Cuddlelump

Join Date 03/2006

Intuitive UI controls

...and just how important they can be...

So, wanting Elemental to come out has left me itching for some TBS gaming. So I pulled Galciv2 TA back out and started playing again. First let me say, that I love Galciv2 alot, its a great game without a doubt. However, with that said, I found a few pieces about the UI rather cumbersome, and couldnt help but think, if only this had been done differently it wouldnt be so bothersome to do. A few of the main things are as follows:

Managing towns, at times can be rather annoying. In this one particular game I had just researched a new planetary improvement, but couldnt afford to upgrade to them quite yet. Unfortunately I couldnt find a way to stop the planetary governors from auto-upgrading aside from tediously going through each planet and disabling the function until I was ready.

Then I had the issue of trying to get my units to converge on a point. The basics were simple enough, but I was trying to coordinate constructors, defensive and offensive ships, all of which were already built or being constructed, and in the end I found it rather frustrating.

So I finally have all my units where I want them, I have my planets making more ships, and I get a few more tech. So now I redesign one of my old ships, and I finally have the funds to make good on it. So I go into the ship yard and see that I have 16 of this particular ship still inservice. But for the life of me I cant find a single way to just say "Upgrade them all." So I'm stuck finding each one and then manually upgrading them all.

Whether what i wanted to do was possible or not, isnt the issue. It was a matter of how easily I could do it, without spending half an hour trying to set it up. I think being able to select multiple units, as well as multiple cities and then giving those selected units the same order will be something important for Elemental to have. As well as a screen that shows not only my cities (with the ability to give them basic instructions), but also that shows my units (again with the ability to give them basic instructions). Maybe Stardock is well aware of these minor frustrations and is already on the path to make them a non-issue, if so great, if not well hopefully that will change.

Note: On a side thought, alot of the features I was thinking about are similar to those found in RTS games. I dont particularly care for the waterdown nature of RTS games in my TBS (cant have too much going on in real time), but I think adapting some of their UI functions would probably be overall beneficial.

Edit: I wanted to add, that while doing this my cousin asked me the following question "What boring game are you playing?' I responded asking what he meant by boring since he wasnt playing. "You've been clicking through the same screen for 20 minutes selecting the same option."

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I know this isn't the point of this thread but bear with me:

You can upgrade all ships of a certain class by bringing up the fleet menu, clicking upgrade selecting the upgrade and one of the options on the side then allows you to apply this to all ships (in the galaxy) of that class, but unfortunatly it does not allow you to do that to all ships in that fleet.

As for auto upgrading on planetary imporvements, i can't remember exactly how to do it but there is a way, I think in one of the options menus.

But not withstanding GC2:TA interface is queit bad, i personally don't like it too much. But Stardock has been mentioned how great all there skin application are and how these will help them design and redesign the UI according to player feed backduring the Beta. Which means that they obvious consider the UI of GC2:TA abit of a let down.

Also I think that Ironclads Soase has a realy great thing going with its interface(and the "bullet-point-list" thing) and I would really like to see such an easy and intuntivie interface incoperated into Elemental.

One other point on interfaces, I didn't like Civ 4 interface, and the main reason was I felt it took up far too much of the screen and on top of that it took me 5 games before I could confotably navigate the variaus screens.

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Thanks Berryman, I did actually end up figuring it all out on my own. But in the end the point of the thread wasn't about whether it was possible, but how easy and intuitive the process was. I'm hoping the beta will play a big role in getting the UI into a nice smooth form, and stardock has shown that they listen to their customers when valid points and concerns are made.

I'm hoping that Elemental has a feature generally found in RTS games which lets you select multiple objects (units, towns, etc) and give them the same instructions. I'll give you a small example, using GalCiv2 for a second.

Lets say I have a ton of planets producing multiple types of ships. And I want each type of ship to go to a specific point on the map aka to a rally point. What I want to be able to do, is select the planets that are each making, say, troop transports and then tell the selected planets to send their newly built ships to TT Rally Point. Similar to the way that you'd use the ctrl key to go and select various files to copy, delete or whatever. While I can do it, it takes a bit of work, and maybe I haven't figured out the magic hidden way to do this, but again, that simply illustrates the point.

I dont mind having to go through a couple of screens to get the outcome I'd like, I really dont have an issue with complexity, only tedious processes. Every command, should be able to be delivered to a single unit, all units, or a selection of units. It needs to be something you can do without too much thought, since your mind should be on what to do, not how to work the interface to do it.

