Better Marine Managment
FarMcKon
Join Date: 2003-10-06 Member: 21476Members
Join Date: 2003-10-06 Member: 21476Members
My idea on better marine management.
As part of the game, during download/setup each player can pick a small image/picture as their own icon (pretty standard). During gameplay, there is a row of icons below the commanders map each one being those user picked icons. I'll call these GIcons for the rest of this.
GIcons make it easy to ID individual marines in game, and on forums, stat trackers, etc. It's all the same username and icon. Folks from clans can pick a clan logo (or some variant) for their GIcons. GICons are greyed out if a marine is dead (or 'not online'*). They also have a few little status bars on them. One mini-status bar is health (of course), one is alien kill count that game, one is 'follows orders' and tracks how often the marine goes to waypoints, defends areas, etc.
So, that end of things will give commanders an intuitive feature-rich way to track who their grunts are ( in a single game and beyond) and how they are doing. Now, to manage them!
A marine can 'requests' a piece of equipment (a-la counterstrike menus or something?) which the team currently has tech for. When they make a request an icon of the item they want with a question mark appears on their GIcon. The commander can drag and drop the item from a tech-bar (on the comm screen) onto the GIcon to give it to the marine. Or use hotkeys to do that same thing. On the GIcon gets a little image of what the marine has equipped.
The commander can also shift-drag (or shift-shortcut) an item onto a GIcon and set is a part of that marine's gear. When something is part of the marines gear, the little image of it on the GIcon has an * or something to show that. Every time the marine spawns, he appears with his gear. The gear generated as part of a spawn costs less resources (2/3 for example) than the same thing dropped out of the sky. The commander can always drag the item off to cancel the gear setting. **
As part of this system the commander also sets a 'minimum resources' (hopefully a slider right on the resources counter) and when resources are below that level, the marines don't get their gear automatically when they spawn. Also, things like armor upgrades won't be automatic, the commander has to set the new armor level as part of each individuals marines gear.***
The commander can also drag and drop GIcons on the map to set a waypoint for a marine (or a group of them), and can set group keys list most RTS's. Commanders can also queue up health or ammo by stacking a couple on a marine's GIcon (with some kind of drop delay and a low max number of total queued items to avoid abuse).Also the res for those are taken from resources when it's queued, not when it drops.
Just a first round of the idea, what do folks think?
* I think it would be great of some alien spray/power/whatever 'interfered' with marine technology and takes marines offline. Offline marines disappear from the commanders, making marine management harder when they walk into an affected area. Maybe it could also disable drops in an affected area, etc.
**I think this can also make the tech tree more robust, since it doesn't take constant work to equip marines. It seems one of the barriers to having more than 3 types of weapons was comm management of that, and this fixes some of that. Upgrades can be set, so some marines have larger clips, some better armor, etc.
*** If all bob does is mess around, give him armor 1 for 0res. If bob is amazingly good, give him armor 4 as part of his gear. You get the idea.
As part of the game, during download/setup each player can pick a small image/picture as their own icon (pretty standard). During gameplay, there is a row of icons below the commanders map each one being those user picked icons. I'll call these GIcons for the rest of this.
GIcons make it easy to ID individual marines in game, and on forums, stat trackers, etc. It's all the same username and icon. Folks from clans can pick a clan logo (or some variant) for their GIcons. GICons are greyed out if a marine is dead (or 'not online'*). They also have a few little status bars on them. One mini-status bar is health (of course), one is alien kill count that game, one is 'follows orders' and tracks how often the marine goes to waypoints, defends areas, etc.
So, that end of things will give commanders an intuitive feature-rich way to track who their grunts are ( in a single game and beyond) and how they are doing. Now, to manage them!
A marine can 'requests' a piece of equipment (a-la counterstrike menus or something?) which the team currently has tech for. When they make a request an icon of the item they want with a question mark appears on their GIcon. The commander can drag and drop the item from a tech-bar (on the comm screen) onto the GIcon to give it to the marine. Or use hotkeys to do that same thing. On the GIcon gets a little image of what the marine has equipped.
The commander can also shift-drag (or shift-shortcut) an item onto a GIcon and set is a part of that marine's gear. When something is part of the marines gear, the little image of it on the GIcon has an * or something to show that. Every time the marine spawns, he appears with his gear. The gear generated as part of a spawn costs less resources (2/3 for example) than the same thing dropped out of the sky. The commander can always drag the item off to cancel the gear setting. **
As part of this system the commander also sets a 'minimum resources' (hopefully a slider right on the resources counter) and when resources are below that level, the marines don't get their gear automatically when they spawn. Also, things like armor upgrades won't be automatic, the commander has to set the new armor level as part of each individuals marines gear.***
The commander can also drag and drop GIcons on the map to set a waypoint for a marine (or a group of them), and can set group keys list most RTS's. Commanders can also queue up health or ammo by stacking a couple on a marine's GIcon (with some kind of drop delay and a low max number of total queued items to avoid abuse).Also the res for those are taken from resources when it's queued, not when it drops.
Just a first round of the idea, what do folks think?
* I think it would be great of some alien spray/power/whatever 'interfered' with marine technology and takes marines offline. Offline marines disappear from the commanders, making marine management harder when they walk into an affected area. Maybe it could also disable drops in an affected area, etc.
**I think this can also make the tech tree more robust, since it doesn't take constant work to equip marines. It seems one of the barriers to having more than 3 types of weapons was comm management of that, and this fixes some of that. Upgrades can be set, so some marines have larger clips, some better armor, etc.
*** If all bob does is mess around, give him armor 1 for 0res. If bob is amazingly good, give him armor 4 as part of his gear. You get the idea.
Comments
I love the idea of tiny icons though. You could even put the added stuff like donaters medals and such in there. Deviantart.com has the perfect size, not too big not too small. 50X50 pixels I believe.
Resupply in NS - Eh, no, get better at commanding.
Drag & Drop - No thanks, NS isn't a mac.
Giving certain players weapons - Well how would new players get a feel for better equipment? Its fine the way it is, just pay more attention to the names at your spawn and call em out.
A lot of GUI's allow a few modes for visual display. Z.b. web browser have 'icon', 'icon with text' 'small icon'. I think the same could be done for the GIcons. The user can select "Large, small, no GIcon" and "Large, small, no Username". Large icon includes indicators (health, whatever), maybe 128x128 small is just a 32x32 image, no indicators.
That would be pretty simple to implement, and allow folks to be flexible. I think it also ties into the '<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=102957" target="_blank">finding friends in game</a>' thread.
Maybe they could place them off to the side, then when someone requests ammo or health or whatever, it blinks, but it would be off to one side of the screen out of the way of the map completely. The commander clicks on the persons icon and it takes them to where they are located on the map! It does already blink in the mini map though so I dunno... Maybe it could be both blinking in the mini map, and they could have user icons on the side. The commanders can choose how to click someone?
Would be nice I guess for some things.