UI Suggestion: Notifications

[Mitokandria]

My suggestion: A tiered notification system: Critical, Important, Normal, and Minor.

• Place the current notifications into categories and assign those categories to a default tier.
  • Allow the user to change the tier for a chosen category in Settings.
• Add a Notifications Panel button to the UI.
  • Lights up when there are new notifications.
• Tier - Critical
  • Noise Alert
  • Notification Panel pop-up
• Tier - Important
  • Notification Pop-Up
• Tier - Normal
  • Notification Panel lights up
• Tier - Minor
  • Notification panel does not light up.

 

At the current stage of development the constant notifications, visuals, and sounds are only a minor problem or annoyance, but as more features are added to the game management of notifications is going to become a much bigger issue. Already we can see the limitations of the current notification system where important notifications, if missed, can't be read elsewhere and too many notifications at once (during warp) causes visual and audio spam that massively degrades frame rate during mid-late game when you have 20+ vessels.

This feature would also be great for modders. Allowing mod devs a framework for notifications and messages outside the vanilla gameplay loop without overloading the player.