Improve unit stat visualization

[wraitii]

7 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Okay, I'll bite. So, you click on an enemy Spearman and see that his attack is now +1. What will you do differently that you wouldn't before this knowledge? Invest in more armor? But you'd want to do that anyway. 

You might not take a fight, basically, because in equal numbers you'll get beaten, so you retreat instead. Now in 0 A.D. proper, at the moment, this is maybe not so relevant because numbers probably matter more, but it could be.

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A second component to this is to show contextual stats. You have units selected, you hover a tree, you should be able to see the gather rate (possibly via a toggle/option). This will teach player a lot of important data in an easy to discover, intuitive manner.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

9 minutes ago, wraitii said:

You might not take a fight, basically, because in equal numbers you'll get beaten, so you retreat instead. Now in 0 A.D. proper, at the moment, this is maybe not so relevant because numbers probably matter more, but it could be.

 

I actually wonder why a player should be able to see this kind of information about their enemies.

[hyperion]

11 hours ago, wraitii said:

I draw inspiration from other games, because I haven't really done the research, and they have, and for example Age of Empires 3, for its Definitive Edition, removed the 'click to see stats' interface and just put them on the unit directly: https://static.ageofempires.com/aoe/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Definitive_100_Musketeer-2048x1152.jpg

If the stats in this screenshot fully represent the unit, then the underlying model is simpler than 0ad. In that case it sure is nice to get away without click to see stats. I just think displaying half truths is worse than click to see. What we can also see here the gui is optimized for 16:9 FullHD.

[hyperion]

2 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I actually wonder why a player should be able to see this kind of information about their enemies.

Yeah, good point. Maybe make it part of the bribe mechanic to get this info.

[wraitii]

3 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I actually wonder why a player should be able to see this kind of information about their enemies.

Well, you would rather obviously see if they've got new fancy armour or not  

[hyperion]

2 hours ago, wraitii said:

Well, you would rather obviously see if they've got new fancy armour or not  

Ha, let's introduce a tech "armour polish", faking increased stats.

[nifa]

16 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Okay, I'll bite. So, you click on an enemy Spearman and see that his attack is now +1. What will you do differently that you wouldn't before this knowledge? Invest in more armor? But you'd want to do that anyway. 

It makes a difference for units garrisoned in buildings e.g. in a Civic Center; attack, capture or retreat?

But so far the shown number doesn't take into account multiple arrows. The CC shows 6 attack (12pierce/2sec), the sentry tower 4.5 (9/2sec), but the CC has 3 default errors while the sentry tower has only 1. So it should be 18 for the CC and 4.5 for the sentry tower. Also so far the numbers don't change with more units inside

So the full Civic Center would have 23 arrows with 12 pierce every 2 sec, means 138. That's quite useful to know. It's another question if you should be able to see that for an opponent's CC or would need an upgrade ..

[Nescio]

A related thread: https://wildfiregames.com/forum/topic/27008-poll-armour-tooltip-format/

[badosu]

On 26/01/2021 at 4:50 AM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I actually wonder why a player should be able to see this kind of information about their enemies.

The most competitive players in 0ad memorize the stats numbers to figure out what are their enemies upgrades.

Everyone else, such as me, just hopes their army can fight. If we had a simple +x attack +x armor info we could perhaps not lose so often :-)

Edited January 28, 2021 by badosu

[Stan`]

Might be some interesting stuff there https://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser/art_source/trunk/grafx and mockups/UI - Game

[badosu]

[badosu]

I overestimated my capacity to work on this issue at the moment, also noticed my vision differs from what might be the best in consensus with some promising wip. It's an issue I'm deeply interested to see sorted out but will not be involved as far as I can see (at least what relates to upstream).

[Stan`]

1 minute ago, badosu said:

I overestimated my capacity to work on this issue at the moment, also noticed my vision differs from what might be the best in consensus with some promising wip. It's an issue I'm deeply interested to see sorted out but will not be involved as far as I can see (at least what relates to upstream).

Your input is always welcome

[DanW58]

I haven't read this entire discussion;  just first half of the first page an second half of the last.  I'm totally with wowgetoffyourcellphone that the user should NOT be able to see these stats.  Why?  Because it should be part of the game itself to discover them.  What there could be and maybe should be is in-game descriptions in faded old script that allude to what different units are good at and what they aren't good at.  Stats are a detail of implementation that should be hidden from the client, just as class variables should be.

I had a similar discussion at a forum with the devs of another game, an RPG for cell phones, where I said to them they should take out the multiple status bars above and below the player.  They had one for health, one for armor, another for energy... And they were thinking of adding a fourth one for gad knows what...  I said to them you should get rid of ALL of these bars.  Those are details of implementation.  Depict the results.  Health could be depicted by blood dripping.  Armor by loss of chunks of it.  Energy by the rate of attacks slowing down.  Why are you showing these things as bars?  But they disagreed with me, so I left.

If you are given enough information about how the game works that you can figure out what will happen in every situation, then what's the point of playing it?  A game should mirror the uncertainties of life.

Edited February 4, 2021 by DanW58

[Genava55]

Not very compatible with open source philosophy. Transparency is better.

Edited February 4, 2021 by Genava55

[DanW58]

Completely unrelated.  Game immersiveness requires mystery and uncertainty.  Development is a totally separate matter.

 

[DanW58]

Look at many of the classic games.  In Doom, health was represented by your face in the bottom bar;  and the capabilities of the various monsters was for you to discover.  In Descent it was obvious that kinetic munitions bypassed shields but had the problem of running out, whereas energy weapons never ran out but needed to get through shields;  but you never had exact numbers of how much damage of what kind this does, etceteras;  it was up to you to discover what worked.  In Masters of Orion, battle stats used pretty advanced math, with gaussian probabilities and whatnot;  but this was discovered and published by hackers;  it was never even hinted at in-game.  In Privateer, it was up to you to discover that the lowliest gun, the laser, was actually better than the top of the line plasma if you added all the extras.  RPG's started this boring fashion of putting stats in-game, which is understandable to some extent, since you had to deal with advancing your character, which had so many points for this and so many for that;  people got curiours how monsters compared.  But the hell with RPG's!  In Sim City it was up to you to discover that police stations became more and more corrupt over time, and that probably the only way to deal with it was to destroy them all and then start fresh.  In Starcraft there were stats that one could read about online, but they were not present in the game itself.

  Games where all the rules are put on the table are the least immersive.  Gamers speak of things like "to hit" ratios.  If you go to a weapons show, do the developers show "to hit" numbers for their weapons?  Stats are ludicrous simplifications, sometimes entirely absurd quantities;  and the least you reveal about them the better.

Edited February 4, 2021 by DanW58

[Loki1950]

And RPG's had a paper legacy where they where already part of the zeitgeist for that class of games.

Enjoy the Choice  

[DanW58]

There's a greater, cultural problem, where games are concerned, that this is a part of.  Just as in politics, where some fanatical and loud minority can steer politics in a direction that disadvantages the vast majority of people,  in gaming culture there's also one typical loud minority that drives developers to ruin games for the rest of us.  This minority is the dedicated, full time, competitive online gamers, who typically no longer care for the story or the art, or even the sound quality or the graphics anymore (presumably they cared at the beginning);  once they become advanced and start getting an online reputation, all they come to care about is winning,  and to win they need to know how the game works down to points of health removed by each single use of a weapon given so many points of defensive armor...

Such people typically DEMAND stats and whatnot.

But the thing for developers to keep in mind is that such players are NOT representative of most players.  Most players would typically enjoy the scenery, enjoy the NOT knowing everything, and enjoy forgetting that they are playing a game in the first place.  Realism is far more important than predictability to most of us.  In the real world you don't look at a tag for most people you meet to read how likely are they to lie to you, for example.  Why is it that in about half of the games that use such stats, they can be read directly in the interface?  Who is being served by such openness?  I think it is the loud minority of high adrenaline, competitive players that typically ruin games before they even release, if they can... winning also developer attention to the detriment of most people.

The proof can be found right in this page, where someone answers the question why should the user know these stats by saying you are more likely to win if you have this knowledge.  As I said, all they care about is winning.  All other aspects of the game that would increase immersiveness are, to them, merely decorative.

Edited February 5, 2021 by DanW58

[Genava55]

If I said it is against open source philosophy, this is because of testing and modding. It further complicates everything. 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

The most relevant real time information for most players is: What is this unit or building good at doing? What is its role? Number crunching every stat in real time satisfies a small minority of players, when most players just need to know which units to use against these other units because unit types have roles.

[DanW58]

Exactly.  And role is better depicted artistically than using words or numbers.  Units with a lot of metal in the armor are visually and intuitively expected to take arrows with a grain of salt, but move more slowly.

However, this requires proper depiction of metal, which takes a bit of science to understand how just by using diffuse and specular colors.   Assets currently in game make very poor use of color to distinguish metals from non-metals.  Improving the texturing would go a long way to make "stats" easier to visualize.

[Freagarach]

21 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

The most relevant real time information for most players is: What is this unit or building good at doing? What is its role? Number crunching every stat in real time satisfies a small minority of players, when most players just need to know which units to use against these other units because unit types have roles.

Yeah, so a compact and informative tooltip, with a *pedia-like option for those who desire that.

[badosu]

I think the stat itself is not as important as knowing whether the opponent has upgrades or not. In real life that would be akin to opponent having a well-maintained equipment and noticeable visually. I'm not advocating for cramming stats in the interface, just a representation of most important modifiers.

[Genava55]

3 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

The most relevant real time information for most players is: What is this unit or building good at doing? What is its role? Number crunching every stat in real time satisfies a small minority of players, when most players just need to know which units to use against these other units because unit types have roles.

Like AoE2 telling you which unit counter what?

2 hours ago, badosu said:

I think the stat itself is not as important as knowing whether the opponent has upgrades or not. In real life that would be akin to opponent having a well-maintained equipment and noticeable visually. I'm not advocating for cramming stats in the interface, just a representation of most important modifiers.

Personally I am not against your proposal, but the game doesn't include at the moment any visual changes for blacksmith upgrades for example.

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Maybe the compromise should be a stat visualizer option enabled only for debugging and testing, something modders could activate. I really want to stress the necessity to keep flexibility for the future and people could have different needs.