Uber, do you agree PA needs a huge UI update?

Saying that we use flat maps in real life is silly. You either use a map that represents such a small portion of a sphere that it might as well be flat. Or you use a bigger map that represents a sphere and you have to be told how to use it. There also used because a flat paper map is easy to store and easy to measure, but that doesn't count as a positive for PA.

I think your underestimating how hard a flat map will be to read. If it were implemented few people would use it and fewer people would fully understand it.

I do think something should be there, but please think about how it will work for sphere rather then saying "that game did it, I want it in this game too".

Thanks captain obvious. I was not speaking about paper map.

There, the control room of the nasa, and the general display system.

Do you see a globe ? and these guys send satellites !

They chose to display the earth flatten because it make sense for the UI point of view.

Showing the planet sperical on a display system, is ok for Science Ficition.

@neutrino is correct, a 2D projection is going backwards.

You think I want a minimap?
I don't want a minimap.
I want a true 3D display.
Holographically projected, so we can meet the requirement of "I see everything on the battlefield" without unnecessarily "click, pan, click, pan, repeat..."










- A large holotank for 1 single planet.
- Where I can use smart motion gestures
- Where the entire thing is transparent.



But I don't have a holotank, nor do I have Stark's garage.
And I sure as heck don't have motion gestures depicted in the movies (that is way, way too intelligent to be used in real life).





What I have is 2D equipment
- 2D monitor.
- 2D user input. A mouse. X and Y coordinates only.


It's not that I don't want to dream big.
But I'm not out of touch with reality for what actually "works".

p.s.

Maybe one day, when I have 2 Myo bracelets, and a hologram display, we can mod the hell out of this game to be played "the way it was intended".







But that day is not today...

I would rather see the ui lag fixed so we can finally having smooth games than a ui overhaul. I do not have a bad pc but the ui lag (and the high cpu usage of the ui) just makes EVERYTHING feel choppy and slow.

@rick104547
Optimization has been promised, Uber know their engineering.
Nobody's worried about that.

We have no idea what Uber has planned for UI.
That has a lot of people worried.

We just need an oculus rift...

just invert the border coulour like in FA!

I always think PA needs some really revolutionary UI features to compensate for the disadvantages of its main sellpoint, or the problems occured in the previous multi-battlefield RTS games will get much worse in PA, since those game have only two or three flat playgrounds.

But so far Uber's approach for UI is pretty ordinary due to the lack of budget or something, which worries me a lot.

no, due to it being beta, they said to consider nothing we see as final and that they would itterate.

Yeah, but I hope fixing that won't take more than a few hours work at most.

Yes, render icons always please. This should be also be a pretty small change with pretty big impact. I can't wait until they get to the point where the finally begin to make such changes, so far they seem to be busy with fundamental base systems.

I can't understand, why are people so bothered about that yellow ping? I don't even notice it. I don't even know why I dont notice it. It has to be because I am zoomed out too much to see it. Or I feel it is a nice feedback of "you deselected stuff". Dunno, but I never notice it consciously at least.

I don't even know exactly what I'm selecting, and when I deselect, I have a ping confirmation. Now, what did I do ? Nothing? Moved something? My ACU maybe?

That's why it's annoying.

I don't need any visual confirmation that I deselect things. Because it's should be obvious what is selected and what's not. Not like now.

Seriously, the first time I saw the ping, I though my factories were going to move..

The visual feedback for "You moved stuff" is different from the yellow ping. The yellow ping confirms that you really have selected nothing. So by that logic I can't follow. But well, I wont miss that ping if it should be removed.

Wow. I can't believe this one is still getting talked about....

UI Design
The UI is supposed to give you feedback when

1. You have done something
   or
2. or you are required to do something.

This is called conveyance.



Now let's talk about WHY a UI does this.
Take your coffee cup, pick it up, now put it back down on the table.
Note how when you place it back on the table, there is a satisfying "click when porcelain met the wood"?
This is your feedback that something just happened.

In a User Interface, this type of "I have completed something" feedback is very important to give the user a sense of control.

Let's consider a trillion dollar industry, your smartphone.
When you type on your smartphone with a touchscreen, 2 things happen.
1. It vibrates per key press.
2. There is a small click.
This lets you know when "action is complete.

Consider Windows.
You mouse over the start button, it glows.
You mouse over the PA Launcher Play button, it glows too.


PA Design
Now, you might say, oh all well and good, but PA is a game. Other games do this.
"UI feedback when action complete" is integral to UI design.

