How should ground, air, and orbital all be displayed?

Thinking a bit back to the style of TA, and later SupCom and the rest the idea of a seamless zoom got me wondering a bit. How the heck does that all work when you add an additional layer of orbital as well?

It creates a situation that could be quite cluttered and confusing if done wrong. But it also raises the question of how should it be done right? I don't know, but now that I'm thinking about it, here are a few ideas. Please feel free to add your own and or debate on which ideas or even combinations of ideas you think would be good or bad and why.

Layering
The way I see it there are four effective layers. These are Space, Orbital, Air, and Ground. The space layer may seem a bit redundant but the idea there is to have a broad overview of everything without focusing on anything specifically letting you see the whole battle across the system.

Fading
The idea here is to fade out lower layers. Say for example you are looking at the orbital layer, any aircraft will be faded, any ground units will be faded more with the idea that you can still hopefully identify these units, but without distracting from the active layer of orbital units.

Scaling
Like fading, the idea is to push away lower layers but this time this is done by making them smaller instead.

Symbols
Like the other ideas, but now as the units are pushed away to lower layers they start getting replaced by easily identifiable symbols to preserve easy at a glance readability which could potentially be lost with other methods.

grey scaling
here the idea is to soften the colors of lower layers towards grey making them less prominent and distracting.

Cutting
Last but not least, is the idea of cutting away irrelevancies entirely making lower layers invisible.

This is just a systematic list of different tactics I can think of off the top of my head that might be used to handle the clutter of multiple layers of conflict in a planetary, and even system wide conflict.

I am not trying to be biased towards any of these ideas, and I am open to any other ideas others may have. The idea here is to get a bit of brainstorming going on how the interface should look and feel when all is said and done.

Let me know what you think.

Well if things are going to look different at different zoom levels then we are going to need to be able to select different layers. No sense in viewing your orbital layer if dragging a box gets you everyone on that part of the planet. So 'hold '1' and drag a box for all your naval units", 'hold '2' and drag a box for all your ground units", 'hold '3' and drag a box for all your air units", and 'hold '4' and drag a box for all your orbital units". There were times in supreme commander where i really wish i could drag boxes and only get my aircraft.

Also I think a combination of SupCom style symbols and a bit of light fading will work great.

Something to bring up, if orbital units use some form of orbital mechanics(simple or complex), more information needs is needed than for air and ground, as things are not as simple.

Lets take an example to make this less vague. Spy sat, lowish orbit, limited view area due to curvature and all that. Seeing the coverage right this second is easy to show, but not informative about future coverage. You could highlight the viewable region for the entire orbit, but that gets a little more interesting if the planet rotates below you (makes the orbit look like it's drifting across the planet), and it wont provide indication of arrival time.

You could try a fading view for the next 3 min. where it highlights the region to be covered where the highlight fades away as you get to where it will be in 3 min.

And all that is not considering if you want to change orbit.

I would prefer the classical layering, at least air and ground units can be distinguished by the presence or lack of a shadow respectively bow wave for ships or the lack of such for submerged units.

Leave orbital units out, don't try to press them into the same view. Didn't realy worked that well in SupCom (that one UEF satellite), you can't comprehend the true position of an orbital unit since it has no visible drop shadow, at least not in the viewport.

But i think this needs some clarification on the actual ROLE of orbital units first.

Do they even have a position or just an orbit?
Do they have direct fire or could they just reach any point of the planet anyway?
Do they play a tactical role or a strategic one, e.g. is critical to have them accesible at any time from everywhere on the planet or would it be sufficient to switch to a different view? (Just think of orbital units as "buttons" in the quickbar as opposed to a seperate layer which would get accesible by zooming out far enough.)

Not meant to be a suggestion, just want to show that there are many more options, depending on the role and possible interactions between the different layers!
So far only aircraft / naval / ground has known roles and possible interactions, it's still open how orbital or interplanetary gameplay will work so i consider it impossible to find a optimal solution right now. We don't even know yet, what the solution would have to achieve.

I think having a option like this would be important, like an isolate layer shortcut.
We would still have to have the capacity to select between layers, say if you wanted to move a force of aircraft and land units; but being able to islolate by layers would really add to the simplicity of managing unit types.

circle, triangle, rectangle, pentagon

Some good ideas already floating around here, which is the whole point really. I was thinking one moment and realized that it could be quite a nightmare with so many units showing at once, how can that still be done without it being a cluttered unusable mess?

