Simplifying commanding
Andos
Join Date: 2003-10-17 Member: 21742Members
Join Date: 2003-10-17 Member: 21742Members
<div class="IPBDescription">better for new and experienced</div>One of the difficult tasks when playing a new RTS game (for example Starcraft for the first time) is to figure out how the different "races" work. Each building you build gives you access to new upgrades while some upgrades are dependent on other upgrades before they show up. It can be a difficult task for newbies to click through all your building to find out which of them has which upgrades and which upgrades are dependent of other buildings upgrades.
To make NS2 easier and more straight forward, why not make all possible upgrades and buildings visible to the commander at one time in the GUI and graying out the ones not yet allowed to build or upgrade with a tooltip telling them (and highlighting) the buildings they have to place before they can proceed.
That way you don't have to move to the armory lab every time you wish to upgrade something (unless you want to electrify it)
Also all currently progressing upgrades should be viewed in the GUI and if the upgrade gave access to new upgrades, they should flash in the GUI and a voice telling "new upgrade options" or something similar.
That way you will never get lost and you have everything you need at your fingertips.
To make NS2 easier and more straight forward, why not make all possible upgrades and buildings visible to the commander at one time in the GUI and graying out the ones not yet allowed to build or upgrade with a tooltip telling them (and highlighting) the buildings they have to place before they can proceed.
That way you don't have to move to the armory lab every time you wish to upgrade something (unless you want to electrify it)
Also all currently progressing upgrades should be viewed in the GUI and if the upgrade gave access to new upgrades, they should flash in the GUI and a voice telling "new upgrade options" or something similar.
That way you will never get lost and you have everything you need at your fingertips.
Comments
or atleast have a shortcut to "select next upgrade" like in warcraft/ dawn of war
I have not heard of this "select next upgrade" shortcut. Could you please explain how it works?
E.g, if w1 completes the comm would have two selectable icons on his UI for w2 and a1.
This could be implimented as a general UI component for in-game access to common functions. Some examples
1) when a player has less than a certain threshold of health or ammo, approproate clickable items would appear to allow the commander to ressuply.
2) If 'your base is under attack' alerts, there would be a clickable icon for emergency beacon.
The general idea would be to make non-immediate tasks easily accessible, allowing the commander to remain more focused on the players.
Yes that was the intention <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile-fix.gif" />
If you use all your time fiddling around your base to find out what is upgradeable, you don't spend any time (if you are new at least) on strategy or supporting your marines.
Having the research options on the right hand side of the screen would be amazingly better. Pro comms already assign hotkeys to buildings so that they don't have to come back to base to research, but this would streamlines things even more.
This is usually only relevant for Observatories, but then it is <i>very</i> relevant. Using a distress beacon from your remote obs instead of the one in base gives you 3 times as much chance to kill that alien by surprise. By contrast, teching Motion from your remote obs in an undefended outpost may be a very bad idea, since it is more likely to die than the one in base.
Armories care too, sometimes, if you have more than one basic armory and only want to upgrade the one in base to an Advanced Armory.
Technologies researched by buildings should be accessible at those buildings, not in a detached general menu.
The actual setup for most recent RTS games is to have buttons on the right or left hand of the screen appear to notify when something has completed. By clicking on it (or right-clicking to clear it) you can goto and select whatever finished. These would periodically clear after they've been up for a set period of time so your GUI doesn't get cluttered.
So, if your Arms Lab finished Weapons 1, an icon would appear to say so, and clicking it would center your view on that Arms Lab, select it, and now the comm could purchase the next upgrade.
Most good comms simply hotkey their stuff anyways to do this and just listen for notifications, so unless there's lots of buildings in NS2 to try and keep up with, I doubt there will be major problems.
Also, I strongly would object to icons appearing for your units being under attack. Use the spacebar or look on the minimap for red dots.
Setting up a variety of these interfaces and allowing the user to choose which interfaces are active would help both the new players that are just trying to comm for the first time, and calm the vets who have every bind known to man somewhere on their keyboard.
One way of doing this could be with meds and ammo. I was thinking something like an auto-resupply toggle for the commander. It would by default be on; med and ammo calls would not show for the commander, and they would be given automatically after, say, 4 seconds. The timing would be a balance issue, but the point of the delay is so that, as a player starts learning how it all works, he can turn off this option and do meds and ammo himself. A good comm has millisecond reaction times to these calls, often even giving them before the marine calls for it.
Though the option could be abused in some cases (players calling for meds right before they enter a battle), these could be prevented. Things like, you need less than full HP for a med call to go through; less than 60% full reserve ammo for ammopacks; and a 5 second cooldown time for each.
Thoughts?
Something similar to this...may be cool...or not.
<a href="http://img374.imageshack.us/my.php?image=userinterfacewr3.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img374.imageshack.us/img374/8931/userinterfacewr3.th.jpg" border="0" alt="IPB Image" /></a>
Hope i helped, now this is just on our idea perspective, or at least mine. It all depends how the balance of the final game is.
