet seven were built, and there was a hole in this string of walls too (the far right wall in the image below): I found that there was a pathing bug here as well, where the fabricator would walk right through the contiguous wall! I *really* hope my enemy will overlook that. I observed the fabricator making inefficient movements when building the strings of walls. For one wall string, it was standing to the side of the string and would build as far as it could reach, then advance to the last wall it had built, then continue to build the string of walls, instead of moving beyond the last wall built to its maximum range, turning around, and then continuing its building. It was moving twice as often as it needed to. In another case of building a wall string, it was standing in front of the advancing wall string, so it would build a wall, then back up and build the next one, then back up, and repeat. This behavior is even more inefficient! See below: I was hoping I could trick the fabricator into trapping itself between those two walls, the rock, and the sea, but it didn't happen, although maybe that was by luck. I was later able to get it to trap itself. - Fabricators can begin spraying their green goo before fully turning towards the thing they're building. - Most terrain I've seen is flat and boring. I'd like to see more movement constraints caused by hills/mountains and canyons. Defending against 360 (or 270, or whatever) degrees all the time seems tiresome and unrealistic. Bottlenecks are interesting too. - I can't figure out how to exit a game early and go back to the lobby. Do I have to surrender first or something? I've clicked around on seemingly everything and don't see an option to exit. Miscellaneous - Are all buttons supposed to have the hover and click sounds? This is inconsistent. OK, that's enough for now. Great progress! Edit: More: - Start up the third time only took 8 seconds to show the disclaimer (which it didn't remember that I'd accepted last time). - The main menu doesn't remember my login credentials from the last time I signed in. - Quitting from the main menu is jarring -- it just ends, mid-music, and the window pops away. Maybe fade the graphics and music out over a second or two? Edit 2: More: - The game created the file ~/CoherentLabs/CoherentUI/Coherent_UI.log. Please don't create files or directories in my home/user directory.
