Making the ChronoCam Useful by Combining it with Notifications

The ChronoCam is such an awesome, but under used feature. The idea of being able to rewind to see what you missed is simply awesome and very useful. So why don't we do it more? Well it takes away attention from gameplay and it takes too long to find what we missed for it to be worth it.

So here's my proof of concept UI to make the ChronCam and notifications much more useful.



Simply combine notifications and the ChronoCam.

When you enter the Chronocam, a list of important notfications appear. Clicking on the notification takes you to the event location and time.

Then there's also different filters for the notifications so if you only want to see combat notifications or intel notifications, then you can quickly do that as well.

This would bring two of PA's most awesome UI features together into one superfeature.

I fully support this

Also scrubbing is kinda iffy, especially how it reacts to paused and unpaused inputs.

On a side note, pausing chronocam doesn't pause effects like explosions. So it's a matter of spamming your screenshot key for that sweet pic. Or in my case, background image number 661.

uhhmmmm LIKE?

this is amazing?

UBER put it in the game?

if this don't full my chrono can w/ lots of notifications... I support this!

This is an issue with too many notifications and notifications being useless because of it. Seriously, who uses notifications? I don't, and it's because there's too many for them to be useful. We need filters and we need less notifications.

Just because there are a lot of notifications doesn't make this UI useless. It just means there's some UI complications that need to be overcome – and can be easily overcome.

This also shouldn't show every notification, but just show the important notifications.

The issue with scrubbing is that it takes time, and can get very choppy trying to find the time and location you're looking for. How long ago was that event? Where was it? We're now quite a few seconds into the game and we'd be better off playing the game than scrubbing around for what we're looking for. The paring of notifications and the chronocam would allow players to find what they're looking for within a shorter span of time.

It definitely shouldn't show every single notification. Just important ones.

Besides, we have too many notifications anyways. Notifications are borderline useless right now.

Yeah we really don't need a notification for every time something explodes. I always panic when I see "metal extractor destroyed" but it actually refers to my units destroying an enemy extractor.

Agreed. I hate those notifications. And for each and every enemy building being destroyed? That's a crap ton of notifications anytime you roll through an enemy base, making notifications entirely useless. Because the notifications are telling me about the attack I'm currently controlling, I don't see the notifications that I'm being attacked on the other side of the planet.

We desperately need similar notifications clumped together and the ability to customize our own notifications.

I actually get the feeling that those notifications are the result of a bug, I don't think we are supposed to be getting them (enemy destroyed notifications)

That moment I'mm too busy doing stuff when it says enemy commander detected and the notification disappears seconds before i click it

a very simple and useful idea. i want.

Fantastic idea Brian. Do want.

My thoughts exactly.

Although for that specific scenario, you can click on the little commander icon in the upper left and the camera will go to the last seen location of the enemy commander.

Even so, there's plenty of other reasons something like this would be useful.

I need to finish/update this mod for the new UI: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/wip-chronocam-markers.55449/.

This is essentially the same, I just need to add the notification list.

Ooh. That's pretty cool.

Will you be able to add the notification list?

Going purely from memory of what I know of the way alerts are implemented, it shouldn't be difficult*

* not to be confused with not time consuming

Woohoo!!! :-D