User Interface?

[Tonto_Icy_Tripod]

I guess the title say most of it, but despite that:

Could you give us any kind of description of the GUI, or just tell us what you plan to have in it. I personally think AoM revolutionized it quite a bit, mostly by the group concept up top, and even more importantly the idle vil tab. The only thing I'd add to that (which was also done with an add-on program) would be to show vil-allocation (and yeah, I know you're not haing vils in that sense, but I actually think that makes it even more important ).

Something like:

Gold: 134/10

Wood: 300/15

Food: 321/16

If you see what I mean.

So, any suggestions?

[CodeOptimist]

I think the user interface is EXTREMELY important in an RTS game. Especially things to do with villager-management and econ.

I'll post other things here as I think of them (can't think of any right now), but your suggestions are good.

[Acumen]

Team Tray (group up top): Check.

Idle Villager button: Check.

Villager Allocation: Great idea. Checked.

The fundamental principles of the interface design are familiarity and ease of use.

[Jeru]

Acumen answered your questions effectively and courteously, as always, but I would like to emphasize a point regarding your comments on the AoM GUI: As one of the 0 A.D GUI developers, I can assure you that we clearly do not plan to "reinvent the wheel" concerning the GUI.

As our target market includes veteran players of other RTS games along with newcomers to RTS gaming, there will be no overcomplications or alien concepts in the GUI, (especially if you've ever played one of the Age series games or an equivalent).

Even if we do invent or add something minor, (and at the moment I can't think of anything we have), we intend to explain and demonstrate it so clearly your grandparents will be able to adjust to the change.

[Fire Giant]

Well, I guess this one goes into my responsibility area, too - so I need to take the time to answer.

We first had the idea of a quite innovative GUI with lots of new and cool features - but soon we saw that this would be too far away from the quasi-standard set by the "age of"-series of games. I guess the old GUI has never been publicized, and therefore I won't post any images

So we stepped back and started to redesign the GUI up from the basics - this time sticking to an Ao...-like layout (with stats window, build/train/research area, minimap, top resource trays and so on), but keeping some of the "better" or more important features and ideas of our first design (like dividing the research/build/train/command-area into several "tabs"). Acumen did a great job on documenting and designing the new GUI form. We are actually starting on making artwork for this new design - and already finished some things (like Jeru's brilliant tab buttons that already were in the news). But due to the fact that we are all quite busy, we slowed down a little in the last weeks. I'm sure we'll get back on speed when we have some nice visualisation ideas and RL things don't occupy us as much as they do now (primarily speaking for me). But I think I can already say one thing: We will be quite close to the AoM GUI (at least in-game), because we all somehow like this interface - it's intuitive but still powerful

[Tonto_Icy_Tripod]

Anyone of you played Celtic Kings (or whatever it was called, I'm sure TRD can fill us in )? Apparently it had this ability to make the minimap take up the entire screen, allowing you to do quite a few things from there alone. I've never used a feature like that, but I believe it could be useful.

Also, regarding the GUI being hard to understand, the simple way to get around that would be to just have an "advanced" option, like back in aok. You know how you could get things like formations, economic/military minimap and such when it was turned on? Something like that would solve any problems. In fact, even the vill allocation bar might not be the best thing for a newcomer to have, as they often won't have a clue as to what to do with it and it'll just be in the way in that case....

[Aeros]

I was thinking that since we're in the Roman period and it's a strategic war game, maps should be much more important than the normal minimap we see now.

Just like in Celtic Kings (and AOM:TT Xpack) you press a button and it brings up the minimap to full screen. In 0AD it would be cool if we did that but what it displays is a more advanced and bigger version of the minimap - maybe a full 3d Render of it? But that would be an insane amount of work to make a supper low quality version of everything in the game for a big birds eye view minimap. And so the minimap also displays important information, like where your allies army is and what they're made up of, where there is an enemy base, your resource income marked above economic buildings.... and so on.

Good idea?

[Wijitmaker]

Hey Cheezy I didn't know AoM:TT did that!? What is the key?

[Aeros]

Tab, I think

[Ulysses S Griffin]

i would like a advanced chat windo and a simple chat window like AoK

[ZeZar]

ok. hi. Just wanna say that i think you should have the GUI like EE or Empires, not the GUI maybe, but at least not like Age of.... WHY you ask??

Because the screen, where the battles take place, is no longer the main "frame". Why not make it small, so we can see the battles better. Or that a window comes up, every time you press a building woth all the stuff you would have had in like Age of.... GUI! Play Empires, or EE, try it out, check the brilliant GUI there

Last thing: hehe. The GUI, is the stuff shown on the screen when you play, like building hit points an more??..

[Fire Giant]

Hmm - sorry, but in that point, I really have to disagree. I personally hate the EE GUI and think it is one of the most weird interfaces out there (one main reason why I didn't like EE and stoped playing it after two weeks).

If you'd like to have a less screen-cluttering UI, I would favor the AoM-Method, which lets you "minimize" the GUI by pressing a key (Ctrl + Arrow Down in AoM by default). Then you won't have the whole GUI but only the important buttons like training or building icons.

[Ulysses S Griffin]

i never knew that minimising GUI would still let you build and research in AoM

[Tonto_Icy_Tripod]

It does, you just don't have the background behind the icons like normal. Or you could just learn the hotkeys

I'd also like to add that I hated the EE interface... it wasn't intuitive in any way (which was also true for the entire game, but let's just skip that point ), which made functions which might've been good annoying.

Haven't got TT myself, so I can't say I know how the enlarged minimap works, but I looked around a bit after I read this post, and it seems that instead of just the dots you actually get building symbols, for the different kinds of buildings (ie a barracks doesn't look like a house). You don't have to make it superdetailed, just make it like a one storey building for houses, and extremely high for towers and such.

As I see it, unless you're playing competively you won't need that kind of feature, so there's really no need to make it look overly beautiful...

Also, would it be possible to remove certain parts of the GUI if you didn't want them? For instance, I might not want to see the build part (if I only use hotkeys, why would I want to see the buttons?). If I could minimize or remove it, I'd be able to see a bigger portion of the map. Or, better yet, how about making the GUI into smaller portions, which you can then choose where you want. I'd make a pic, but I'd need somewhere to post it, so I'll just have to describe I guess...

AoM is the example of course

1. Resource bar, you could move it around the edges basically, and it'd behave like the bottom bar in windows (if you put it at the bottom, it'll lie horizontally, while if you put it against the sides, it'll be vertical)

2. "Actions" menu. This is the one where you have the build house buttons and such. It'd be good to allow people to move it arond the bottom or minimize/hide this window. That'd require researches to have hotkeys as well though.

3. "Stats window" the one with the pic and all. Also a good idea to remove often, as it's big, and it's not like you're gonna sit there and look at stats during the game. I'd say, put this either in corners or by the bottom.

4. Minimap. Same positions as above, but This one is critical all the time, so I don't think it'd be a good idea to allow people to remove it (the way I see it, if it's possible to remove it people will think it's less important, while in this case it's rather the opposite, hence only the repositioning )

5. Score, anywhere you please. Heck, put it smack dab in the centre of your screen if you wish

Well, yeah, that's all for now I guess.

[CodeOptimist]

I have two more things to add here:

1. An "advanced GUI"-toggle button is a must (aka. AoK). That way, beginners don't get overwhelmed by the buttons, tabs, etc, while the experts can get everything.

2. Maybe, just maybe, there could be a way to customize your GUI, sort of what Icy_Tripod is describing. It could be under Settings (or Options) on the main menu. If you go to the "Customize GUI" setting (or whatever it's called), you can drag around parts of the GUI, toggle them off/on, etc.

Just got another idea you could save custom GUI layouts and map them to a hotkey, so you can switch in-game. That way, you can mimic the features in AoM (full-screen minimap, full-screen game window, etc), by just creating them and mapping them to a hotkey, instead of them being hard-coded into the game.

That's all for now...

[Cougar]

A customizable GUI would be a very useful feature. Players would be able to remove things they never use or even turn of the GUI all together. I like it...

[Tonto_Icy_Tripod]

Turning everything off would be great for screenshots I guess

[CodeOptimist]

Yep, with layouts mapped to hotkeys, you could quickly switch to a "game only" GUI to snap a screenshot, then switch back to "normal" mode.

[Fire Giant]

Hmm, those ideas are all great , but I doubt we will get the possibility to create such a user-customizable GUI. Perhaps things like minimizing the GUI or activating a big minimap are possible, but as we are a non-professional development team, this modular layout will most likely be too hard to code (or if not that, we need to concentrate our resources on other parts of the game, since we want to get it done some day ). Sorry, but I doubt that we can make things possible that not even ES managed to integrate into their games

[Cougar]

It depends on how we specify the GUI. If it's a static image, of course it will be pratically impossible to accomplish, but if the GUI is defined by some type of script making it dynamic shouldn't be all that difficult.

[CodeOptimist]

I think a "dynamic" GUI is very possible. You could split the GUI into definable "sections" internally, i.e.:

MiniMap

TaskButtons

BuildButtons

ScoreBoard

ResourceBar

... and so on. Then, you could hide/show each of these individual "panes", and possibly reorganize them.

[Tonto_Icy_Tripod]

think photoshop. Just not as free

[Tonto_Icy_Tripod]

And since I've got nothing better to do right now (I do, but I can't be bothered to do it), I guess I'll add some more in here.

Selecting units (and more importantly, cloning/microing)

The idea here being, making a difference between selecting one kind of unit, or many. So, here's my plan:

One unit type selected: AoK style. This is mostly used in battles I find, and for cloning vils. