Developer feedback requested: Ship Icons.

[eRe4s3r]

That's huge posts to take in Wanderer and yllamana

I only have one thing to say about that so far, it is this -> Real fleets (with fleet systems, which true enough, would allow for WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more ships on the screen with tons less GUI issues) are a massive gameplay change, I would want that, but I can not seriously expect Arcen to indulge my wants If you are not aware of the game, google gameplay of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf57myMJKyg to get an idea how fleet combat would (potentially) work

I would want fleets to even have progression system linked to your in-game profile, beating games, kills by the ship and stuff like that should all reward you stuffings for fleet ships, and a fleet ship is the first thing you build, then you assign 50 of those, 20 of those, 100 of those.. etc. It could be done in a very clean UI even (I think here how Star Ruler 2 did that) gameplay wise this would be very close to Sins of a Solar Empire though. I would want this as a mod (simply to see if it's fun in AI War 2 setting) because I could not possible judge that beforehand...

Heck, I'd have enemy capital things drop LOOT that you can mount on your flagships. To me, focusing entire game on the flagships (ie, capital ships) would be hugely interesting to see and play, because you can do so much when you have a fixed set of unique capital ships available. At the start you mulligan to get your capital ships assigned (I think we would need 40 to really make it interesting). Anyway, why do I say this? because when you talk about fleet display then it wouldn't be an GUI thing now would it, you'd expect a fleet to act like a fleet in battle. The blobs we have now are just "a dumb bunch of ships" and that is that, but when we would go beyond that.. I dunno. It just sounds like way massive i scope than a simple sidebar design.

true enough, focusing on fleets, flagships, and a "tree" where the flagship is the top and ships branch out in the sidebar (with the mentioned features) would be an extremely streamlined way to convey fleet info and fleet status. Since your primary decision making rests on 1 unit (the flagship) and where it goes, while the fleet intelligent shoots at stuff (this, by the way, needs range offsets for where in the formation a ship is, so that a fleet can shoot all at once (with some random value).. err, anyway, that would be the "we have a few million $ and don't know what to do with them" idea

[yllamana]

The obvious problem is that the minimum unit of organisation in the game is a ship, so you're left trying to figure out how the heck to combine the dozens, hundred or thousands of ships on the screen into meaningful groups to convey to me. Maybe ships aren't a good minimum unit of organisation for the game? Maybe you need to dial back a level to have both the player and the AI operate in fleets, even if those fleets can be split into smaller ones easily.

I think the idea behind squads as a design decision was to increase the minimum unit of ships in the game. Honestly, if the squads are at defaults of ~10 ships, then even with a thousand ships on screen, that only comes out to 100 icons. Messy, but a lot more workable.

When I first heard about squadrons I thought they were going to be like that, but then the things said through the kickstarter made it sound like they're just a way of making them cuter (and cuter is good too, obviously, but it's not what I was initially expecting).

Wanderer, your post is very good!

I only have one thing to say about that so far, it is this -> Real fleets (with fleet systems, which true enough, would allow for WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more ships on the screen with tons less GUI issues) are a massive gameplay change, I would want that, but I can not seriously expect Arcen to indulge my wants

It does worry me that it's potentially a big design departure and that makes it harder, especially if you are a little studio with a pretty strict budget.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how much of a departure it really is. The game kinda plays like it's made up of fleets already, mostly due to control limitations. It could make other things more natural, too, like building ships and having them end up at the right place.

The main question would be how mixed ship types work - if you have to have a fighter fleet and a bomber fleet and a frigate fleet or if you can just put them all into the one fleet. The easiest case would be that they just work like control groups. Or maybe they have different Elements that you can move separately but are part of the one fleet. The hard case is I guess it just works itself out?

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, we're not jumping to fleets as the primary unit of control. I'd like to, personally, but every time I've thought it through (both during AIWC's development, and AIW2's design) I've come to the conclusion that it would just be a radically different game. Maybe we'll make that game some day, but I don't think this is it.

[eRe4s3r]

Btw to come back to Wanderers post, it is also worth to consider that in a sidebar with condensing, you *can* sort by "status effect" "combat state" etc. (simply by having your condense script filter for that, but how would that become an interaction/filter toggle?)  The problem this brings however is that we offload 1 info overload (glowing icons with NO info do count into that same as fancy icons with tons of info) to the sidebar, by now giving it many different feedback elements that we have to look at even when we don't want to.

