Since we’re now in the Graph Update release cycle, I think that this is the right time for us to start working on improving auto-evo reports, specifically making them graphical.
I based this concept off of what was said here: Explaining the auto-evo prediction to the player - #3 by hhyyrylainen, building up from that.
Now, one important thing to consider is that auto-evo reports provide a lot of information, while only a small amount of it is actually relevant to the player. So, in an improved auto-evo reporter, there should be less information immediately available, to make it less overwhelming. At the same time, no information should be locked away from the player for being “irrelevant”. Additionally, the given information should be as readable as possible, with much of it visible at a glance, which means using less text and more graphics.
So, based on all of that, here is how I imagine a new auto-evo reporter:
Each species is shown in a box with some overall information (name, population, etc.). A button on the box would allow the player to see more detailed information. There also needs to be a species image to make the boxes more interesting and also to make the player able to guess what kind of creature it is at a glance.
The boxes are shown in scrollable list. They should be divided into some categories, like “current patch”, “selected patch” and maybe more, so that relevant species are immediately visible to the player. Species outside of those categories might be displayed per-patch or just in a single list.
Boxes might have small icons near them to display some additional info about species, such as patches of their habitat, a something for “this species has mutated”, etc.
As I said before, each box should have a button to show more detailed info on a species. This might include what is already shown in auto-evo reports for each species, but there might be much more info. Occupied miche(s), habitat patches, mutation history, etc.
Here’s a concept-art for demonstration. The design isn’t great, but I hope it conveys the idea.
So, that’s pretty much it. I would like to hear your thoughts on this, considering that this is something we might want to add to the game in the near future.
I was thinking that the graphical display way would overhaul the entire “auto-evo” sub-view. So there would be no more like a list view even if it is made more graphical, but instead there’d be a web view with icons around each species (a very quick mockup based on your image):
So this way everything is combined into one: species relationships, images of the species, their population results (and a patch breakdown), as well as any other events like marking newly split species. More info would then be given on hover or on click of the species images.
So yeah I had in mind that we throw out the whole paradigm that it needs to follow some desktop application GUI control practices and just do it all from scratch in a draggable scroll container with custom drawing of everything and packing in as much details as possible to a view that is at a first look pretty simple but allows the player to drag around or zoom out to see a lot more details about the world.
Having though this over, I think that visualizing auto-evo as a graph with species relationships would be the right idea. Specifically, not a free form graph of some kind, but a food web.
For the following reasons:
It is organized strictly and thus easier to navigate and read
Given food web’s organization principles, some info about each species is possible to discern just from its vertical position on the graph (whether its a producer or a consumer and of what level)
It is a scientific way of showing species’ relationship, which fits Thrive very well
There is a good concept of food webs by MirrorMonkey2:
Applying the desing I descibed in the first post, it would look somewhat like this:
However, graphs being the central part of auto-evo doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be a species list. I believe that there should be a separate tab with such a list (as I described in my previous post), as it would make it easier to find an exact species, especially if there is some kind of filtering system.
Considering that a complete auto-evo report should also contain a miche view, I think that we could include all those three screens (food web, species list, and miches) as sub-tabs of a single auto-evo tab.
On thinking about this more and what I should do initially, I decided to work on the general increase of graphics part for the report. I thought that if I immediately started on the food chain tab, that would basically conflict with my idea for the main tab of the results. So as a result I did this based on @dligr’s initial design:
