Posted May 15, 2017
I would make some modifications, though:
Speed axis should go from 0 to MaxSpeed, where MaxSpeed is the top speed that ship could reach by diverting all power to engines.
On the vertical axes, I would leave it from 0 to 100, since no other ships in the game, other than the player's, ever goes past 100.
For custom missions or game modes where we allow the AI to surpass 100% shields, I would just recolor the overflow, or make it have another bar immediately next to it for values 100 to 200. That would make better use of the screen space.
I think the part where you wrote "Sienar TIE/LN" needs to house, instead, the other information like current order and ETA.
I just fear that this will look two crowded or unreadable at these font sizes.
I put together an updated mockup based on your feedback (although I'd put the TIE Interceptor at 110 from memory, which may or may not be correct, plus would have been based on TIE Fighter rather than X-Wing ;-) ). I think the overflow is a good idea - a lighter blue bar could overlay on top of the existing bars and would maximise space.
I agree that readability could be a bit of an issue - I think that this type of design would work quite well for high-res monitor setups, but I imagine it would be a bit trickier at 800x600! At that point, the choice of font and rendering method would be quite important, I expect.
For this particular example, I've used Profont which I've mentioned previously, which looks quite close to the original - although I didn't realise how blocky it gets at larger sizes until I did the mockup.
However, I think that the really important aspect of whatever font is eventually used (in whatever targeting computer design is used in the actual release) is that it is monospaced - from a UI standpoint, this actually makes things easier since you can control the format of the string yourself - since you know exactly how many character spaces you have to work with. It also fits quite nicely with the military computing aesthetic.
I've also included an extra version where the ETA is formatted differently - this would be a static counter (and I believe a safe position given the limits on the number of F/G name characters in the original game)
About the font, I do not really want to use one that is bitmap based. I don't want to show artificial pixels.
However, I have found the way to use both dynamic and monospaced characters in the same text, so I am changing all digits (distances, speeds, ETAs, etc) to use monospaced characters, while the words use dynamic fonts. So it will be a mix of both.
I really want to try implementing one of these mockups. It looks closer to the original, it isn't a copy/paste from TIE Fighter, and the bars could help with legibility during combat.