The important thing to ask yourself, Wanderer, is if you could find your required information in the mock up I made (And how Sins did that) and how do you envision it to be displayed with icons that are not much larger than this mockup (maybe at best 2x larger). Because let's face that head-on, a side-bar is not a massive space that you can add infinite information levels to, or where you can add infinitely fancy icons to. It is supposed to condense and abstract information. By adding more information to the icons in a sidebar, we are doing the exact opposite that we originally intended with it (that is to abstract information to give us general status feedback on our stuff, and on the enemy/ally)

Big thing to remember, that a sidebar does 1 thing that is needed (tactical overview, pinning, quick jump to planets where you got stuff, condensing, enemy display with mouse over) but it is not the be-all of GUI design. If you do not have fleets bound to a core element then you have blobs, and blobs will never look pretty no matter what you do ... Just ask.. Stellaris ;P Yeah, 2 fleets duking it out looks neat, but you know what fleets add as problem? The ships at the back never come into range when the ship in the middle stops to fire. (This is also why 4 smaller fleets "on top" of each other are always superior to 1 large fleet (with same numbers/firepower/ranges). Same of course also applies to blob sizes. Important is that we can't "move-glitch" the blobs to be more dense too ;P

It's also one of these things that just need to grow as the game is played. And since I don't plan on playing Alpha (no offense, but that spoils first impressions forever) I can only give general 2ct worth of opinion. And btw, I am not saying a side-bar is the only GUI element we would need either Something fancy gotta be there to give us in-depth info about something we clicked on. An info container, somewhere to the bottom of the view or something?

Btw, just to be clear, my personal favorite is clearly a mix of flagships -> fleets and single units -> blobs for various tactics, in Sins for example, you often want your capital ship to do things it's good at, and not sit around forever destroying 5 mining stations. You want it in the fray, earning XP after all. You paid for it too, so that means you gotta put that investment to use ASAP.

Important thing I learned in RTS gaming is that if you invest resources into a unit and you are just bunching them up forever then that CAN be a vital tactic, but not if your enemy has infinitely more resources. This is also where a fleet focus comes back, because a fleet ship means a mobile rally point. Or potentially even a flagship that can BUILD replacements out of combat (with resource cost+). Anyway, to me, the fleet idea is not dead, just a very far away mod idea for now.

[lagomorph129]

Yea, we're not jumping to fleets as the primary unit of control. I'd like to, personally

I don't know if it's been brought up already, (excuse me for not being thorough) can we explore the idea of an icon for control groups to replace that of the regular fleet (not capital ships since those can be important even when clumped together) to improve on the icon-clutter?

[Wanderer]

Yeah, definitely wasn't discussing fleet driven mechanics unless we want to get into fleet positioning constructs, but I was thinking more along these lines when I was considering wrappers.  Ignore the art, work with the idea, please.  I didn't want to spend hours trying to make a simple idea mockup pretty.

So, your standard blob whacking on a force field looks something like this:


But, if we could wrap the blob to remove the billions of fleetship icons and do something like this, it would certainly make it more intelligible:

Because let's face that head-on, a side-bar is not a massive space that you can add infinite information levels to, or where you can add infinitely fancy icons to. It is supposed to condense and abstract information. By adding more information to the icons in a sidebar, we are doing the exact opposite that we originally intended with it (that is to abstract information to give us general status feedback on our stuff, and on the enemy/ally)

EDIT:  I worded this poorly...
I disagree with this fundamental use, but bear with me a second.  Under 99% of combat circumstances, my sidebar will be showing only selected units.  Enemy, allied, me, whatever I selected to 'inspect'.  Be the selection be from click-drag, hot-key, or single-click on a guardian to find out what its specifics are, the sidebar, in my mind, is a drill down report from the screen information. 

That's the dashboard I need in a fight.  Other filters/tabs/whatever on it would be relegated to 'quieter' times, when you're right, I want more detailed information about larger sets of data, such as entire planet defenses, overall fleet cap usage, actual #'s of turrets wrecked, etc.  If I need a quick hit I could just drag-select the entire planet during combat, but I never found that useful while I was fighting except as a more instinctive 'look' at the information than anything I'd actually sit down and process with intellect.

