AI War 2 v0.513 Released! "Tooltips For Your Tooltips"

[keith.lamothe]

Release notes here!

More GUI work, this time dealing with a longstanding problem with AIWC's info display: too much text. The ships simply have a lot of relevant info, and that's fun, but displaying it all as words gets pretty busy. But showing it as icons was technically difficult, and what if the player doesn't know what the icon means? They couldn't exactly mouseover the window, since it only showed while the mouse was over a ship.

Well, here, that's exactly what we're doing.

Here's classic's display:



And the sequel's (with the mouse outside the detail display) :

(incidentally, that's probably way too much space between icon/text elements. But maybe AIWC's approach was excessively compact. Please let us know your thoughts)

And the sequel's display with the mouse over the attack icon:



Would have had more in this release, but I spent a couple days wrestling through various issues in actually doing the release-push-to-steam myself, so this can go more smoothly in the future :)

That said, there was some massively important framework that wasn't there before, but now is. Being able to mouse-interact with individual icons and text-bits inside this kind of display isn't easy, but it's key.


Keith

[x4000]

I really love where this is headed.

[BadgerBadger]

Yeah, this is pretty awesome. A huge improvement.

A few quick critiques: I kinda want to be able to see the actual Range/Speed numbers. Is not including those numbers a deliberate design point? There are actual numbers for damage/health/fuel costs.

Also, is the "attack rate" going to be shown in some fashion?

I started a really quick game to try hovering over some things and I note that sometimes I can't "unselect" a unit so it will stop showing that hover-text. I wound up fighting on an AI planet and one of their guardians had a little yellow selection circle around it and that hover text was shown. And whatever I clicked on (other units, for example) I couldn't get that one unit's hovertext to stop showing.

[TheVampire100]

I showed these pictures to a friend who doesn't play AI War and he told me it's easier to read the tooltips of AIW2. He also said, it doesn't look so "cramped" then the upper one.
This is a good sign, when people can tell at one glance what a tooltip says, even if they don't play the game you can assume that the design was a success.

I like where this is heading.

However, soem of the icons are a little... extraordinary. Left icons are the easiest, from up to down, fuel, metal, shipcap (will this get an icon as well? Maybe a ship symbol?) and power.
Icons on the right are a little harder to read at first look. If I had to guess, first is attack damage (you show it in the second pic already), hit points, range and speed. Speed is the easiest to read obviously but I don't know what the first shall be?
Range took me a while until I realized it litteraly shows a distance between to points.
Hitpoints are, I guess, the sip in the middle (arror) and the other arrows at the sights are indicating incoming shots? Anyway, just my thoughts.

In terms of icons people are more used to soemthing like crosshairs (I gues sthe damage one could be an alien variation of that), a gun, a piece of plating (or a heart), stuff like that. Trying to be more unique might just confuse people on first playthrough.
It's liek AIWC again when the tooltip was very readable for experienced players but confusing for newcomers at first sight. It's a lot better than that time but liek I said, the right choice of symbols can mean a lot.

[Draco18s]

Iconography could use some work, but in terms of layout and design, I'm pretty on board.

[Cinth]

I think it eats up a lot of space on screen, but I'm only seeing it in the Unity Editor, so I dunno...

And to derail it early with a bit of what I've distracted myself from models with 

[FalseMyrmidon]

At 2560x1440 the tooltip is enormous (but so is most of the UI overall).  Some of the icons in that section also seem like they aren't positioned correctly.  Trying to mouse over things in the tooltip without mousing over something else (thus changing what's displayed) can be challenging.  The tooltip tooltip (we need to go deeper...) sits below instead of on top of some UI elements - the tooltip tooltip should probably take precedence over everything else since it goes away if you move your mouse.

I think it could be worth considering having a small copy of the icon that represents the ship next to the name.

[keith.lamothe]

FYI, still plugging away. I never imagined the concept of "a settings menu" would take a whole week, but it isn't the first such surprise with this project

The settings menu itself was finished today, now I'm just investigating the strange selection behavior from last version.

[BadgerBadger]

From the description of the new UI tools, it sounds like this will be perfect to allow us to expose additional map tuning parameters at the game start screen (like "How many clusters do you want in your clusters map", or "What degree of planet connectivity do you want for the galaxy?", things like that). Do you see any gotchas that would prevent this?

[keith.lamothe]

From the description of the new UI tools, it sounds like this will be perfect to allow us to expose additional map tuning parameters at the game start screen (like "How many clusters do you want in your clusters map", or "What degree of planet connectivity do you want for the galaxy?", things like that). Do you see any gotchas that would prevent this?

Yes, I think it should work fine for that, and that use case was in mind as it was written. If you want any of those things to be dropdowns it's a bit trickier (to make them have the right options), but should be doable.

Getting those extra map-specific lobby "what did I use last?" settings to persist across runs of the applications would be an extra step, though. I think you could do it by defining those as additional IntHidden settings in the new external xml for setting definitions, and then using those values when populating your lobby controls. The hidden part is so they don't show up on the settings screen. I should probably add BoolHidden, FloatHidden, and FIntHidden (for mapgen use, as opposed to Float) while I'm at it.

[BadgerBadger]

Excellent. Odds of .514 coming out today?

[keith.lamothe]

Excellent. Odds of .514 coming out today?

0. Aiming for tomorrow. The work is actually done but I'm working through the release process in a way that will make it much faster and more reliable in the future.

[keith.lamothe]

Excellent. Odds of .514 coming out today?

0.

Apparently "speaking too confidently" not only causes releases to be delayed if we say it will definitely be out by so-and-so, but also causes releases to happen earlier than expected if we say it will definitely not be out until a particular later date.

.514 just escaped. Passed testing in my steam client, so I'll let it roam

Now working on the announce process, which will presumably take well into tomorrow to get nailed down in my quasi-automation tool.

[BadgerBadger]

A couple quick bug reports. Mantis only lets me open things against .512 at the moment, so just putting them here for your reference.

 When starting a new game I hit this crash. Apparently my beard is not adequate:
9/1/2017 11:17:39 PM   World Created, Launching Server
9/1/2017 11:17:39 PM
Exception thrown when attempting to open host socket:BeardedManStudios.Forge.Networking.FailedBindingException: Failed to bind to host/port, see inner exception ---> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: Access denied
  at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.Bind (System.Net.EndPoint local_end) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0
  at BeardedManStudios.Forge.Networking.CachedUdpClient.InitSocket (System.Net.EndPoint localEP) [0x00041] in C:\vcprojs\arcengames_aiw_ultra\ArcenUniversal\src\Logic\Networking\ForgeRemastered\Forge\Networking\CachedUdpClient.cs:141
  at BeardedManStudios.Forge.Networking.CachedUdpClient..ctor (Int32 port) [0x0006b] in C:\vcprojs\arcengames_aiw_ultra\ArcenUniversal\src\Logic\Networking\ForgeRemastered\Forge\Networking\CachedUdpClient.cs:78
  at BeardedManStudios.Forge.Networking.UDPServer.Connect (System.String host, UInt16 port, System.String natHost, UInt16 natPort) [0x00004] in C:\vcprojs\arcengames_aiw_ultra\ArcenUniversal\src\Logic\Networking\ForgeRemastered\Forge\Networking\UDPServer.cs:121
  --- End of inner exception stack trace ---
  at BeardedManStudios.Forge.Networking.UDPServer.Connect (System.String host, UInt16 port, System.String natHost, UInt16 natPort) [0x000f2] in C:\vcprojs\arcengames_aiw_ultra\ArcenUniversal\src\Logic\Networking\ForgeRemastered\Forge\Networking\UDPServer.cs:152
  at Arcen.Universal.ArcenSocket.OpenAsServer (UInt16 Port) [0x00032] in C:\vcprojs\arcengames_aiw_ultra\ArcenUniversal\src\Logic\Networking\ArcenSocket.cs:30

   at System.Environment.get_StackTrace() in /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono/build/mcs/class/corlib/System/Environment.cs:line 227
   at Arcen.Universal.ArcenDebugging.ArcenDebugLog(System.String Message, DebugLogDestination Destination, Boolean IncludeStackTrace, Verbosity Verbosity) in C:\vcprojs\arcengames_aiw_ultra\ArcenUniversal\src\UtilityLibraries\ArcenDebugging.cs:line 140
   at Arcen.Universal.ArcenDebugging.ArcenDebugLog(System.String Message, DebugLogDestination Destination, Verbosity Verbosity) in C:\vcprojs\arcengames_aiw_ultra\ArcenUniversal\src\UtilityLibraries\ArcenDebugging.cs:line 109
   at Arcen.Universal.ArcenDebugging.ArcenDebugLog(System.String Message, Verbosity Verbosity) in C:\vcprojs\arcengames_aiw_ultra\ArcenUniversal\src\UtilityLibraries\ArcenDebugging.cs:line 88
   at Arcen.Universal.ArcenSocket.OpenAsServer(UInt16 Port) in C:\vcprojs\arcengames_aiw_ultra\ArcenUniversal\src\Logic\Networking\ArcenSocket.cs:line 44
   at Arcen.Universal.Engine_Universal.CheckForStartOrStopServerListening() in C:\vcprojs\arcengames_aiw_ultra\ArcenUniversal\src\Engine_Universal.cs:line 297
   at Arcen.AIW2.Core.Engine_AIW2.WorkThreadOnly_StartNewGame() in C:\vcprojs\arcengames_aiw_ultra\ArcenAIW2Core\src\Logic\Engine_AIW2.cs:line 772
   at Arcen.AIW2.Core.Engine_AIW2+<StartWorkThread>c__AnonStorey0.<>m__0(System.Object ) in C:\vcprojs\arcengames_aiw_ultra\ArcenAIW2Core\src\Logic\Engine_AIW2.cs:line 650

Second, there are truly awful default settings for a bunch of important parameters like "Mouse zoom speed" and "map scroll speed". Everything is set to "slowest possible" which makes scrolling and zooming unpleasant unless you spend a few minutes setting things up properly. Why not give people sane defaults to start?

Third, tooltips no longer show the name of the object. For example, mousing over the Ark or a Design Template server or a Fighter no longer shows the name. It will print the Mark Level though. See attached picture.

Fourth, some of the shot types are leaving visual artifacts behind. I think the MLRS in particular. See attached picture. They go away eventually (say 1-2 minutes).

Fifth: Any chance you can make mouse scrolling work for the vertical scrollbar in the settings screen? I want to be able to scroll the Settings window up and down to see different options by using my mouse scroll wheel (I don't think the scroll wheel has any other use in that screen) and it can be annoying to move the mouse from the vertical scrollbar over to a horizontal scroll bar and back. Lots of precise clicking that wouldn't be needed with mousewheel scrolling...

[keith.lamothe]

Exception thrown when attempting to open host socket:BeardedManStudios.Forge.Networking.FailedBindingException: Failed to bind to host/port, see inner exception ---> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: Access denied

Weird. Does this happen consistently? Looks like what I need to do for now is just catch and log that one, but if it's always happening that's going to be tricky for getting MP going again.

Second, there are truly awful default settings for a bunch of important parameters like "Mouse zoom speed" and "map scroll speed". Everything is set to "slowest possible" which makes scrolling and zooming unpleasant unless you spend a few minutes setting things up properly. Why not give people sane defaults to start?

There are supposed to be sane defaults, the same as were there before that screen. I don't know why it didn't set them for you, but I'll look into it, thanks.

Third, tooltips no longer show the name of the object.

I can't reproduce that one, and I don't know why it would be happening, hopefully it will fix along with this other stuff.

Fourth, some of the shot types are leaving visual artifacts behind. I think the MLRS in particular. See attached picture. They go away eventually (say 1-2 minutes).

Yea, that's probably you getting some absurdly low "default" setting for some of those performance counters that control how many shots are updated/checked per frame/second.

Fifth: Any chance you can make mouse scrolling work for the vertical scrollbar in the settings screen ?

That's coming, just hadn't gotten to it yet. As far as I can tell there's no easy way to do it, but hopefully the necessary inputs are visible to the code so it can be handled manually.

Thanks for letting me know about all the above