Medal Awards

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Another question. I have been looking at options to improve on the black background, ribbon-less medals of VB6.

Option 1: Keep the VB6 medals. No work required, but black background looks odd on dark blue, there are no ribbons and there is a relatively small choice of medals.

Option 2: Use medal ribbons on the Commander window instead of the physical medals. This is a simple option as they all the same size, or at least are easy to resize, and I don't have to worry about background. There are MANY available online for real-world medals. There would be plenty of space on the commander window where I would add them in rows as on a uniform and could even add priority of display. I could also add to them to each row of the medal list on the Medal window, rather than needing to clock on the row to see a medal.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awards_and_decorations_of_the_United_States_Armed_Forces

Option 3: Use PNG medals with attached ribbons and a transparent background. This would probably look the most impressive as you would see a row of medals with ribbons but it requires a lot of messing about. Firstly, most of the images I can find are all different aspect ratios, so I would have to crop them to get them to line up. Many of them don't have transparent backgrounds and white backgrounds would look odd. Cropping those that do have transparent backgrounds removes the transparent background, so then I need an editor that can handle that and perhaps add transparent backgrounds to some others. There are also some issues that different medals are shown with different length ribbons so they don't line up neatly.

For example: https://www.usamilitarymedals.com/collections/military-medals

I have been playing around with option 3 quite a lot in an effort to make it work but I am starting to think option 2 is a lot more practical and useful. I would also be able to create a huge amount of choice relatively quickly.

Open to comments and feedback on my musings

[Father Tim]

Option 3 would awesome, but I wouldn't want to spend too much time trying to achieve it.

Option 2 makes me happy.

[Kristover]

I'll second it.  I actually think I would prefer Option 2 over 3 even though 3 would 'look better'.  Straightforward, easy to implement, and I think it would look sharp.

[DIT_grue]

How are medals for non commanding officers handled?

I would like an option to award special medals to to them for tasks related to their station,
e.g. to the Science Officer for survey or tactical for killing enemy missiles and ships

At the moment it is just the ship commander. I am open to suggestions about how other officers should benefit. A couple of options:

Option 1) It would be possible to have officer-type-specific conditions, such as Science Officer on Ship that Discovers 10 jump Points, or Tactical Officer on Ship that Destroys 100,000 tons of Shipping, etc.

Option 2) Junior officers receive a partial benefit for each measurement, based on the type of measurement (so Tactical Officer receives half credit for destroyed tonnage or Science Officer gets half credit for survey achievement, etc.).

Other suggestions welcome.

Regarding partial credit; I'd advise letting the junior officers take full credit, and offering partial credit as an option for the CO. The CO isn't at the station doing the work themselves after all, and they're going to get credit for a lot of things.

I don't know whether it would add too much to the coding... but if there was an option, then whether an empire assigns credit to the commanding officer, their subordinate, or both, would tell you quite a lot about them.

Edit: Actually, I'm guessing that these are all career totals, but while 'battle' is too fuzzy for automatic issue, would 'tour of duty' / 'assignment to post' be a suitably distinct period for analysis?

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I'll second it.  I actually think I would prefer Option 2 over 3 even though 3 would 'look better'.  Straightforward, easy to implement, and I think it would look sharp.

Yes, I am leaning more that way the more I consider it.

Also, someone suggested mass medal awards for campaigns. I am going to setup it up so you can manually award medals to all officers at a ship, sub-fleet, fleet or admin command level or any level of HQ for ground forces. I'll also set a filter for this so you can award to different officer types. With the significant scope this adds for campaign medals, ribbons would be far superior due to the better use of space and variety of options.

[TMaekler]

A suggestion: a medal can remove/replace an older medal. For example: if you discover a star system, you receive the 1-star-system medal, which will be replaced with the 2-star-system medal when you disocover the second. Removing "medal-clutter"...

[Titanian]

What about option 2, but instead of using images for the ribbons, just defining their colours in some kind of dialogue?

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

What about option 2, but instead of using images for the ribbons, just defining their colours in some kind of dialogue?

I was looking at some ribbons today and realized it would be easy to generate your own. Looks like I will be building Paint into Aurora

[Hazard]

It gets even easier; ribbons are bilaterally mirrored in the vertical, and can be defined with a 'colour, width' coding system describing the width of any of the colour bands on the ribbon. It should be noted that any given nation's ribbons are unique to a given medal of that nation, and that it's very common for medals that have been awarded multiple times to have special markings on the ribbon to explain this. If only to keep a given soldier's rack of ribbons from exploding after a long and fruitful career.

It may be harder to code though.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

It gets even easier; ribbons are bilaterally mirrored in the vertical, and can be defined with a 'colour, width' coding system describing the width of any of the colour bands on the ribbon. It should be noted that any given nation's ribbons are unique to a given medal of that nation, and that it's very common for medals that have been awarded multiple times to have special markings on the ribbon to explain this. If only to keep a given soldier's rack of ribbons from exploding after a long and fruitful career.

It may be harder to code though.

I could probably code that award of Medal A removes Medal B, so you could create medals that have specific ribbons for multiple awards.

[Garfunkel]

Oh wow, awesome change/addition!

[Desdinova]

This is really cool!

One suggestion: add "medals awarded' as a sort criteria in the officer list so that we can review our most decorated officers.

Do you plan to add a "hall of fame" for dead or retired officers also?

[Father Tim]

Do you plan to add a "hall of fame" for dead or retired officers also?

One has been in and out several times.  The problem is separating the one officer you care about from the two hundred you don't.  Steve hasn't yet managed to automate a score for 'interestingness' of an officer, but 'accumulated points from medals' might do it.

[Kristover]

One thing that I think would increase 'interestingness' of officers is if the characteristics attached to officers (brave, rich family, etc), actually had some marginal but real gameplay effect in the form of a small modifier.  Something which would actually make it more important to distinguish and select between officers.  Right now it is merely cosmetic and for role play purposes.   This isn't a must have feature for me by any stretch of the imagination but I think it would be one of those 'neat' little additions to put in if it weren't too much trouble and easy to code (I have no coding ability at all so I don't have the first idea about difficulty degree).

[Naismith]

Do you plan to add a "hall of fame" for dead or retired officers also?

One has been in and out several times.  The problem is separating the one officer you care about from the two hundred you don't.  Steve hasn't yet managed to automate a score for 'interestingness' of an officer, but 'accumulated points from medals' might do it.

One way to do it might be to save all officers for a short time after death. (One month?) And then have a check box that will save the record permanently.