The primary reason is the fundamental concern you raise above.  Screen Real Estate.  I don't want it taken up with extraneous information when what I want is vision.  Every icon, every piece of data that doesn't relate to the immediate battle is just a distractor and eating up real estate I want for vision.  So, I agree, the sidebar does aggregate information generally.  Which means once I'm in combat I want a different sidebar/dashboard.  The icon cluster with marks and health ratings and whatnot is an unreadable report if 300+ ships are lumped on top of each other.  I need a way to get at that information when I need it.  It's nearly impossible to tell if all my bombers are dead in the alphastrike without it.

Now, if I could filter, there are a few things I'd probably end up with as tabs if I couldn't immediately see them on the map.  Things like Ion Cannons, Mass Drivers, etc... things that affect planet-wide combat prior to a planet's 'awakening'.

[eRe4s3r]

In my sidebar mockup each bomber would have an icon (at 1x condense) or a text underneath saying how many (at MAX condense) so you would instantly see if your bombers died, if you drag the selection / control group of them up in the priority. (which displays them above whatever, it can be 100% your own option even)

I dunno if you could pin single (enemy) things to THAT sidebar though, if you want to mark structures as targets, then a smaller sidebar to the right could do that, and work as an additional coordination help for COOP. Basically you click on whatever structure you wanna target (or planet) and hit the "priority MARK" button and it's displayed to the right with combat relevant stat (for structures) or a simple icon with name for planet. Right click on a mark could be drop down that allows you to set notation for a target (Attack/Avoid/Cleared/Danger etc.).

What you think about that? Marked things obviously get own icon on the game-screen too.

Well and as for your selection boundary, that is something Keith has to reply to. I don't think that would be FPS friendly.

[Cyborg]

There's a lot of information here, but I think some people need to let go of their sacred cows on the UI issue. Due to the transition to 3D, the top-down approach of having icons represent ships doesn't work. We tried it, it was universally disliked.

This is not the first game to have this UI design issue. Looking at something like sins of a solar empire, they have a foldout that would be where our vertical bar currently is. And I think if you did away with the usual menu on the bottom, you would find yourself with a little more room to deal with combat control. The ability to control formations, tactics, fleets and sub fleets, that has to take priority.

I think that the individual icons should only be viewable at max zoom distance.

[Cinth]

I think that the individual icons should only be viewable at max zoom distance.

That wouldn't work with the ship scales we have though.  You're going to lose visibility on a lot of ship types long before you hit max zoom out (regardless of LOD culling).

Yeah, definitely wasn't discussing fleet driven mechanics unless we want to get into fleet positioning constructs, but I was thinking more along these lines when I was considering wrappers.  Ignore the art, work with the idea, please.  I didn't want to spend hours trying to make a simple idea mockup pretty

So pretty looking for more room between individual squads once they get stopped.

[eRe4s3r]

Are shields like the one Wanderer posted his mockup about in the game though? And is that a fixed thing?

Can someone post a screenshot of that, with and without GUI if possible so that we could think a bit more how this would ever actually work in a 3d camera (I am not convinced it WOULD work, I've never seen anything like this done before). In 2D it is simply enough, but in 3D the view can change in ways that would make this non-working (literally, when ships are in front of the shield in the view)

So I have to say, I tried to mock this up and ended with that problem. Yeah, top-down, super idea, but not when the camera can rotate....

And yeah Cyborg, you will always have icons, don't see how you would even tell what is what without at least Supreme Commander style blips. Now sure, they could implement NLIPS to give you better visibility in far zoom. BUT this would still not make blips in the game-view a thing you can go without. (GUI element menu should exist though). Without blips, you literally can not tell whose ships are what at far zoom, unless they glow in team-colors (And even then....)

Actually, can someone post a screenshot not at 4K please, WITH and without any GUI so that we can mock-up some ideas?

[Blue]

Hey guys!

Alright, so taking into account everyone's notes, here's the next mock.

There's a couple of options here.



The first image is of how to maybe handle large important ships like Arks and stuff.

The second image is using a sidebar style to list off the ships, as discussed.

The third is a super minimal 'map blip' to indicate where ships are.

The scattered images below show how those would stack up.

What you're looking at:



Image One.

1. Player color.
2. Mark Level.
3. Shield.
4. Stance.
5. Cloak (on)
6. Health Bar


Image Two.
7. Mark Levels
8. Shield
9. Cloak
10. Stance (Defend)
11. Stance (Patrol)
12. Health Bar (Got a little confusing there, sorry.)

Image Three.

13. Blip representing a ship.
14. Stance (Attack.)
15. Stance (Defend)
16. Stance (Patrol)
17. Player Colors
18. Tooltip to give more info. The boarder of this tool tip can also represent player color.
19.  Tooltip Shield
20. Tooltip Health.

Thoughts?

-Blue

[eRe4s3r]

Nhh, musings

#seeing that I am no longer sure I want to see MK levels in the sidebar...  (see *1)
#on hover an icon in the sidebar, you gotta show text in the hover box, % and more detailed info imo
#love the ARK icon, if every important unique building had such an icon that would be neat.
#how would you imagine condensed information to display in image 2? Because in reality we'd have dozens of bombers, the info that the icon is condensed would somehow need to be clearly visible.

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*1 (Sidebar related)
Well more musings about sidebar, seems to me an overlay icon should be used to denote the odd status (like cloak or DOT effects or whatever) and hovering over the icon lists you (in the hover box near the mouse)
Type -  MK - HP (%) - Shield (%)
Description

But MK levels are important to see, ergh..... ;/

An idea would be to have MK1 be a super flat simple bomber, and get a growing different icon (basically, MK1 plain, MK4 super fancy) for each type.. would that be viable?

Something else, the sidebar can only be really tuned when we have a sidebar in game to see how it works, I am not convinced capital ships would work this way, and I think the icons are too fixed-size'ish, not a lot of em could fit at 1080p (and it'd get all the worse at 720p)

If we'd replace the MK text with icons, and maybe only show MK level on a contextual mouse hover (basically, mousing over the sidebar reveals the MK levels) then maybe we could have less cluttered icons in the sidebar ;p

Also one of the things related to sidebar status icons is that I think an overlapping icon could work just fine, to show if it's in FRD etc. (maybe cloak would change the entire icon to give it a sort of cloak-swirly-shader effect?) basically the upper half of the icon would be showing a sort of shaded icon (sort of like you already did, but not part of the ship icon itself) this would allow for a lot easier prototyping, but I don't know what GUI engine this uses, it's possible overlay icons don't actually work right when we take condensing of icons into account.

And these 2 icons would make 1 side-bar icon... ehm. Or maybe not, anyhow, condensing at MAX would need to display ship numbers? Would it need to?

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I like the map blip, but it could be even more minimal for me (basically just a dot for ships and a box for capital ships and a swirly thing for buildings (or the other way around))

And when a structure was "pinned/marked" it would get an reddish target painted over it visible for you and coop partners.

Mhnhmhn, yeah. I like it much, but no telling how it all works in practice ........

All things considered I can not really say much more without seeing it in game, one thing I definitely love above all else is the Ark Icon, if all unit buildings had a unique icon like this then that would be amazing

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[Wanderer]

Love your work Blue.

I haven't stepped out of the conversation, I'm just pondering things and trying to understand some of Eraser's vision for the sidebar.  The words alone aren't getting me to match what I assume is a prettier vision than what I'm getting out of it.

[eRe4s3r]

Love your work Blue.

I haven't stepped out of the conversation, I'm just pondering things and trying to understand some of Eraser's vision for the sidebar.  The words alone aren't getting me to match what I assume is a prettier vision than what I'm getting out of it.

Just ask me Things are not nearly as clear in my head as you think.. and I am open to better ideas and improvements to the idea. In the end nothing is written in stone that a sidebar is better, it's just what I would find preferable to .. well, no sidebar, because really without a sidebar you have no higher awareness of anything going on in this game right now. But maybe better ideas exist how to solve this? SupCom 2 had no sidebar, but it had control group details. and it drew neat selections around your (same type same control group) units and put them in formations... point being, not everything works everywhere the same way or even better.

The big problem I see is that a lot of REALLY fancy GUI things would require a fixed camera perspective. If you had an idea how to solve the problem that happens when you moved the camera while drawing that (i admit, very smart!) selection "boundary" around a blob, with details to the right in a hovering box, then I would be all for that. Because it would in essence give a far superior blob management than having a GUI that shows me "none" of that info (And I don't know enough about GUI coding to understand whether any of our ideas are technically feasible)

[Draco18s]

I think I agree that I don't care for mark icons in the side bar. But I do care about mark icons on the pips: If stuff warps in I want to know immediately that it's Mk4 and going to wreck my face.  Having to go to the sidebar to figure that out will be slow.