[WIP] Team task list v0.2.1

Discussion in 'Mod Discussions' started by Shalkka, March 31, 2014.

  1. Shalkka

    Shalkka Active Member

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    Currently at version 0.2.1
    New command bar allow you to view current planets state and change the state.
    -Planetary Scouting reporting: Each planet has one of 5 states: unknow(initial),light,medium,heavy and empty.
    -Planet development reporting: Each planet has one of 4 states: unbuilt(initial), outpost, colony, coreworld
    -Hostile planet development: Likewise as planet development
    Changing a state is broadcast as a team message. This behaviour can be toggled off. Anyone else using this mod or uttering sentences that this mod recognises updates your states.

    Known limitations: black screen at start, landing hides the command bar and forgets information.
    -----

    I have been playing some 5v5 shared teams. It would be cool if there were things that faciliate communication. What I did was announce key events that happens in the game. There are also many routine job division decision to do, such as who takes what planet. I would use the text channel to do this but lately it has been a rather big strain on my memory. I am throwing out what I want in hopes that it can be reduced to a good design that would serve multiple people / others would be willing to use it with me.


    Division of area
    Mainly i am thinking that you save an association who is the primary controller of an area. I am thinking as one person leading a planet in my asteroid map. Then when your view is within that persons area the name of the controller would be prominently displayed. You would have quick access to private chat with that guy and maybe pings only visible to the controller.

    Battle status
    Each area would have "occupation rating". Unknown, Empty, friendly occupied, hostile occupied and contested. Occupation would have three levels, light, substantial and fortified. There would be a annonucement when a new conflict starts. People could be assigned as primaries leading that combat. They would conclude in either "Area X was conquered" or "Area X fell".

    Scouting
    A player may be assigned scout duty either general or spesific areas. That job is to have a unit go check out an area labeled "unknown" and then label it a different occupation rating. When a move order was given it would show up as a box or ui item reading info like "Scouting of Xisho eta 50sec" where the eta would be the arrival time. If the eta would go 0 or negative. the box would be a different color indicating needing immidiet action.
    When a player views a planet/location it would show the history of that places occupation labels atleast the last change and how long ago was it. Maybe also tasks like "find the nuke silos / artillery" or "check factory distribution on base X".

    Colonization
    a player is assigned to turn an empty area into occupied. By default he becomes the controller of the new region and is reponsible for it's development. There would be a timer that shows when the last time that players attention was at that planet/area. The task box would be colored more brightly the more non-attention accumulates to the box. Alternatively an eta timer could be set. Task can also be given that the controller hood of the resultant place is freed to being grabable by other players. The intention is to inform the left hand what the right hand is doing. a couple of times I have built separate teleporters on planets etc.

    Eco balance
    A player may request that a spesific resource be upped. usually this is a "need more power". When this kind of request happens a player may announce that he grabs part of the responcibility to build more power. The game would have a completetion progress bar tracking how many power gens were constrcuted vs the amount demanded. There would also be eco goals such as "build halleys on planet A" or "have +40 mass production asap from this area" eco players could then estimate etas for them. There would also be request to keep radar on and warn of an expected stalling and request to turn off all secondary production (such as diverting all power to nukes).

    Reinforcements
    Some commander might be focused on battles and other on eco. Commanders on front line duty may request that a certain composition of troops be at certain future time at a spesific place. Eco commanders then can accept these requests. Has progress bar for units delivered. It can result in either delivery or failure (set manually by producer) or be deowned being up for a differnt producer to fullfill. For real smart functioning the front line commanders can start start consuming the units from the drop-off point before all units have been delivered but progress tracking still works. Also a guide to have telereinforments as well as astraus reinforcements (like those happen). They could also be announced by the producers in what they are going to build and the front liners can start to think how they are going to utilise them.

    Defences
    A player can spot a threat and create a defence task. For example seeing a bunch of hostile anchors and SXX be headed to a friendly planet. The task would notify the relevant area controller.

    Targets
    Maybe not a separate thing from defences. These task would be like "kill halleys on hostile planet B before they can annihilate". When a fighting drags on the front line comander may label his fronts fight as either "rolling", "holding" or "falling". Spare front line commanders would try to turn "falling" fronts into "holding". Front line commander could also have a separate arm of the command. For example that "Setasi ground" and "Setasi air" would have different primaries or "setasi west" and "setasi east". You would also have a priority list of nukeable and smashable sites. I site would have valuableness rating and obstruction rating. When a player notices anti-nukes they would be added as an obstruction rating, while players could maybe numerically value how juicy it would be for a nuke to land in that area. If a target is otherwise destroyed weakenedd it could be crossed off / made more uninteresting on the list. Then when a nuke silo is finished the nuker can refer to this list. It would also be used as a microfest where several commanders focus their attention to a wing of a formation to see a critical push go smoothly. Certain units would be the primary responcibility of certain player allowing each to focus on their slice of the battle.

    Missions
    You could select a group of units and label them as "don't you dare touch". If ever a player selects units with this label that another commander has set there would be a big notification about it and a shortkey to unselect all such units (with possibility ignore them and mess with them).

    When a player finds idle time he could just see what unowned tasks there are and own a couple more. It would also be a distributed way of coming up with a strategy. for example if two expansion task are created, a team member could reason that they can't do both safely and cancel the other.

    I thought that these could be simply be made by having standardised text displayed in team chat althoguth I am not sure whether that would be spammy. Would it remain an ui mod if you share hard data with your teammates? In many fps games there is button to call for medic or ammo and portal has neat little marker system to help reason about spatial puzzles without text. Anyone interested in using or making this kind of mod? I might get around it eventually but would rather do it so it can be used by someone other than me too.
    Last edited: April 27, 2014
    zihuatanejo and trialq like this.
  2. Shalkka

    Shalkka Active Member

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    Implemented a way to where pressing a ui button outputs to team chat the occupancy information of curretn planet. I have some trouble getting icons to be dependent on whether a planet has been scouted with a certain status. I want the scout icons to appear in the planet listing and tried to extend the celestialViewModel as it's per planet information. However it seems to not work. Any hints why it doens't work or how to approach it differently?
  3. thetrophysystem

    thetrophysystem Post Master General

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    Some of your ideas seem complicated. Takes the casual out of the game, as well as forcing a particular kind of structure. However, you did mention good ideas.

    1) Area of Player Focus in Team Battles - Designating who watches what or does what sounds like a planning stage sort of thing. However, knowing where the camera of a teammate is located so you can watch elsewhere, is a good idea. Maybe teammate camera center location should be shown to teammates? A little rectangle like a camera viewfinder icon, of a team color, is visible to teammates of the player, and is located at the center of the view of the player. That way, if you see that rectangle, you know they are giving orders around it, also that they are watching that area, also even that it is possible they are microing that area. (yes, if multiwindow, should mark all the windows centers with the icon)

    Good thing about that is, if you see it, you know you are wasting vision watching the same area, you might conflict orders, and what task that player is working on. I SWORE I lost a game last night because I was microing a commander to attack a turret from safe range with ubercannon and my teammate kept "tugging" my commander around and he actually died. It is the only time I recall I deleted another teammate commander and quitted, not out of rage but because it was over and was no longer a contest nor was there anything I could do anyway, it was just saving time that way.

    2) Listing Goals: Should possibly be a chat option. chat should be persistent up to 5 lines at LEAST, and should scroll as more chat comes down, but maybe there should be a line of text next to each player's name up top, that a player can use a text tag to send text up by their name, designating either their main task they are working on or a note about the team focus. That would be pretty sweet. Casuals can use that space to type personal motto or one-liner in. ("leeeROOOOY JEEENkinnnns!!!!!")

    When a line of text is sent to a player's namespace, it should make ping sound. That would draw attention to it.
  4. Shalkka

    Shalkka Active Member

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    v0.1 First release - get it via PAMM
    -Planetary Scouting reporting: Each planet has 5 states: unknow(initial),light,medium,heavy and empty. New command bar allow you to view current planets state and change the state. This change is broadcast as a team message. Anyone else using this mod or uttering sentences that this mod recognises updates your states.

    Known limitations: black screen at start, landing hides the command bar
  5. LavaSnake

    LavaSnake Post Master General

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  6. trialq

    trialq Post Master General

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    Nice mod, I especially like how it's useful even if only one person has the mod installed. What's different between v0.1 and v0.1.1?

    If you plan on tackling the other items on your list, What's next?
  7. ViolentMind

    ViolentMind Active Member

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    For some reason when I have this mod turned on, then I can't see any games in the "Play" screen. I know that there are games running and open to join, because when I turn it off and log back in, then I see them.

    Edit: On further review, I might be having issues with other mods, because the problem kept happening after I turned this one off when I refreshed the screen (might be the Show Players mod).
    Last edited: April 26, 2014
  8. Shalkka

    Shalkka Active Member

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    The difference between v0.1 and v0.1.1 is propably one line of mod_info.json . I also couldn't run the mod as I thought 0.1 had been uploaded. I rather make each version a separate thing than file diversing files under the same version.

    v0.2.0
    -Very regrettably for a team coordination mod 0.1.1 broke freefrom teamchat which has been fixed. Should have caught this in testing.
    -Planet state changes involving halleys would make the scout information be discarded. A dual storage system has been deployed to inelegantly dance around this issue. Now such forgetting shouldn't happen but it is untested.
    -2 new per planet designations: Allied build level is one of: unbuilt (initial), outpost, colony or coreworld. Same values for hostile buildlevels.

    Currently the sun also has per planet values but they can't really be accessed + they don't kinda make sense. Plan is to include some global function on them. If nothing else scout level is the most severe out of the planets (empty being the least sever, unknown the next with the detection in increasing order) also most sever out of build levels. Not expecting them to be very useful.

    Making the build level made me inspire how cool it would be to place them down to planet surface and give them names. Also having a hierachy were a colony could contain outposts. An outpost that is primarily made out of factories would get an industrial area icon. For outposts consisting of economic strucutres you could see the total production beside the outpost icon. It could also be cool to have a base tree structure on the celestial item menu or as new element on the left hand side. You could collapse any part of the hierachy and selecting an item would select all units belonging to that division.

    Next I am probably going to work on claiming a primary commander status on a planet and a separate economy bars on primary planets under the main one.
  9. Shalkka

    Shalkka Active Member

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    v0.2.1
    -Halley forgettting fixed and tested to work. Unfortunately landing forgetting is something that happens
    -Behaviour of announcing changes to team chat can be toggled off
  10. keterei

    keterei Active Member

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    When I have your mod enabled through pamm, at the start of each game, the game summary window pops up after planet generation, showing a draw. I can't close the window or interact with the game. The esc menu is opened as well. It's similar to this https://forums.uberent.com/threads/gw-game-summary-draw-with-mods.66179/

    (I dont have the Orbital Warfare Overhaul Strategic Icons mod installed, which was causing it for the OP in that post.)
  11. zihuatanejo

    zihuatanejo Well-Known Member

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    This sounds bloody brilliant! Will test it asap. This will make team games much more enjoyable for me. Communication is key, after all.

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