In fact this is how the rest of PA behaves!
Beta disclaimer. Mouse over accept, it glows awaiting input. You click it, it turns orange to give you feedback it was done!

In the main login screen, you mouse over the buttons, they glow!
You click "Settings", and the game does 2 things.
- Wrap the button in a "confirmed click" white glow.
- Give you audio feedback you have clicked the button


I'll start with a PA example.
Click the "attack icon", it changes from "all is good, at rest state"


To telling you "hey, I am waiting for input"


When you completed this attack option, "click" and you see a "glow".
This is the keeping in line with all the other functions such a move and patrol.






Now let's look back to that annoying yellow ping.

When your Commander is selected, and you click somewhere else on the screen,
Did the player issue a command to that location? No?
It's giving you both audio and visual feedback though!

It is breaking the consistency with the rest of PA behavior. It's counter intuitive.
Then it is sending player wrong information. That something just happened.
It is conveying something that never happened.
This also means the player not longer feels in control.


So there you have it.
3 broken principles of UI design from a bit of "click" and "glow".



Nobody said UI Design was easy work.

Gee look at all those graphs and curvy lines and a bunch of other numbers. They must be Astronauts to understand all of that. Oh wait. . . ?

This is also a different use case than PA, and a room of experts who understand likely the issues with a 2d representation. And it doesn't matter if the map is a display or paper, they'll have the same problems. How do you explain to every single user that a unit with constant speed appears to change speed on the mini map and it's not broken?

I honestly don't get the anti-projection crowd at all. It's not hard at all to have an implementation where 'close' zoom is spherical (where you've zoomed in far enough to only see 30% of the map), and then 'far away' zoom is a flat projection. See here for what 'flattening' looks like.

By doing it all in one smooth motion (like in the video linked above) the inconsistency between what you see on the projection map (variable speeds etc) become easily understandable to the user, because they can with a simple mouse scroll see the 'real' speeds by zooming in.

I have yet to see anyone with a valid reason why this is a bad idea. And like Ze-Pilot, I too find it painful to navigate a planet for long.

Frankly, I'd love the ability to have 2 windows open, one for each planet, with the planet flattened out so I have a full overview of my entire forces.

So yes, it's beta.
Yes, the UI will get better as it hasn't even had it's first major refinement yet.
But budget is also an issue.
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/uber-do-you-agree-pa-needs-a-huge-ui-update.52662/#post-803454


I'm spending all this time trying to collect all the user suggestions because I think it is something that is really needed. I'm crazy for this stuff and I would rather pitch in my time to help collect all this data, than somebody at Uber who doesn't live and breathe UI.
I'm doing this as a labor of love since I hope PA kicks serious ***.
I thought it could trounce FAF.

To me,
- Smooth UI makes the game fun.
- Not a powerful UI and we will never get that "epic" throwing 1000 unit armies at each other.
- PA is a multiple battlefield game. Much more complex battlefield than a standard 2D map.
- PA will get a lot more complex when we start seeing those tighter chokes from the terrain and multi-levels shown in the dessert biome concept render.


To me, this all means powerful and smart UI, or we won't get "epic" massive armies.
It simply won't make the player feel like a total omniscient badass Commander.

The problem is that I don't really look closely at the ping. I don't really see the color, because my attention is are already on something else (like selecting others stuff).

But then there is that gmrlgl blip in my periphery vision that tell to my brain "oops, you did something you didn't meant to", because in every other single RTS in existence, there is NO GRMBL BLIP WHEN YOU DO NOTHING.

Yes, it's really drive me crazy, it seems nothing but it adds up to all the UI flaws that make me unable to play this game.

From the kickstarter, it always seems to me that the biggest challenge PA will have is to get the UI right, because you will get so many stuff to manage and see that it has to be perfect. Not just good, perfect.

Sure HDR is nice, and graphics are important to appeal people (that's one of my main concern for FAF currently), but I will be sad if it's added before a slick UI (and interesting battlefield with some features like cliffs, plateaux, chokepoints,..).

I'm sure they will work on it, but it's probably a bigger challenge than adding some shaders. And it has been overlooked for so much time while I feel it should have been one of the main focus...

But then we hear from the team that they will add some stuff on the existing UI, while for me, the only good point of the UI right now is that there is an UI.
Yeah, when I've heard on one livestream that they didn't start to work on the UI yet, I was thinking it was a placeholder and that they will start from scratch. And I think it's still one of the best idea, there is not a lot of good stuff to keep currently.