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beyond-all-reason / Beyond-All-Reason

Main game repository for Beyond All Reason.
https://www.beyondallreason.info/
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Player feedback suggestion: Make mexes overlay signal metal worth #1670

Open badosu opened 1 year ago

badosu commented 1 year ago

Perhaps the number of concentric circles and their color could vary according to metal income of a spot.

2.5 = 3 circles, > 3.5 = 4 circles, and so on

I agree looking at numbers on metalmap is not too good of a way to discover mexes amounts. Unsure of a proposal I'd agree with, but seems something worth proposing to look at.

SethDGamre commented 2 months ago

still relevant.

SethDGamre commented 3 weeks ago

@icexuick I think this needs a judgement call.

icexuick commented 5 days ago

The 1-2-3 lines is interesting... However I think that mex-size should be determining their output mostly.

There are maps with super-mexes (Rosetta f.e.) with 10. I don't think you want to go beyond 3 rings to visually not over-clutter the screen.

On the other hand, looking at numbers isn't ideal as well (though accurate) Having 1-2-3 lines/circles could be done, though the design would need to be a bit more minimalized. I think 4 lines will start to over-clutter. And then we'd probably also need to decide for super-mexes - how to visualize those?

I think current size of the mex-number is rather small. We could also increase that instead of using the (rather inaccurate) 1-2-3 rings.

Doing both will likely only increase clutter more.

Maybe we could do something with the spin-speed. More metal = more speed...?

WatchTheFort commented 5 days ago

We should take inspiration from Total Annihilation - metal spot differentiation was done via blatant, obvious visual differences in the amount of metal showing on the spot.

sprunk commented 5 days ago

How does that handle strategic zoom, spots in deep water, or (in the future with Modding™ Support™) custom maps where the mapper just doesn't follow the rule?

badosu commented 5 days ago

Of course the ideal would be to show, not tell.

But it's evident that maps and mapping culture in general are not at a point we have and can expect to have good design for that.

A simple inspection on traversibility issues on maps that require players to use clunky engine provided traversibility maps is a blatant example of this lack of polish (most if not all that aren't mostly flat?). Heck, we have maps that were supposed to be mostly symmetric with asymmetric metal amounts in tournaments for crying out loud. Point being it's a great idea to rely on sensible map design instead of more panes on the cockpit, unfortunately that's not short term realistic.

Instead we solve, or at least aim to mitigate, via ui.

icexuick commented 5 days ago

Valid point about TA using the same metal-patch (with attached value) across each map. However with the current 200+ map-pool - all with custom/styled/unique designs integrated that is not a viable option.

There is an option to use custom places metal spots, now possible with diffuse + normal and we could even auto-remove grass and place them through LUA. However, still not a backwards compatible solution.

So yes, we need to aim to mitigate via UI.

I think @Ruwetuin made the current mex UI rings. Floris, how feasible is it to have dynamics regarding metal output value per mex for: