WYSIWYG- Harmful, or Helpful?

Buildings count as units.

Edit: Ninja'd by a couple hours.

The original concept of WYSIWYG was a lot more of a general guideline for good design than the strict law that sometimes gets selectively cited to win a debate. People have a lot of misconceptions about it because so many ideas have been shot down with "that's not WYSIWYG" here on this forum.

But you don't see how many are in them.

They only go up to one, and anti-nukes build up to three- which you can see in three different holding areas.

Yes, you do. The nuke launcher can only hold one missile and you can clearly see it if it is there. The anti-nuke can hold three and those are also visible although they are smaller.

no, you do ... nukeslaunchers have only one nuke and antinuke build up to 3 which you can see when there are 3 in its launchbays

Of course you do. You have played the game, right?

Edit: Wow epic ninja.

I hear an echo.

i rather imagined a chorus ... with echo

Harmful if taken in more then light doses.


it's a total drug with this community and the problem is that it's become the ultimate agrument winner.

all you have to do is believe it somehow applies and hey presto you win. to me that's as good as "Tag you're it" - "Nuh Unhh"

I'm tired of seeing the communal shared philosophy of what this game should be polluted by a lack of direction in what we claim we want.

we don't really know and we've elected WYSIWYG as our ship's driver and given him the wheel.

he's been bumping into every rock there is, he's a terrible driver.

this is an equally terrible philosophy. We can't justify every design choice opinion we have with one thing. that doesn't work with life it shouldn't work here as well.


on top of that WYSIWYG is extremely specific and few people seem to know that.

Yeah I agree, I think overuse of "that's not WYSIWYG" when talking about ideas contributes to people maybe having a misconception of the original goal.

I can only think of a few things that I'm not a fan of that were probably influenced by WYSIWYG.

I miss the ability to stockpile nukes and anti-nukes.

I liked TA's system where construction units had a specific build power and the rate of which they drained resources was related to how expensive what they were building was, but also it's total build time. While more complex, I think it offers more options than making the build time of every unit directly related to it's metal cost.

Finally, one thing that kind of falls under WYSIWYG, that isn't done and I think should be is visually show nanostall. In TA when you ran out of energy, or metal, the visual effect of the nanolathe would cut out until you had enough energy or metal at which point the nanolathe effect would start up again (and if you were still in the negatives, it would immediately cut out after running through the resources you made in that game tic) PA the nanolate effect continues to be shown, I think this simple visual change would be a great extra indicator to people that oh look my eco is hurting, I need to cut back.

Is the nanolathe stall not happening for you? because it happens for me...

I checked and it seems to stutter a bit, but it doesn't really stop entirely.

Here's a short video showing what I mean (in TA)


See how the commander's nanolathe cuts out entirely? That doesn't happen in PA.

WYSIWYG is not even a general guideline or common truth. It's a possible design process. You do the visual stuff first and have the intention and semantics guessed by the system (or other developers) to what appears to fit best.

There ARE examples for WYSIWYG in PA:

• Designing T2 tanks as visual upgrades over T1 tanks - and thereby turning them into such
• Designing the terrain under artistic aspects - with the result of making it unplayable so it got dumbed down into oblivion
• Designing the visuals for planetary collisions first - and having the damage volume limited to the areas covered by the visuals
• Designing the Catalysts as ultimate weapons - and have them end up being such

In some way, some of the more fuzzy commands (like area patrol) are also WYSIWYG, since you're doing something visually, and the game GUESSES what you could have intended.

Visualizing what's happening isn't WYSIWYG, it's actually the precise opposite of it. And the lack of visualization isn't the same as lack of WYSIWYG either, it's an entirely different case. And yes, some of the devs are messing that up, too.

you can't be dependent on s hit like that at the scale at which PA is played (and BTW PA does do it and it's more precise because it shows exactly what quantity your stalling with the number of particles. but it just shows that that is generally useless to us on an informative level).

We had this debate before with people telling us strat icons should be removed and units models made bigger as a general rule OR simply stay the same size as you zoom out so that you have PURE WYSIWYG.

I'm not going to go into the NUMBER of reasons why that is a terrible idea.

The fact of the matter is you simply CANNOT conciliate TA's high level of WYSIWYG with PA's grand scale and multiple simultaneous battlefields.

you HAVE to use SOME FORM of representation. of surrogation. of replacements.

SupremeCommander realized that and rather then fight it, embraced it.

So did Spring.

Both of those have spawned, as solutions to missing WYSIWYGs, some of the amazing and incredible macro tools we are blessed with in PA.

Erm.. TA wasn't WYSIWYG at all..

it was quite a bit. and according to the WYSIWYG defenders, more than PA is.

It's economy deeefinitely wasn't, and nuke silos could hold multiple, also missiles did extra damage to aircraft and less to everything else, etc...

It was not WYSIWYG. :S

Who said anything about being completely dependent on just that? It's simply an additional visual cue. Sure PA might be more precise, if it actually does base number of particles on exactly how bad you are stalling, I don't know if it does this or if it just reduces the density, but if anything at PA's scale this is worse. In the middle of a game you might take a quick glance, it's much easier in a quick glance to see that the nanolate stream is off entirely, than to see that the density it lower.

Not to mention the amount a construction unit drew when nanolathing was not at all consistent, being based on the BuildTime of the unit being constructed, the workerTime of the unit doing the construction and the total cost of the unit.