So keep brainstorming people. Some good ideas coming in here.

You may have a point there.

Shadows on orbitals may not work so well which leaves some ambiguity as to where exactly things are. That however doesn't mean I want to throw the layer out entirely. Surely there must be some way to resolve this snarl.

Another idea I like. I hadn't considered the hassle of this, but yes it would be convenient to somehow isolate layers and select them individually as needed.

One way is to use standard layering, but to disable specific layers if you want to focus on them. For example, if you want to only work with air units, choose the air unit layer and the other layers are faded out/grayed/etc to make them less prominent while locket out of your control. However, they should be visible so that the player can still see what they need to interact with (like telling your air units to attack a ground army). Also, multiple layers could be activated at once, so if you wanted to work with ground and navy, you would enable just those two layers and work on them without fear of accidentally grabbing an air/orbital unit.

I'm against hiding layers. This will almost certainly lead to people forgetting they have, and missing vital information.

Yeah that's a really good point. If we zoom out enough we really should be able to see everything, even orbital.

I agree, as much as possible I am for keeping the layers visible because having them disappear, is going to be confusing to me.

Exterminans does raise a good point with orbital, shadows don't make a lot of sense there for a visual reference. Nor does it really make a lot of sense to me to be selecting planes and tanks when you're zoomed this far out and likely trying to select a satellite.

Maybe this layer should be treated a little differently? What if when you are zoomed out this far you can only select orbital units. Other units below are still visible, but muted into the background in some way (grey scaled, shrunk, symbolized, or whatever).

Would something like that work for you?

There are plenty of ways around that. Making the hotkeys that focus specific layers to be modifiers instead of toggles is a simple way. Giving visual feedback, like a dimmer display, or a bright icon is another. After all, you won't be hiding layers for a long period, just long enough to do some selects and administer some commands.

As to whether the feature is needed or not, that really depends on how crowded it gets. This would probably become more apparent later on.

Yeah the one really good argument for being able to see everything all at once (fading or not) is that the layers interact.

So if you have that UEF death satellite that shoots at ground units, you need to see the ground layer while ordering around your death satellite, and you need to see the orbital layer to avoid getting shot at by other orbital units.

And there was also that torpedo bomber that you'd need to see the air and underwater layer at the same time to use.

a flip side of this we need to keep in mind is the concept of ground to orbital weapons. How do you target satellites from the ground in an easy and natural way?

this is a really good point. If a player is looking at all layers at once this could get quite cluttered. But at the same time I share others concerns that hiding layers as a perminant feature would result in players missing something vital.

The way I thought of it was that you have layer keys to bring that layer to the fore visually, either by bolding the tactical icons in that layer while slightly fading the others. Either that or it could fade other layers out entirely but I dont much like that solution. There should also be an "all layer key" to deselect whatever layer you had bolded so you could get a proper overview of all layers without visual bias.

With this in mind I see it following a logic something like this:

See target you want dead-by-orbital -> hit orbital layer key (or zoom out to orbital) -> select orbital unit+hit action desired -> hit ground layer key (or zoom to ground view) -> select target -> "hit all layer key" to resume watching the whole battlefield.

Note: I am definitely not suggesting preset zoom levels to replace tactical zoom or something stupid like that. Tactical zoom is my friend. Im suggesting that the tactical icons 'boldness' and what is selectable on screen should be filtered by layer keys for ease of use.

If anything this should be contextual. If you have an anti orbital unit selected then the orbital units it can target should be highlighted.

I don't think we'll need keys to highlight various layers, just make the units distinctive, the brain is perfectly capable of knowing what is what.

That is a really good point I hadn't thought of that. Scrap that idea then, this sounds like a more elegant solution.

That sounds reasonable. Add something with colours such as the grey scaling idea in the OP and it shouldn't be a major problem.

Also contextual highlighting is a good idea. Maybe a bright border around the relevant symbols or non-relevant symbols faded to grey.

You can't mess with colours because thats your faction indicator.

That is another interesting point actually.

Given that huge (40v40) games may be possible, does each player need a faction colour?

Or would it be better to have for example, green = your units, blue = allied units, red = enemy units?

In that case, using colour to show layer (dark red is a lower layer than bright red) would be perfectly ok.

I wouldn't see a need for 80 different team shades on my radar.