Um, I think there's a much better way to do this.
The actual setup for most recent RTS games is to have buttons on the right or left hand of the screen appear to notify when something has completed. By clicking on it (or right-clicking to clear it) you can goto and select whatever finished. These would periodically clear after they've been up for a set period of time so your GUI doesn't get cluttered.
So, if your Arms Lab finished Weapons 1, an icon would appear to say so, and clicking it would center your view on that Arms Lab, select it, and now the comm could purchase the next upgrade.
Most good comms simply hotkey their stuff anyways to do this and just listen for notifications, so unless there's lots of buildings in NS2 to try and keep up with, I doubt there will be major problems.
Also, I strongly would object to icons appearing for your units being under attack. Use the spacebar or look on the minimap for red dots.
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Hey, I like that idea a lot. Much better than detaching upgrades from buildings. This would just me a minor improvement that would help the game run more smoothly. You get a <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/skulk.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="::skulk::" border="0" alt="skulk.gif" />
NS already requires a lot of decisions to be made, a lot of buildings to be dropped, and lots of individual medpacking to be done. Why wouldn't you want things that streamline this process?
You could streamline the process the marine squads/groups, upgrades, and building status a lot by doing simple commander interface changes (though this would complicate the commander programming :x).
I recently played a game where a marine was the first one to notice he had no upgrades (arms lab down). Then a second or two later the com said "O crap, they're in base." WTH...lol. Base was GONE! lol. AA, proto, obs, everything dead. lol. We were all in heavies..and the com jumped out. Heavies were out of ammo and died trying to make it back. Worst game I've played in probably 6 months. Pure pwnage sieging 2nd hive down, to #$#$ noob com let entire f'ing base die then hops out w/out deploying the uber remote beacon system.
^^^^ The above story should only really happen with the Most Noob coms in NS2 b/c of the modifications made to the interface. Please make it easier to know WTH is going on in base...and when upgrades are done, and when things are dying. =D.
I think sleaker, faster, easier == better. I think having an upgrade row would be faster/easier. You want things to be as streamlined as possible, because that's more efficient.
NS already requires a lot of decisions to be made, a lot of buildings to be dropped, and lots of individual medpacking to be done. Why wouldn't you want things that streamline this process?
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Faster and Easier does not make better. In fact, in some ways it can make life worse.
To one extreme, there's plenty of programs that hold your hand and prevent you from expanding and doing things your way. Sure they're "easy to use" but they prevent the full potential of the user and the program.
On the other hand, full customization and control can be hazardous too. It's like programming in assembly when you've got C++ and Java. Sure you've got all the power you could ever want, but it's a major pain and only with serious training and a strong background can you do anything non-trivial.
The happy balance is what we're looking for. Something that's simple enough, but with enough power to the commander to do things as they please.
I personally feel the current GUI is pretty good. Perhaps a few minor tweaks (more hotkeyable groups, perhaps assigning marines to more than 1 group) that have been added to more recent RTS systems could help, but don't make it "easy".
As for auto stuff, I'm personally against this. It's a skill that people need. If you want to learn to comm, do it in a setting conducive to learning and not getting pwned. For example, against bots. The only reason to auto anything would be there's too much to take care of. This would only arise is 1) the games got alot larger (20+ per team) and thus the micro required would be immense, or 2) the tech is so massive it requires you to queue things up to stay on top of stuff. Both, in my opinion, are bad things to turn NS into. See my post in the 50 player server for why.
Overall, I say the current system is pretty good, and some minor additions would be welcome.
click and hold to make the camera follow the marine that requested said item.
letting go of click drops the request medpack or ammo pack.
right clicking dragging the mouse away from the icon clears the request.
Also when a marine is near a res point and is requesting orders, your click should drop a res tower, unless you right click to cancel
Though, I still think having a row of icons for upgrades would eliminate the step of selecting the building, and thereby be faster, on top of the fact of being visible at all times (blinks red if building is getting attacked, red if building is destroyed, grey if it hasn't been built, etc. IE, the entire row of upgrades for said building blinks if under attack).
If you wanted you could even have a 'double-click to deselect as primary' option, which would then default the next most recently build version of the structure to primary status.
This way you
1) have easy access to every tech
2) learn which upgrade is researched from each building
3) have the red flashing icons present
Hotkeying is what every semi-decent comm should do anyway, it just removes the need to do that from newbies.
I'd say its a bit confusing to have 10 icons on your screen, half flashing red, some disappearing and reappearing here and there. Simple icons for each building should do the trick better unless you can make the system really flawless. If you have taken a look at the Master of Orion 3 ingame tutorial (the text messages) you should know how confusing it is to have so many options on the screen right from the start.
Automated meds and ammo are probably a too big change. It would be difficult to learn the medding if you haven't picked the habit all the way from the start.