UBER - Everything is too hard to distinguish from one another in this game

Ok, my friend and I just sat down with the Beta for the past 5+ hours. We played a few games and one of the biggest issues that we had both agreeed on was a big one was that the units, regardless if they were movable units (land or air), or small structures, and sometimes even terrain, were all too damn hard to distinguish from each other. This is especially true when things were getting hot and heavy and you are attacking or under attack.

Is that a Fab Bot or is that an Anti-Air Missile Launcher?

Is that a Tree or a Fab Bot?

Is that an enemy plane above my large struture, or just a detail of the structure itself? (<- this one really sucks)

Where the heck did I leave my planes? They landed, which sounds cool on paper, but they are now lost in the scrub on this planet and I have no clue where they are. Oh! There they are, right in front of my face! I didn't notice them as they blended in sitting there.

The amount of times I tried to "order" a FabBot to do something only to discover it was a turret or something similar was frustrating to say the least.

I know that your graphics department spent a ton of time on this game, I can tell as my PC with a Quad-Core i7 CPU, 12GB of RAM, Solid State HDD, and 1GB nVidia video card grinds to molasses even in the lowest settings mode at best to run this game. It's brutal. I see an upgrade in my future.

But something really has to be done about everything just blending in with everything else or it'll make it hard for me to enjoy the game and, more importantly, recommending it to others. Some ideas are:

• Put an option for halos around units and/or structures in the game.
• Put another one in to always show a red halo around any incoming enemy units.
• Really mix up to color pallete. If grey is the overwhelming color of structures, make it so there is zero grey on any units.
• Make a hotkey bar that you had toggle to hide if you want that you can put unit portraits into or that has them built in already. Everytime you click the portrait, it moves you around to all of those units, whereever they are on the map. Like a Windows ALT+TAB for units. "Where did I leave my fourth Advanced Fab Bot? Click, click, click, Oh! There he is!"

But hey, you guys are the game designers, so I'll leave it to you.

I WANT to love this game. And I did enjoy it, to a degree, but I need to be able to see, and discern, everything clearly to enjoy this game to its fullest potential.

Also, I won't even get into what my other friend who is color-blind who just observed us had for comments about his state of confusion in regards to the terrain, structures, units, et al.

The halo idea sounds interesting. Even the one around enemy units. but wouldn't it just give the GPU more (unnecessary) stuff to do?

I think that once the shaders are in, we'll be able to read things better. Mavor said that he wants to see more contrast (and saturation if my mind serves me right) so it might help too. lights on units, if used correctly might be another tool to help identifying diferent units.

Something that would definitely help: permanent strategic icons. With a toggle on the options of course.

one word strategic view, seems like you havent zoom out enough.

but i find strategic view to work perfectly just like in supcom

Well, for starters, "strategic view" is two words.

Secondly, I did try and use that, but it is flawed. In my view:

• SV takes you out of the game, lessening the experience. I want to be IN the action, not looking for it.
• SV costs you oodles of time if the machine you are playing PA on is less than stellar. The amount of time it takes to go out, roll all over the place, and then back in with all the redrawing is ridiculous on my and my friends machines. Mine is only two years old was a medium-high-end rig when I built it. This is currently the only game that I have that is going to require me to buy new hardware to play unless Uber can clean it up behind the scenes to run better on not-new gear.
• SV is not as fast nor as clear in general as a simple MiniMap or even just flashing on the left, right, top or bottom of the screen to alert you to activity.

In short, Strategic View is a neat idea that can serve as an addition to the game, but given that or a clickable MiniMap, (or something similar), no player would take the time to zoom in and out and here and there to find out what the heck is happening while they're getting laid waste to down below.

Strategic view also has the issues that the current icon set is not... ideal to say the least.


Anyway while it gets easier to see stuff once you get used to it there are imo some design issues with units and buildings that are hard to distinguish even after a lot of plays. T1 and T2 engineers. Have a bunch of them and its impossible to tell which is which. T1 bots look very similar.

Factories from far away or telling which way is the exit when zoomed out.

And so on.

I'm not sure what issues you're having. I've got a six year old PC (2.4Ghz Q6600 with a 512Mb 8800 GT and 4Gb of RAM) and on a standard 2 planet system the game runs fine (lowest settings of course).

As for the strategic zoom, if you want to play the game optimally you shouldn't be zooming in very often. If you're watching your battles you might win the first couple, but you'll lose to the guy who sends his army in and the continues building economy behind it.

Sounds like you need to reduce the size of the system that you are playing in. The more planets, the more surface area that you're system (and the server) needs to deal with, so fewer planets = better performance.

I have almost exactly the same specs on my system. The only difference is that I have 2 1GB ATI cards in XFire mode. I play on all Medium (default) graphics settings, and as long as I keep the total planet count to under 5 (smaller planets), or 3 (mid-sized planets), then I don't have too many issues.

Also, keep in mind that most of the optimization phase has yet to come. They are mostly in bug fix mode since the Beta has been released. So, it should improve quite a bit when they get to that part.

I play on Uber graphics with a much lower spec 6 year old PC than you guys. I believe this is either a system or planet to large issue or there is something wrong specifically with your card/setup and the game at the moment. I wouldn't buy a new PC, with those specs you shouldn't have to.

Back on topic:
I agree that things are hard to distinguish but I feel that's to be expected until all the graphics features and final art is in the game. I also imagine Uber haven't finalised the types of units that are in the game yet and the specialist/strategic rolls they'll fill. Until all this is locked down I don't see a lot of point in spending more time than the minimum on each unit/building.

Okey. Some counter arguments.

1. Making halos underneath every unit have the same effect, it "takes you out of the game" (breaks immersion).

2. Its allmost instant to "zoom in to max" and "zoom out to max" (not celestial view) for me, if your computer cant handle to zoom do you think that it will be able to handle the addition of a couple of 1000 halos (one underneath every unit)? I would instead wait for them to optimize the game so that zooming works without difficulties for you.

3. They are currently working on some sort of minimap (or something simular, more details in the future), but i doubt it will be as effective as the zoom considering that your not just fighting on a flat square, your fighting on MULTIPLE spheres.

However, i dont realy see a reason for them to not do include halo's. As long as its a option and not forced. (Since me myself have no difficulties discerning units at a glance even without strategic view, on the other hand i hate cluttered screens and halo's would do that).

Would it be possible to get the "Always render strategic icons" SupCom like setting re-introduced, as long as they scale down along with the view of course.

I would like to have this, too!

I think they already confirmed that there will be a setting for setting a height for when strategic icons blend in.

PA is not your bag. It is, by nature, a strategic title. If you want up close eye candy, play Starcraft/every-other-knockoff-since-Dune2.

Performance tuning is the pipeline. This is beta. Think 'its maybe 1/3 finished' as a release title.

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  How would you minimap 10 planets, 20+| moons, 'roid belts, etc? <- this is an actual question not sarcasm. Its an issue that is debated atm.
  
  

SV is a core of a `strategic` level title. Did you play SupCom much?

I agree. I would love to love this game, but for this it needs a lot of UI/Graphics improvements so that we can focus a lot more on the strategy, and a lot less in searching for the buttons, units, buildings, etc. Keyboard shortcuts are absolutely NOT an answer. Eyes and mouse first (I'm not asking for beauty but convenciency) !

There would need to be screenshot comparisons between TA, SupCom and PA. I'm sure it would become obvious that the firt two were way more "readable".

PLEASE don't overlook this issue.

Uber knows there is a lack of contrast for units (especially with trees and such) and this will be heavily mitigated once post processing comes in. Also, once trees and such actually react (like in SupCom) it will be easier to find units amongst the forests.

Just one of those things that will be fixed over time.

Look at TA :


And SupCom :


Now PA :



I am really doubtful a simple post-processing trick will be enough to make the game as readable as its glorious ancestors. It´s even worse on metal planets, of course.

LIGHTS!

the solution is lights on units that only hte player can see, you'll get used to see specific lights and shape combos based on your faction.

I think these screenshots are a bit unfair, the TA and SupCom ones are both with no fog of war, the PA one everything but the bright red tanks are in fog... which will make them less colourfully distinct.

I'm not saying it doesn't need work, this just isn't a completely fair comparison.

You forgot to add that the first two are examples are from finished products, and PA is still in Beta.