The interface for Spacewar|ARMADA can be broken up into four distinct regions:
Your fleet is divided into a small number of task forces. The fleet list on the left side of the screen presents your ships in a tree structure. At any given time, one task force will be expanded, showing beneath it all the ships belonging to that task force. Clicking on the name of a ship will cause your viewport to center on that ship in a default view, and that ship becomes selected. Clicking on the name of a task force will expand it in the fleet list.
This area will provide further details about the ship you have selected. This area uses tabbed sheets so that you can choose which attributes to view about your ship.
The Damage tab gives a graphical wireframe view of your ship, with colors indicating the amount of damage that part of the ship has sustained.
The Status tab gives a summary of each of the attributes for the ship as a whole.
The Power tab shows the amount of power generated and consumed by each of the components of your ship.
The Heat tab, likewise, shows the amount of heat and the heat limits of each of the components.
Your ship is always equipped with an optical sensor, but you may have additional sensors as well. Buttons appear at the bottom of the screen, and if you are equipped with the appropriate sensor, that button will be enabled. Clicking on a sensor button will change the cause your viewport to display the scene as it would appear to that sensor.
This region displays what is going on. At any time, you will have one of your ships selected. You may use the mouse while holding down the right-mouse button to rotate your view around the ship, and the mouse-wheel to zoom in and out to a limited degree.
CEGUI poses a huge configuration headache. Poorly formed XML can cause the application to crash, and the sheer volume of options available can make it difficult to identify the right configuration values.
The starfield code was entertaining. The right-ascension, and declination of some 8000 real stars are used to populate a vertex buffer. Each frame the translation of the vertex buffer is set to match the camera, making the stars appear infinitely far away.
There are simple camera controls available to fly around the primitive solar system (only Earth and the Sun are present). In the GUI view you can use W, A, S, D, Alt and Space to translate the camera. If you exit the GUI view by pressing Esc, then press Space, you will enter the free flight view. Here you can use the same camera translation keys in concert with the mouse to pitch, yaw, and zoom the camera.