Reading the game

Today was the day of the combat live stream, and things were looking pretty slick! Explosions and tanks, robots and craters, it was pretty cool.

It did cause me to think about reading the game. By that I mean being able to look at a situation, be it a single engagement, or the broader state of the current game, and making sense of what's going on. While I appreciate that the game's still in pre-alpha, and so lots of stuff will change before even Beta rolls around, the livestream did spark a hint of concern there.

The strategic icons are going to help a lot in the more zoomed out situations, where it's important to see the unit counts and types. I couldn't see any health bars that far out though, and when the camera got closer and the icons disappeared it got a lot more difficult to make out the units.

Is this something that will change a lot? Is this just something players will have to get used to? Are there things yet to be done that will help making engagements at all zoom levels more readable?

FA suffers from the exact same problem. Imho it is solving it by offering an option to always render strategic icons. I've been playing with it for years. There are people who are put off by it for the "war of dots" reasoning, but hey: dots are just so far easier to read.

Imo Icons need work. But its still pre alpha ... :twisted:

Yup as they said, those icons were first pass.

Mike

Note though that in FA, the option is that you can leave strategic icons to be on all the time, not just when zoomed out. I used this feature all the time, and it helped quite a bit.

Health is tricky. If you have health bars for all the units showing, it might start looking cluttered. There's a couple ways to address this:

-The strategic icons could be colored based on current health. Standard color if full, darker as it gets more damaged.
-Give a single health bar in the UI somewhere for all your selected units, giving you a basic idea of how things are going.

It will be interesting to see how Uber addresses this. It definitely was tricky to gauge how your army was doing in supcom.

In my feeling this was not a problem at all in SupCom, since it only mattered for very small armies. With bigger armies it started to matter less. Units either were fully intact or dead. You only rarely ended up with a ton of heavily damaged units.

You're right, and knowing about individual unit strength isn't going to be important in big battles.

What will be important is being able to gauge in what shape your army is. Sometimes it's just better to retreat, and if you don't have metrics that give you an idea when to retreat, among other things, then it's hard to, well, retreat.

That's where the health bar colors come in I'd think, at a glance if you see lots of green, you know or good to go, more yellow, you might want to be a bit cautious but otherwise okay, but if you see lots of red you know you need to pull back or re-enforce that army.

Mike

I think a lot can be done for the strategic icons still, and I like some of the suggestions here, but I also feel that without those the game should still be readable, given that you're close enough to the combat.

Just compare TA to PA. Now, they do have different aesthetics, but you can easily see the large difference in clarity that they both have.







I think some of it may be related to the lighting affecting the countours of the units, making their colours blend in with the background, and making the units more difficult to distinguish, though I don't think it helps that units seem to clump up a bit more. The extravagant explosions probably aren't helping either.

It's interesting because I found the structures to be pretty clearly visible at most levels. Maybe the size ratios are just a lot different as well.

You'll notice in TA that a lot of units also had shadows, which add a nice contrasting border to the unit.

One Thing i just realized: That the teamcolored lifebars of Starcaft2 are very helpfull.

That TA-screen is zoomed in, the PA screen still is rather zoomed out. I'd say that's the only real difference.

I was gonna say the same thing, zoom in so the units are the same size, and automagically it's just as readable.

Mike

They're actually not that different. The biggest difference is the resolution here. Here, these are the unit sizes relative to eachother.



Biggest difference is styling and how much stuff is in the shot really, sizes are pretty close.

From that screen I'd say the problem is that PA shows dark units on a dark (nightside) part of a planet.
Also in PA the size of the units varies due to the varying distances due to the planets spherical nature.

Work in progress, I'm sure it'll improve.

Also I'd really like them to group the strategic zoom icons of clustered units together and display a small number below it to indicate numbers. This will be a lot easier to read and understand than to display each unit's individual icon separately, it's just going to cluster the screen and provide less info than the alternative i mentioned above.

Well half of every planet will be dark even more if moons block light on planets, or the other way around.
Maybe they also intoduce moonlight. But then still no moon and no sun equals dark.

Colors are hard to read.

Ok guys it struc me: Parachute Flares.

I don't go into lore now, cuz that is the road to insanity.

Gameplay aspects:
- it keeps the illumination of day and night ->helps not to destroy immersion of the game. though you are able to light battles on nightside up.
- while automatic fired by only some units, it creates possibilitys for players (use them or not) so you can fight in the dark if you wish but you musn't
- it helps with the feeling of 3D if you have a higher altitude thing and rotating it and the planet beneath it.
- it could be used for plausible different lightings. Common real flares are white red and green
- creates room for cosmetic dlc (orange or pink flares anyone?)

OK after watching the vid once again i address two problems:
1. Garat and justice(?) had very similar(the same) colour on their units that's confusing.
2. The icons are so big you cant see the units under them, after the icons sudently disappear, the units are still to far away to really tell them appart. Thus making icons smaller and fade them out later.

And yes i know they are first pass.

TA was really high contrast. That kind of contrast just wouldn't look good in a modern game engine. If you're having dynamic lighting you need some dynamic range to work with, but look at that TA screenshot. Pretty much every unit uses the whole brightness range with only ambient lighting. Throw some AA and light that TA scene from the side and it becomes a lot less readable.

This is fine, because strategic icons are the best thing ever.