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Newbies! What did bother you in default user interface?

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12 years ago
Question is for newbies only (not for veterans used to various past versions of gui/widgets).
We would like to hear how does default GUI (ingame graphical user interface) work for you?

What did take long time to figure?
What did you have to tweak and change?

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12 years ago
maybe link to this thread on the (new)users homepage?
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Ok I am not a newbies, but I saw many newbies use only ally chat and dont use
points and labels.
I think may should have some little buttons to the chat box, where you can
change between the global chat, the ally chat and spec chat.
For points and lables a adv. user guide would be a solution.
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12 years ago
yea, "drawing on the map/placing labels/removing stuff" is not well known for starters. its usefull but not essential to play the game. maybe make a loading screen with tips like this? so everyone hits this information (and other usefull information) even if they have no clue there is a forum/newb guide/wiki/manual etc.

this group of people might even not read this topic/forum ;) so bring the mountain to the prophet?
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Skasi
12 years ago
I've started creating an Advanced guide ~20h ago, Logikfreak and mojjj. These topics will also be used in loading screens. The Newbie Guide will hopefully be used for an ingame/video tutorial one day.
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12 years ago
Perhaps a widget with a few buttons next to the chatbox that gives you a mouse-driven way to access the ~functions? Basically a set of 3 on-screen (draw, erase, map-point) buttons that work kind of like build-buttons - the button is automatically released when the player finishes drawing a line or placing a point or they hit rclick to cancel. Hold shift to chain them up.
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12 years ago
"Hold ~ for map drawing options"

is all that's needed. The tooltip says the rest.
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12 years ago
I'm not a newbie, but I often find the playerlist somewhat opaque.
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12 years ago
Posting on forums is hard.
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12 years ago
"Posting on forums is hard."

Agree, and most of them will not even look at the forum, maybe do not even know it exist, make a forum Tab in Zero-K Lobby, that will help a little at least.
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12 years ago
When I was new the bubbles pissed me off. I used to connect late due to my crappy computer and I got spammed by like two or three full screens of bubbles popping up while I'm trying to place.
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12 years ago
CarRepairer, the drawing key "~" is keyboard-layout dependant. i use german layout and here the key to draw is "^". you cannot hardcode the variable keys and then put this is as-is in a tutorial for noobs...
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12 years ago
Asks for newbie feedback, gets nothing but veterans. :|
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Scrollwheel zoom is asymmetric. Scrollwheel zoom is asymmetric. Scrollwheel zoom is asymmetric. Scrollwheel zoom is asymmetric. Scrollwheel zoom is asymmetric. Please fix this. Currently you zoom in faster than you zoom out. This is ridiculous. It's also inverted by default. Also ridiculous.


Right click opening the build menu is a bad default. If people want to use it, great, but it interferes with other commands.

Build menu would be perfect with this option: separate tooltips from mouse navigation so that navigation can be turned off while retaining the handy mouseover tooltips. I am unhappy with having to deal with mouse navigation (I cannot navigate the build menu while moving the mouse, I must stop the mouse while I tap the keys), but it is a necessary sacrifice at the moment.



The smoothscroll widget that is on by default is a horrible default (1. bad method of scrolling & 2. violates physical mouse-space continuity by teleporting the cursor) and blocks the more valuable mouse-drag movement on middle-click that is standard in self-respecting RTS games since WC3 as well as the similar genres now with HoN and Dota2. Also, it is backwards. For the sake of knowledge, I will explain the way it's supposed to be: middle-clicking can be visualized as "grabbing" the terrain (if you've played Black&White you've seen this in action and it makes perfect sense), pulling yourself along across the world. Combined with the natural SupCom flavor zooming this enables you to cover as much or as little ground as you need with a given swipe of the mouse. Mousedrag provides my small-adjustment needs (it replaces the edge-scrolling of olden days) and combined with zoom-out or minimap usage it is the perfect system. I suggest there also be a variable available to multiply or diminish the speed to attain something other than a 1:1 ratio, but that would be a bonus implementation.

Along with that: holy shit the mouse toggle mode has GOT to go. Setting MouseDragScrollThreshold to 0 is 100% required for anyone who uses the mousedrag method for camera. Otherwise it enables itself when dragging quickly or in short movements, leaving the user confounded as to why his mouse is behaving the way it is, and with no clue how to fix it. Ditto for backspace toggling this mode. Always happens when I am deleting text and press enter to close the box. This will absolutely destroy anyone who doesn't know what's going on and how to fix it.



Chat bubbles. Turned them off immediately. Ugly, pointless, taking up real-estate, seeing the same messages in two places is confusing.



Things I would have never found on my own:

Setting movestates for nanos. Add this to "things that bothered me" as well, since teammates building things near my nanos, or vice versa, and losing resources to helping them build their stuff was very undesirable and aggravating till I learned how to fix it. Nanos should default to repair ally only.

Shared mexes.

Energy grid, obviously.

