I was watching some zaphodx casts on youtube, and was struck by how hard it is to identify locations other then by north, south and a very vague east or west, I was thinking maybe adding a longitude and latitude lines that you can toggle on or off as needed, for quick location finding in team games or casting.
Another vote for toggleable coordinates. Areas of intrest to share with teammates would make good addition too but I think have been discussed in an older thread already.
It has come up before, and although Uber hadn't at the time specifically selected Long&lat stuff, bgolus has mentioned they are looking into "methods for quickly giving planet relative orientation information is important to alleviate confusion." Mike
Oh god, yes please this. I was playing a 5v5 earlier and we had the damnest time trying to call out locations of things in relation to other things. Something simple like displaying lat/long in the top right based on your mouse's position on the planet would go a long way. "They've got tanks coming at our base!" "Where?" "By the big rock!" "What? Theres dozens of big rocks!" "To the east of our base!" "Whose base? We have 3..." "The one north of the other base." "Oh, you mean the place with all the wreckages?" "yes... that WAS our base......"
The pinging is useful, I use it a lot in team games in SC2, and would be a great idea, only hard to tell where the pinging is as well, since there is no mini map(AGH) but some way of identifying location is necessary in my opinion. Glad to hear they are looking at something at least, hopefully it works really well.
Another issue I can see when multiple planets arrive is trying to differentiate between the planets. Either the name needs to be displayed somewhere or they need A/B/C labels like the spawn points. Calling out "fighting going on here on the lava planet" is all well and good when there's only 1 lava planet in the system, but otherwise...
maybe you don't need long/lat lines maybe just an equator and prime meridian line per planet would suffice.
I think a marker system could work. Custom set player markers that can be named and all allies can see. Maybe an option to toggle markers to go along with it.
One thing I would like to add to Long/Lat lines is coloring. This is going to sound weird, and I only have one image to back it up. Longitude lines would go from red, to yellow, to green, to blue, to purple, and then to red again, as they wrap around the planet. This way, you can instantly recognize your position on a planet by the color of its coordinates. Both longitude and latitude lines would get brighter towards the equator and darker towards the poles, with an inverse exponential drop off as it moves towards the poles. While a pinging system (a la SupCom multiplayer) would be superior for barking orders and alerts at your teammate, for general orientation I think colored Long/Lat lines would be awesome.
I think that is a brilliant idea, it would definitely be a great way to identify, although it would have to be dulled to not interfere with unit and building colors.