Anywho I'm starting to ramble.

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Gal Civ 2 had that wierd fleet mechanic that I had a hard time figuring out to a point where I really appriciated it. Like, i always didn't have fleet sizes big enough to accomidate more than 1 of my uber ships that I created towards late game (because I usually focused on getting bigger guns rather than better fleet management)

But I'd imagine this game, war of magic, will have master of magic style grouping, except not arbitrarily limited to 9. So I don't think it will be a problem. I figure modern concepts would enter the master of magic system like rally points as well (civ 4 had them, so I can't imagine why this game wouldn't)

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Age of Wonders 2 improved on the MoM battle formula a bit. Instead of squares it used hexes and it managed to render terrain in 3 dimentions fairly well. An archer standing atop a castle wall would be protected from most missiles fired at him simply because the wall blocked line of sight. You could fit far more units into a city siege than you could in MoM, but the total was ultimately limited to stacks.

Elemental seems to be heading in an isometric direction in regards to combat, but without the stack limitations.

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GalCiv2's GUI is very good, but I think it fell down here in some areas. To manage a planet, I had to use 3 windows (Colonies, the Planet Screen, and the Detail Screen for a couple odd things). To manage a fleet I had to use the Rally Point window, the Fleet Window, and sometimes the Governor window (to manage other aspects of Rally Points).

Note that I'm not saying I could have designed it any better. I'm also a bit of a micromanager, so the thought of a massive screen full of data kind of appeals to me.

What does everyone else think? Do most people prefer lots of data in one place to support a workflow or set of tasks, or would they prefer to click through to the data they need for a narrow, particular task?

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FWIW, I'm okay with isometric. GalCiv2 is fundamentally isometric. I know you can roll the camera and so forth, but I would bet most people find the angle they like and just zoom in/out from there.

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Quoting Ynglaur,

reply 5

I think one of the keys to good UI design is not having minimal (or "just enough") information on the screen/in a window, but having all relevant information for a given process/workflow. Thus, the "town" viewer should have everything needed for managing a town at your fingertips. The "army" viewer should have everything for armies.

GalCiv2's GUI is very good, but I think it fell down here in some areas. To manage a planet, I had to use 3 windows (Colonies, the Planet Screen, and the Detail Screen for a couple odd things). To manage a fleet I had to use the Rally Point window, the Fleet Window, and sometimes the Governor window (to manage other aspects of Rally Points).

Note that I'm not saying I could have designed it any better. I'm also a bit of a micromanager, so the thought of a massive screen full of data kind of appeals to me.

What does everyone else think? Do most people prefer lots of data in one place to support a workflow or set of tasks, or would they prefer to click through to the data they need for a narrow, particular task?

I'm just sort of thinking out loud, but what about a UI that allows me to "dock together" various managers and give them a my own 'workflow' title? Like maybe I have a "War Manager" where I'd stick management screens for production, rally points and armies. And maybe my "Research Manager" has research management and my production capacity slider (so I can change my research spending right there, where I'm also looking at what I want to research). Allow me to assign hot keys to my custom 'manager views' and presto, I can define views that let me accomplish tasks the way that works for me

Just a thought and I imagine it'd be monstrously more complex to code, but I think I've always wanted something like that in my "grand strategy" games.

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I like the idea a lot. I wouldn't necessarily be that much more difficult to implement. See Shadowbane for an excellent example of good, customizable UI design that still comes with a good default setup out-of-the-box.

Stardock - What do you think? Will we be getting details on the UI prior to beta? I know SoaSE went through several UI iterations. Is the intent to follow a similar development process for Elemental?

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I do hope it will NOT be able to change the angle of the view. With a good design it is not necessary. If one can rotate the screen, it makes only problems with orientation. And if you allow this, you must handle the extensive 3D graphic problems too and it does not have a any influence on a gameplay. Heroes V has this feature and I think it is useless there. It is better (and easier) to have a nice graphics from one side rather than from all sides.

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Quoting mrakomo,

reply 9

In essence: It adds very, very little for the amount of work that (may) be necessary. There's no reason to have rotatable viewing angles, we don't need it, we don't want it.

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Quoting Luckmann,

reply 10

Quoting mrakomo, reply 9I do hope it will NOT be able to change the angle of the view. With a good design it is not necessary. If one can rotate the screen, it makes only problems with orientation. And if you allow this, you must handle the extensive 3D graphic problems too and it does not have a any influence on a gameplay. Heroes V has this feature and I think it is useless there. It is better (and easier) to have a nice graphics from one side rather than from all sides.In essence: It adds very, very little for the amount of work that (may) be necessary. There's no reason to have rotatable viewing angles, we don't need it, we don't want it.

If the graphics are already being done in a 3D engine, and I've seen nothing to indicate that they aren't, then camera rotation is basically "for free". I'd rather see an option to lock the camera view for those that don't want to rotate their view around. Especially since they're claiming smoothly zooming from far out to very close in and with the seemingly huge amount of customization that will be available. I like to zoom in and get a good look at my heroes, units and (in this game) buildings.

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However it is something different. If you use a 3D engine and lock the camera angle, you must draw the objects only from one single side. The other side remains hidden forever and so you don't need to bother with it. It also means much less triangles to paint.

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Quoting mrakomo,

reply 9

Personally I like being able to rotate the camera. Locked cameras make me feel a little claustrophobic - and in games with significant variations in terrain, or large buildings or other objects, things can be obscured by other objects. Age of Empires (or one of its sequals) came up with the idea of drawing an outline of units that are blocked from view, but I prefer being able to (also) rotate the camera.

I also like it for purely aesthetical reasons - like DrGuppie I like to zoom in and swivel the camera around my cities, units, and the like.

Quoting mrakomo,

reply 9

Heroes V has this feature and I think it is useless there. It is better (and easier) to have a nice graphics from one side rather than from all sides.

Are you crazy? If you couldn't rotate the camera in Heroes V you'd miss soooo many things. That said, I still would have been happy if HoMM V used 2D graphics (or locked 3D graphics) so long as it didn't obscure things. But in a game where I get to build my own cities, customize my units, etc, I want to be able to look at my creations from any angle I want!

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Yes, I want to be able to rotate/swivel/zoom my camura. In fact, I want to be able to watch it in a 'cinematic view' for replays and record them without much or any hug to be my screen saver.

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Quoting mrakomo,

reply 12

No, I disagree. Unlocking the camera is simple. I modeled a 3D landscape in my thesis and moving camera was feature you really needed for such project. In OpenGL it was pretty easy and it is similar in DirectX.

However it is something different. If you use a 3D engine and lock the camera angle, you must draw the objects only from one single side. The other side remains hidden forever and so you don't need to bother with it. It also means much less triangles to paint.

From my perspective, I just can't come up with a compelling reason why they'd force the camera to a particular angle. Now, I could see giving users an option to lock a particular preferred view.

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As far as I know, culling non-visibile triangles is somehting that all the professional 3D game engines do (and have to do well). Throw in all the user-generated custom content, which I can only imagine will be as customizable as the GalCiv2 ships (rotation, scaling, etc.), and I'm pretty sure they can't ignore one half of the art either.

From my perspective, I just can't come up with a compelling reason why they'd force the camera to a particular angle. Now, I could see giving users an option to lock a particular preferred view.

Its true. That is what they do! If you don't believe it, look at Titan quest. it doesn't render the backside of anything, but they lock the camura so you can't tell. Its possible relitively easily to force camura movement, cliffs and things like that. The engine is not designed to let you move the camura, so if you force it, it becomes obvious to how they keep the frame rate up. (not rendering the backside of everything) I believe that there are even places where you can hug walls, and get a sight of a bit of un-rendered backside, but don't quote me on that.

Something like a strategy game should always let you change the camura, ever since it has become allowed. Its like asking to play chess with a fixed camura, its just bad form. Even if people still play from the same angle 90% of the time, the remaining 10% is very important.

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Of course they do that. There is a possibility to show the content of the texture from the single side or from both sides. If single-side, it is invisible, if you are on the bad side. The think is the calculation is not for free. GPU or CPU must calculate the angles of all (invisible inclusive triangles). I know, GPUs and CPUs are fast, however on large maps low-end machines and laptops may have problems with it.

It would be bad if you would have to rotate the map to reveal objects. I don't like 3D in the strategic games. The result of being "cool 3D" may be seen in UFO, Enemy unknown and UFO 3 and later games. Excellent looking original game graphics was replaced by crappy looking "cool 3D". The same happened to city building titles like Caesar, Pharaoh and later title Children of the Nile.

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