Priority buttons. I'd have found these on my own (hadn't yet explored the UI fully when I read about it), but I don't know if it would have been clear exactly what it was for and what the effects were.

LOS view. Let us turn this on by defualt (or tell me how to do it). Echo messages to console to explain what is happening when we push the buttons. I was familiar with the LOS toggle from spring, but the radar toggle mode is enigmatic to anyone who doesn't already know what to expect. Also, the radar jamming coverage is very hard to see.



Things that need adding, besides above:

The very bottom row of factory buttons (the build-queue) needs to be tooltip-enabled so people can identify what's in the queue when they're trying to delete stuff.

For things like the factory & comm buttons on the bottom (I love these, btw), left click should select only since this is the most common and desired action, swap this and make right click the select&go, leave middle mouse as go-only.

Minimap clicking strays from the standard. Why is this? Why do I have to middle-click the minimap to do what left-click has done for decades? It's fancy that the minimap is basically a second viewport with being able to select units and all, but it's not practical and breaks the standard expected behavior of a minimap. Current functionality can be made an option, as well as whether or not you can give right-click orders via the minimap (off by default).

I would like to be able to hear the actual game start (commanders dropped) while alt tabbed.

Fix the noise associated with clicking a starting position on the map. Everyone who wears headphones hates you, soundguy. Replace it with a less violent noise, and throttle the spam from people clicking.

Preview post button.

Confirmation for unlocking tech.

Actual information in the unlock page tooltips, especially commander upgrades. The ones now are close to useless.

Some type of feedback explaining to new players what is happening when they press the commander select button in-game when they don't have any commanders. Right now it just says "requesting baseline comm" which explains nothing if you don't already know, plus it somewhat implies that something should actually be happening afterwards.

Some way to identify friendly/enemy units on the main screen when the blips (these are called unit icons in the options, I believe) are on-screen. Without knowing the individual colors, you can't tell what's a friendly or an enemy without context. Maybe add a thin colored outline to the blips, red for enemy, some other colors for friendly and self (or none at all, since it is assumed you know what color you happen to be, and anything not highlighted as an enemy is also obviously on your team). Do this for healthbars as well. It's a subtle change but it's amazing how much this enhances situational awareness when parsing a battle (speaking from experience as a dota player). All of these things configurable options, of course.

Also, blips should be displayed or hidden all at once, currently they are height-enabled on a unit-by-unit basis and this leads to strange camera-zoom limbo areas where only half of the icons are on screen, forcing you to zoom in or out to escape the awkwardness.
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Skasi
I love you for saying things I've been saying for quite some time now, Shadark! :)

> Build menu would be perfect with this option: separate tooltips from mouse navigation so that navigation can be turned off while retaining the handy mouseover tooltips.

What do you mean by this?

The only thing I'd hate to see would be using left click for the minimap. Accidently left clicking on the minimap would probably happen more often than accidently middle/backspace-clicking (as you described) does now.
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12 years ago
Shadark, you are springlobby user, thats why you have different defaults than zero-k lobby users. (Like "inverted zoom").

Why do you use SpringLobby?
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12 years ago
Probably Linux?
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12 years ago
"Scrollwheel zoom is asymmetric."
I haven't noticed this.

"It's also inverted by default."
Zero-K lobby has working defaults. If you use another lobby some defaults will be stupid.

"Right click opening the build menu is a bad default."
Agreed but Licho always says I cannot gain enough evidence that this is a bad default.

"Build menu would be perfect with this option: separate tooltips from mouse navigation"
There is an option for this, I suggested binding it to 'C' by default and removing mouse by default.

"The smoothscroll widget that is on by default is a horrible default"
Agreed, I use engine default which just turns my cursor into a scroller. Your grabbing idea sounds possible but the widget doesn't exist.

"Along with that: holy shit the mouse toggle mode has GOT to go."
What is this?

"Chat bubbles."
Agreed although Licho says avatar displaying and 'click to go to point' is far too important to disable them...

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Skasi
click to go to point really is important, Licho is right about that! It's not worth getting spammed at by juggler though. This feature needs to be moved from bubbles to default chili chat, then bubbles can be removed and everyone is happy. Avatars can be added too, but that's secondary.
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12 years ago
> Scrollwheel zoom is asymmetric.

I've noticed this but never made a big deal about it. I suppose it could set off some UI-OCD.

> Right click opening the build menu is a bad default. If people want to use it, great, but it interferes with other commands.

Agreed. We have the build box at the bottom now, we don't need this anymore.

> I am unhappy with having to deal with mouse navigation (I cannot navigate the build menu while moving the mouse, I must stop the mouse while I tap the keys), but it is a necessary sacrifice at the moment.

Disagree. I like having both mouse and keyboard navigation in the gesture menu. Currently we're moving towards two keys to invoke the gesture menu, one with mouse and one without... that seems unnecessary. Provide one that supports both and give an option in the options menu to remove mouse nav. Buttons that aren't buttons are counterintuitive. But the options menu is pretty fiercely cluttered. Tough call.

