A couple of UI pointers

It's actually just a standard keyboard rearranged..

I think at the end of the day, every command should be able to be bound to a key and the configs should be exportable / tradeable.

Keeps everyone happy.

The UI's being done in JavaScript, and is in a separate layer above the rest of the game, so the whole thing should be completely customisable without interfering with gameplay in the slightest.

So you can basically have whatever UI you damn well please! I'd imagine that encompasses hotkeys as well.

Well does Keyboard input counts to the UI?

One thing I'd love to see while not a UI function is a tool tip window. In the very under rated game Impire a window would pop-up when you hovered over a unit or other object when you were zoomed out.

This window showed the object in real time. So if it was an idle worker or a unit in combat you could with a sweep of the mouse see everything going on at the micro level while keeping an eye on things at the macro level.

In addition to the unit symbols flashing if in combat you could get the entire picture of what was going on without feeling like you were drowning in information.

Given the Devs opinion of a mini map I think a feature like this would be a huge improvement to the game as not everyone has multiple monitors. This gives us both the macro view and micro on one screen.

hit 'U' to toggle it At least that's what happens in my build.

I find this interesting. May I ask for the reasons you decided to do it this way?

From the outside, the decision seems to be more wrong than right to me. (Let me know if you would like me to elaborate on my thinking.)

Not to put words in neutrinos mouth. But I imagine they wanted something that looked more polished to show off since Mavor has expressed a lot of concern over showing unfinished things that don't look good because people could mistake it for something finished.

As for myself I certainly appreciate polished appearances in demos.

Pretty much what I said on page one. That actually is exactly what we wanted. Dev art vs. Art Art. We've put some thought into form and function, but only a little bit so far. Getting UI right takes a long time and a ton of iteration.

Syox,

My point was that all game functions should be all bound, and ideally, using a cluster around WASD.
I don't mean this as "you must use those keys to play", but rather, be coded into the software from the beginning. So shield toggle, factory pause, loop builds, patrol, assist, should all be identified by unique keys.

I think the FPS shooter cluster is very familiar to most gamers.
But if you choose not to use them, you should be able to play without as well.

Expanding upon smallcpu's earlier point...
Key combinations totally work.
This is from Zulan's GUI mod.

Unlike Starcraft where you have a small number of buildings and unit types, this GUI mod takes into account the higher number of units, here you can tap to cycle through what you want to build.

Same opinion here.
Though somethings are gamedesign related. For instance the amounts of keys needed. Or the amounts keys needed for one unit.

As someone who has produced both dev art and art-(ish? I'm not actually an artist) art throughout his life, I do understand what is meant. However, my experience is that user interfaces which are unfinished but look polished will, in many cases, generate more questions than unfinished user interfaces that actually look like they're unfinished.

Of course, if you're showing something work-in-progress from a game that's being created "behind the scenes", using dev art can be dangerous -- I understand that such art may be interpreted as a representation of the game's final state. But with images from a game where "everybody knows" that the things that are shown do not represent the final state (such as in a live stream where this is explicitly noted), I didn't think that swapping dev art for art art early on would be overly helpful (as long as there's at least something else in the images that shows that the people behind it do in fact understand what they are doing edit: so that this is still understandable when the images are shown out-of-context).

Anyway, I'm not assuming that I would know better than you -- I understand that I'm too uninvolved in the process of making Planetary Annihilation at uberent for that to be the case. But while I haven't seen the dev art in this specific case, I still wanted to share from my experience and add something to it. At least, I know that personally, I would have preferred to see the previous, DIRTY(TM) UI with all the bells and quirks and useless whistles that effectively represent how this game is actually being made. That layer of information is what's actually special about the making of Planetary Annihilation, and if I'm seeing things correctly, it's enjoyed by most people.

Yeppers, I know you guys are getting some odd questions and responses, but for once in my gaming life, I'm getting to see the behind-the-scenes for a game that I "bought", intend to play, and hopefully will love made by people who had a hand in TA and SupCom, 2 of my favorite games.
This doesn't happen every day.

So I'll take any little gritty insight I can get, even if it's not pretty.
It'll so much sweeter when the final product is delivered.

You know this is an interesting point. I've honestly been avoiding telling stories about the development of SupCom for various reasons.

UI is an interesting one. We actually went through about three major revisions (maybe more) to the UI during SupCom development. This included writing the system that eventually shipped which was lua based. Since people didn't see the in between stuff they don't have context.

We are definitely getting into the headspace that getting the game in your hands, even incomplete, is simply better in every way than holding it back. This means there will be rough edges and we'll have to deal with the criticism of that. At this point there are a bunch of examples of games that did this.

Thats the way i think.

In some ways, I think whatever rough edges there are, will get buffed out by the community suggestions.

Take Forged Alliance Forever as an example. The in-game lobby now shows player rankings, and there have been many, many balance changes, and the biggest bugs (the most annoying bugs) will get talked about to death, are are usually the first to get addressed.
While annoying, those complaints (from the end user perspective) seem pretty legit.

At that point, it's really up to Uber what community fixes and suggestions you want to adopt.
I think the end result is that finished copy (the one that stands for all time) will be a much more thought out and polished product.

Well, as regards to the dev art thing, couldn't you have removed the bars around the buttons to make it look more unfinished precisely for te attitude described before?

Also, how did you end up with such a 'fat' UI for SupCom, i've never seen the sense in all the useless space it has with thick frames and stuff. It's not very immersive, and it keeps you from seeing as uch as possible, which i always thought should be a main design target for an RTS UI.

It was perfectly immersive... if you wanted to feel like you were looking out of a pillbox.

I think the idea was for it to look like you were looking through the UEF Commander's viewing 'visor'

It's just a bar on the bottom just like in every RTS since Age of Empires popularized the layout. It doesn't lend itself well to widescreen, but the vertical layout does. It's bigger than older UI's because it has more pixels to play with to make itself more readable.

I think the good part of the SupCom GUI was the Forged Alliance floaty bits.
The econ bar, the re-sizable chat, the idle engineers, that was all really well done and useful. Even the menu/pause floating bar that can be tucked away was awesome.

And one thing wide screen was useful for was queuing up long chains of stuff (though I rarely had massive chains). Most of the time, I would just modify things in-game right on the map.


One thing Forged Alliance forever has added is the Econ Income to the game score counter in the top right. Now during a replay, we can monitor how each player is doing on econ.

If we were to expand upon that point,
It would be use for in-game to have some more floating trackers.
Something like what Starcraft 2 has on replays.

That way, we as a player, we can monitor what is going on with our econ, army and factories.
It gives me, the player, a much better feel of "control" of all my units.

The floaty bits were quite useless because you had to manually toggle them each and every match and it did not remember your choices. Might as well not bother.

And the score meter is one piece of free intel I do not particularly care for. Especially when it takes away the corner which should really be reserved for resource monitors.

The FA ui was horrible imho.