[REL] Enhanced System Preview

I've been working on system sharing, but I realized that it was going to be a big pain to have to load a system just to see what planets it has in it. I came up with a solution that I was going to use in the system sharing mod, but it actually makes more sense to release it separately.

The system previews now show icons for other planets in the system to the left of the thumbnail for the main planet. The icons are all scaled according to their radius. Hover your mouse over a planet icon to get more details about it.

This mod includes my partial fix for FS#3011, so the preview panel image is for the correct biome.



UPDATE v1.1.0

Updated the mod so that it also uses the right column. I also added a nice little glow effect around the planets when you mouse over them.

That is an awesome mod. Something like that should be incorporated in to the actual game.

Looks so much better.

Thanks! The tooltips that popup actually have a semi-transparent background too, although that didn't show up in the screenshot for some reason. I think that makes it quite a bit nicer.

I will probably get around to updating this at some point. Right now it only shows as many planets as it can fit on the left column. I will need to allow additional planets to show up on the right side.

Yeah. This'll have to be pretty scalable as we'll (hopefully) be able to play on dozens of planets down the line.

What about a way to switch starting planets?

That's not really something we should be dealing with from this screen. you're better off using one of the New Game screen mods that gives you more tools for generating new seeds and changing starting planets. My goal with this mod is just to help keep things organized. Once system sharing is in, there will be a lot of planets to dig through.

Another shot of this mod. this one is also using system sharing.

Is it recommended to keep the danzel's Better system mod in addition to using this one to see all the details of the starting planet still?

Danzel's Better System View mod is absolutely recommended, as well as Dementiurge's Advanced Planet Details. Each of those mods works in a different game screen. Mine only changes the page that let's you choose a system to load, advanced planet details gives more information and controls on the new game screen, and better system view is an in-game ui mod.

I use all three of these with no conflict and a vastly improved ui experience.

It would be nice to see the Better System View & Advanced Planet Details mods incorporate the use of the planetary scaling that you do to show the relative size of the planets next to each other as well. It helps to get a read on the relative size of each planet with a quick glance. Can you offer up that bit of code to them by chance?

It's pretty integrated into the mod, and I would like to clean it up. The image size thing is fairly easy to do, and would have been a lot easier if I had just done a knockout data-bind to the image width.

If you have the planetSpec, you can do something like this;

Code:

function imageSizeForPlanetPreviews(radius) {
    radius = radius<=1200 ? radius : 1200;  // Bigger than this is just stupid anyway.
    var imageSize = radius / 1200 * 56; // Maximum size is 56px
    return imageSize;
}

var radius = planetSpec.planet.radius;
var imageSize = imageSizeForPlanetPreviews(radius);

And then you just set the image width to imageSize. PlanetSpecs are all kept in model.selectedSystem().planets[], but the way.

*Edit*

I would be happy to help with any ui mods related to this idea. It is always great to keep a consistent theme across different mods.

Sweet as, sorry my question was about the advanced planet details mod not the better system view which you answered anyway - got mixed up with the names (there are numerous mods now - I love it!) Thanks for your response cpt.

The version of Advanced Planet Details on PAMM is very old, and I've made major strides since then. (Major strides.) The latest version, 1.3, is already available in its thread and it does have scaled planet icons, but I haven't uploaded anything to PAMM's Github because | insert excuse here |.

What I would really like to see are icons positioned to show the relationship between planets and their moons. Sadly, the way systems are stored internally makes it difficult to determine whether a planet is orbiting another planet.

I had no idea that had been updated! We need to get that up on PAMM. And yeah, I didn't even attempt to do anything more complicated than image scaling. It's too bad orbits are computed in the engine and not stored in the system spec.

Updated to version 1.1.0. see the original post for details.

I would be nice to have a preview like this in the lobby so we could see all the planets and their details before the start of the game.

You mean like this?
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-advanced-planet-details-59607.54290/

yup lol idk how i did not find that b4.

There is an old version of it on PAMM, but the newest version in that thread is a lot better.

Could the new version please be pushed to PAMM??

Works perfectly in Gamma v.62037

Obviously the mod is broken right now. I'm working on getting System Sharing back up, but when that's done I can get around to a version 2.0 of Enhanced System Preview.

I'll be bringing back something like the old panel that let you look at all the planet attributes, but I also want to use the space around system thumbnails to show information like number of planets, number of starting planets, number of smashables, largest planet size, and smallest planet size. I'll probably need icons for each of those numbers in order to save space. Do you know anyone that could help with that? For the smashables I can use either the halley icon from the game or that asteroid graphic that I've seen a lot.