> The smoothscroll widget that is on by default is a horrible default

Agree. It's a nice attempt, but I'd rather see improvements made to the core Spring engine scrolling than using this widget.

> Along with that: holy shit the mouse toggle mode has GOT to go.

AGREE. This absolutely murdered me when I was a newbie many moons ago. Middle-HOLD should be the only way to get into scrollmode... the middle-CLICK "OMGWHATHAPPENEDTOMYMOUSEHOWDOITURNTHISOFF" thing is brutal. But there are a few players who use the middle-toggle-mode and they'll rage.

I disagree about tablet-style panning vs. mouselook-style panning. My browser, my FPS games, my Word documents all move towards the direction you move the mouse when you hold middle-click, not away from it. But many things are changing, Apple and Ubuntu are forging ahead with bringing this convention to the desktop... so who knows?

> Chat bubbles. Turned them off immediately. Ugly, pointless, taking up real-estate, seeing the same messages in two places is confusing.

Yes. Prettify the chatbox more, ditch the chat bubbles.

> Setting movestates for nanos. Add this to "things that bothered me" as well, since teammates building things near my nanos, or vice versa, and losing resources to helping them build their stuff was very undesirable and aggravating till I learned how to fix it. Nanos should default to repair ally only.

> Shared mexes.

This could be improved with a the tooltip breaking down how much it's paying out to you and how much is going to *team*. Especially with the new overdrive breakdown change.

> Energy grid, obviously.

Yeah, I've seen a lot of newbies miss this, but I don't know how it could be fixed without focusing on the tutorial mission. The GUI for it is perfect, imho. Maybe a hint tooltip when placing energy buildings? A similar hint box on mexes might be good too - I sometimes see newbies not realize you have to build mexes on metal patches.

> Priority buttons. I'd have found these on my own (hadn't yet explored the UI fully when I read about it), but I don't know if it would have been clear exactly what it was for and what the effects were.

In general, all the state toggles take some getting used to... but they're not part of the basic newbie gameplay really, so maybe leaving them to exploration and just making sure they have good tooltips is best. I'm still confused about how Retreat works now that my UI no longer has the ambulance button though.

> LOS view. Let us turn this on by defualt (or tell me how to do it). Echo messages to console to explain what is happening when we push the buttons. I was familiar with the LOS toggle from spring, but the radar toggle mode is enigmatic to anyone who doesn't already know what to expect. Also, the radar jamming coverage is very hard to see.

Agree. I'd really love to see the core, default mode be the LOS-only view with some non-highlighting based hints for radar/sonar/jammer coverage instead of the mishmash of colours we've got now... and make the BlobShadow widget auto-enable when you've got this view on.

> Things that need adding, besides above:

> The very bottom row of factory buttons (the build-queue) needs to be tooltip-enabled so people can identify what's in the queue when they're trying to delete stuff.

Agreed.

> Minimap clicking strays from the standard. Why is this? Why do I have to middle-click the minimap to do what left-click has done for decades? It's fancy that the minimap is basically a second viewport with being able to select units and all, but it's not practical and breaks the standard expected behavior of a minimap. Current functionality can be made an option, as well as whether or not you can give right-click orders via the minimap (off by default).

> I would like to be able to hear the actual game start (commanders dropped) while alt tabbed.

Yeah, I a couple of starts this way. In general, more lobby support for getting notifications of game start status would be awesome. I'd ultimately like e-mail support so I can forward the various "game launched" and "game starting" notifications to my phone.

> Fix the noise associated with clicking a starting position on the map.

Agree

> Preview post button.

Disagree

> Confirmation for unlocking tech.

Disagree

> Actual information in the unlock page tooltips, especially commander upgrades. The ones now are close to useless.

OMG AGREE.

> Some type of feedback explaining to new players what is happening when they press the commander select button in-game when they don't have any commanders. Right now it just says "requesting baseline comm" which explains nothing if you don't already know, plus it somewhat implies that something should actually be happening afterwards.

I actually think adding the "show comm selector" button was solving the wrong problem. Imho, it would be better to shrink and move the "comm selector" window so you can select your comm in parallel with picking your map start point, instead of making it an either-or thing. Then you don't have to show or hide it, just keep it visible with a box around the selected comm until the player readies.

> Some way to identify friendly/enemy units on the main screen when the blips (these are called unit icons in the options, I believe) are on-screen.

Personally I think we've got this covered now that the teams are consistently color-grouped, but I can see where you're coming from.

> Also, blips should be displayed or hidden all at once, currently they are height-enabled on a unit-by-unit basis and this leads to strange camera-zoom limbo areas where only half of the icons are on screen, forcing you to zoom in or out to escape the awkwardness.

This is by design in the case of the crawling bomb units that are too small to see and vitally important to keep away from your main force.
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