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New GUI: Design & Features Discussion


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Yeah, "balance" wasn't exactly the right word for what I tried to say... And looking back, it may unbalance the UI too much (most buildings have nothing in the left square next to the minimap allready). You've probably thought about this more than me anyway, so I guess you're right :) .

Another suggestion: for multiple Units UI: perhaps the hitpoints and stamina bars could be refined. In this case, I'm showing the average health of the first quartile (bottom greenest bar), the whole(middle green bar), and the fourth quartile(yellow bar). I'm not completely sure it's not "more useless info", but I guess it could have its use.

P8k4qs.jpg

Edited by wraitii
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what is the problem, i didn't noticed anything wrong?

You make a selection and the total max health and total current health are calculated and shown. Then as units are damaged and die, the total current health decreases, but the total max health remains the same. It's supposed to give you a good idea of how well or badly your select is doing at a glance. It currently doesn't do this. Currently, max health is reset every time a unit dies, pretty much making this health bar useless for its intended purpose. The current total health jumps around and doesn't tell you anything about the original selection.
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When/if you implement this Brian, stick all the attack/armor/speed/accuracy etc info into a tooltip when hovering over the shield/sword icon. Nothing when hovering over the portait please.

We have such a large unit portrait, why can't it be used to show the stat tooltip like the shield/sword icon does (and should)? I don't see why it just repeats the generic name which is now visible in the GUI anyway, I'd rather have it showing the stats like it did before.

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OK, centered the shield and removed the player color from the queue panel.

I tried to fix the multiple unit selection health, but it apparently won't refresh until you at least hover over some entity. In other words, if you selected a group with full health and then selected a subset of them, they would appear injured. When you hovered or clicked something else (even trees count) then the heal bar would fill correctly.

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Looks great (y)

IMO we need to show attack type (melee, ranged, charge) in the stat tooltip, since some units can have multiple attack types, and there's currently no indication of attack type other than what can be inferred from the unit appearance or description. See the training tooltips for examples and the logic to implement it. Eventually the training tooltip stats will go away because it's overkill and ugly, to be replaced by a separate reference window, but it can serve for now as an example of what to include in the unit panel.

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We added the shield/sword icon because a few people suggested it wasn't obvious the unit portrait shows the stat tooltip - that I agree with. But I wasn't expecting us to remove the functionality from the unit portrait, I really don't see the reasoning for that.

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Yer, keep the name and description. I just meant no attack/armor stats in that tooltip. That sort of info has been, should be, and is on the sword/shield icon.

To be honest, I'd like all the info related to the unit visible when hovering over the unit portrait, including the attack/armor stats - but I'll let others chime in :)

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The unit portrait currently shows generic name and tooltip info:

eIyl7.png

The "counters" stuff is manually typed in the tooltip field. The only other textual information we could show is the history, rollover, and specific name fields. History and rollover can be quite lengthy, here's the Celtic spearman as an example:


<History>The spear was the main weapon of the Celts, arming the bulk of their forces. The average Celt would only have to take up his long spear and body shield to be ready for battle. While armor was rare the rabid fighting spirit of the Celts more than made up for in vigor what was lost in protection.</History>
<Rollover>Probably one of the most primitive units in the game. Fighting with a sharp object at the end of the pole didn't require a lot of technology to develop. It also allowed the human to distance themselves from their attacker. As time passed the spears got longer and longer. Started with a fighting style similar to using a quarterstaff, then to using them in numbers as a 'pin cushion' vs. humans (sarissa in a phalanx). Later it was developed to combat cavalry. During the medieval period it evolved to the pike. These units tended to be armoured as heavily as possible.</Rollover>

I think that's beyond what most people want to read in a tooltip. Of course we could shorten those fields in the entity templates, at the expensive of valuable info, that's something that needs to be decided (how and if we plan to use them and their max length).

I personally would prefer leaving that info for some other UI window, maybe a "History" screen like in the AoE/AoK series. Once you've read it, do you really need to see the in depth history every time you hover the unit portrait?

To be honest, I'd like all the info related to the unit visible when hovering over the unit portrait, including the attack/armor stats - but I'll let others chime in :)

IMO it would become quite ugly. The training tooltips are a good demonstration that mixing arbitrarily long text + numeric stats doesn't work well in practice:

N3YSN.png

It would be even worse if we added more text. Whereas if we have a single tooltip with textual info and a single tooltip with stats only (not all but the most important ones) then it looks tidier:

oFAYj.png

Another possible idea: we could move stats to the unit portrait tooltip, and then have a separate "?" or "i" icon which provides description and history. In other words flipping the two as they are now. I think it's more clear the way it is now though :)

On the subject of training/construction tooltips, their style needs to be updated to match the new unit panel.

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<Rollover> is the old legacy code superseded by the newer <Tooltip> implementation. So if there is a unit entity with <r\Rollover> text, then it should be converted to <Tooltip>.

Another comment: In Age of Mythology, clicking the portrait would launch the encyclopedia entry--a window that showed all the stats, available upgrades, bigger portrait, summary, and History information. I liked it a lot.

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Another comment: In Age of Mythology, clicking the portrait would launch the encyclopedia entry--a window that showed all the stats, available upgrades, bigger portrait, summary, and History information. I liked it a lot.

This. Having 1 place to get all the unit's info would be handy.

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If you're going to keep the button to show "attack" stats, I'd prefer it the way it currently is (though without the lag for the tooltip to appear, that's fairly annoying). Perhaps showing attack rates and some other useful stuffs could be added.

I support the idea of having a centralized way of knowing every info about a unit. Reminds me of RTW, too. It's fairly neat.

(BTW: what prevents from having the counters written dynamically? Lack of time? Was it decided so?)

Edited by wraitii
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