Current State of the Beta: Feedback

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Devildogff
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Current State of the Beta: Feedback

Postby Devildogff » Thu Mar 19, 2015 11:03 am

The game has definitely seen some improvements since beta first started. I appreciate the map panning and the general ease of getting around the map now.

I still think a zooming out/in function is desperately needed. I still think that having to click move before every move is clunky and obtrusive. I think having to click on any action before doing something in combat is also clunky. These things should be a priority, IMHO. Also, having to left click each ship in my fleet to see what role it plays/its name is not ideal either. I'd also much rather left click to select/deselect ships in the fleet. These are just UI sticking points for me.

I'm a bit worried about the pace of patching, though. Maybe it's just that I'm not seeing some of the backend stuff, and I know it's just Sven, but there's still a lot of work to do. I don't know your target release, but progress is a bit slow. Again, understandable, but I worry to a degree.

That being said, the game has a lot of personality. It has an insane amount of potential, too. It's good to have more testers coming in because I think our feedback has sort of tapped out and a lot of what needs to be added is already known. I hope that this game realizes its potential and I see the only way to do that is more feedback (and more hours in the day for Sven).
Last edited by Devildogff on Thu Mar 19, 2015 11:55 am, edited 2 times in total.
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luciderous
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Re: Current State

Postby luciderous » Thu Mar 19, 2015 11:16 am

Devildogff wrote:I still think a zooming out/in function is desperately needed. I still think that having to click move before every move is clunky and obtrusive. I think having to click on any action before doing something in combat is also clunky. These things should be a priority, IMHO.

I agree with the above statement. Intuitive and polished UI control flow is the backbone of fluid game experience. Then again, given the resource constraint for such a compact team, it might take quite a while to iron out all these issues.

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Re: Current State of the Beta: Feedback

Postby sven » Thu Mar 19, 2015 1:31 pm

Devildogff wrote:I still think that having to click move before every move is clunky and obtrusive.


One of the things that is consistently bothering new beta testers remains the strategic fleet motion interface. And making a right-click based motion shortcut might help it feel less clunky... There's at least one simple candidate UI tweak I'd like to try here, I'll post it sometime later today.

Devildogff wrote:I think having to click on any action before doing something in combat is also clunky.


In the current builds, right-click sensitive move and attack should be working -- it's only retreat and self destruct that still require left-click menu actions. So, I think this issue has been pretty much fixed, though I know you've been badly scarred by a month worth of playtesting without the feature :)

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Re: Current State of the Beta: Feedback

Postby sven » Thu Mar 19, 2015 1:46 pm

Devildogff wrote:I still think a zooming out/in function is desperately needed.


So here I'll ask you to elaborate a bit. Strategic map zooming is certainly something that we could do -- but, I see real drawbacks to including the feature. The core issue is that a zoomed-out strategic map is necessarily going to have a lot less room to show information on each visible star. The current map view has space to show things like distinct planetary orbits, events of interest, and some hints on the composition of any fleets in the system. A zoomed-out map would need much smaller fleet and report icons -- and we'd likely need to do away with the planetary orbit lines entirely.

I'm not saying I wouldn't be willing to implement strategic-map zooming, in some form. But I think this is a feature where we need to think carefully about *why* exactly, we want it to be in the game. And how including it would change the flow of gameplay.

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Re: Current State of the Beta: Feedback

Postby Arioch » Thu Mar 19, 2015 3:38 pm

I think that zoomed-in and zoomed-out modes for the strategic map would be "nice to have", the former to see more detail, and the latter to see a large scale overview (especially when maps get bigger), but I imagine myself returning to the normal zoom level for regular play. I'd also be interested to hear what people think about what they would do with strategic zoom modes and why they are important. Do you find yourself wanting to zoom in or to zoom out (or both), and why?

Devildogff wrote:I think having to click on any action before doing something in combat is also clunky.

Just to elaborate, you can now issue move or fire commands in tactical combat with a right-click without having to manually select "move" or "fire."

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Re: Current State of the Beta: Feedback

Postby Gyrfalcon » Thu Mar 19, 2015 4:34 pm

sven wrote:I'm not saying I wouldn't be willing to implement strategic-map zooming, in some form. But I think this is a feature where we need to think carefully about *why* exactly, we want it to be in the game. And how including it would change the flow of gameplay.


I'd like to have a zoom feature so that I can get a overview of the strategic situation before I zoom in to take care of details. Particularly when I come back to a game I haven't played in a while, I start by zooming out so I can see the whole map to help me remember what's going on, although I do also take notes for more complicated games like a 350 star SotS game. But not being able to see the overall picture, particularly once I've got more than a few colonies, would be a hindrance for me.

As far as flow goes, I tend to zoom out toward the end of the turn to see if there are any items or areas that need attention which I have forgotten. Being a spatially-organized thinker, I tend to remember things by location and looking at a large scale maps helps me keep track of things.
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Re: Current State of the Beta: Feedback

Postby sven » Thu Mar 19, 2015 4:55 pm

Gyrfalcon wrote:
sven wrote:I'm not saying I wouldn't be willing to implement strategic-map zooming, in some form. But I think this is a feature where we need to think carefully about *why* exactly, we want it to be in the game. And how including it would change the flow of gameplay.


I'd like to have a zoom feature so that I can get a overview of the strategic situation before I zoom in to take care of details. Particularly when I come back to a game I haven't played in a while, I start by zooming out so I can see the whole map to help me remember what's going on...


Yeah, this I sympathize with. And I think that giving players a view that lets them drink in the scope and scale of their empire is very much worth doing. But, the interface for things like fleet selection, event inspection, etc is necessarily going to be more awkward in a map view where all the stars are significantly smaller. One option would be to add a zoomed-out strategic view, but, dramatically limit the set of interactions that we support in that mode. For example, moving fleets might not be possible in the zoomed-out map. That would force players to spend most of their time playing the game at standard-res -- the guiding philosophy would be that purpose of the zoomed out mode really is just *looking* at the big picture.

This would mean that the role of the zoomed-out view would be closer to that of an RTS's mini-map than a fully functional SOTS-style controllable resolution strategic map.

edit: I recall Civ V's zoom modes doing some interesting things in terms of limiting interactions and information density at different zoom levels -- but there Arioch will remember the details better than I do :)

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Re: Current State of the Beta: Feedback

Postby Gyrfalcon » Thu Mar 19, 2015 5:34 pm

Limiting what you can do when looking at things on a large scale makes sense, although it also might work to zoom back into the normal resolution once you select a star system and indicate you want to do something with it. I do wonder how difficult it will be to move fleets over long distances later in the game when the ship and it's destination are not both visible at normal resolution.
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Re: Current State of the Beta: Feedback

Postby sven » Thu Mar 19, 2015 5:53 pm

Gyrfalcon wrote:Limiting what you can do when looking at things on a large scale makes sense, although it also might work to zoom back into the normal resolution once you select a star system and indicate you want to do something with it. I do wonder how difficult it will be to move fleets over long distances later in the game when the ship and it's destination are not both visible at normal resolution.


Well, click-drag panning works while queuing up a fleet move order, so, I'm hopeful even long distance moves won't feel too awkward. But, we won't really be able to get a good sense of how big an issue long-distance fleet moves are in practice until the late game experience starts to come together.

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Re: Current State of the Beta: Feedback

Postby sven » Thu Mar 19, 2015 5:58 pm

Gyrfalcon wrote:although it also might work to zoom back into the normal resolution once you select a star system and indicate you want to do something with it.


Might be worth trying -- but the devil's in the details. What does it mean to "indicate you want to do something with a star"? A left-click should probably just show the planet list. Again, if the purpose of the mode is just to passively view the big picture, browsing over planet lists while in the big-picture mode is a natural part of that. We could zoom-in and recenter in response to a right-click, but that's not a terribly intuitive mechanic. The cleanest interface might just be to zoom in/out on mousewheel, recentering on the cursor position (as is done in the tactical battle map).

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Re: Current State of the Beta: Feedback

Postby Gyrfalcon » Thu Mar 19, 2015 6:08 pm

sven wrote: "indicate you want to do something with a star"?

I would define that as anything that isn't just looking at information, so drilling down to a build queue, moving ships, or combat. But selecting a planet to look at its population or see how far along the progress bar is on the Factory* it's building wouldn't zoom back in. Or maybe a better way to think about it would be don't zoom back in until I open up something other than the planet or fleet display at the bottom of the screen.
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Re: Current State of the Beta: Feedback

Postby sven » Thu Mar 19, 2015 6:13 pm

Gyrfalcon wrote:
sven wrote: "indicate you want to do something with a star"?

I would define that as anything that isn't just looking at information, so drilling down to a build queue, moving ships, or combat. But selecting a planet to look at its population or see how far along the progress bar is on the Factory* it's building wouldn't zoom back in. Or maybe a better way to think about it would be don't zoom back in until I open up something other than the planet or fleet display at the bottom of the screen.


Yeah, it's an idea that sounds sensible enough. But it feels like the kind of thing that could easily become frustrating if it happens when players don't expect or want it to. But this is all still pretty hypothetical atm. The right approach here is probably to start by implementing a zoomed out overview map in about the simplest, cleanest, way we can imagine, then complicate as necessary.

That means the big question that needs to be answered is not the details of how implicit view switching might work, but, exactly what strategic elements would be 1) visible and 2) intractable.

The simplest solution, I think, would be to make make stars themselves both visible and interactable, but, limit fleets and in-system event notifications. Event notification should probably be a pruned subset of the list you see in the standard mode -- maybe limit it to the highest-priority event notification per-system.

The thorniest issue I see is just how much of the fleet control interface to try and expose. The simplest answer here is "none" -- we could show a little icon indicating that there are "some ships present" in the system, and similar little icons showing fleets traveling in hyperspace, but not grant the power to select or control them.

There's not really any technical reason that we couldn't have complete fleet control in a zoom-ed out map as well -- using little SOTS/MOO2 style wedges in place of the current larger fleet icons. But, if we included a complete control mode, I suspect most people would end up playing the game entirely in that mode -- which means that we'd need to spend a lot of time creating carefully optimized art and UI behaviors to support that gameplay style. And that's a project I'm much more wary of.

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Re: Current State of the Beta: Feedback

Postby Gyrfalcon » Thu Mar 19, 2015 6:39 pm

Limiting my options to just looking at things while zoomed out makes a lot of sense to me. When I find something that needs doing, I can zoom in to take care of it and zoom back out when I'm done. Although I would find a system that automatically zooms in when I push an action button more convenient and intuitive for the way I play a 4x game. I'm not sure everyone would, however.
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Re: Current State of the Beta: Feedback

Postby Arioch » Thu Mar 19, 2015 9:30 pm

A simple zoomed out mode would just look that much more like MOO2: smaller fleet and star icons with no planets. I don't think there's necessarily a need to limit the player's options in this mode; if you still have the same bottom pane, you still have access to all the same capabilities. The stars and fleets and event icons would be smaller and therefore harder click-targets, but that shouldn't be a problem (because if the player isn't comfortable issuing orders in this mode, he can just zoom in).

A simple zoomed in mode (with no additional system information) would probably require new art assets. Ideally such a mode could be much more complex, with a larger fleet display and possibly even planet-accurate orbit displays. But this is, I think, more eye candy rather than necessary.


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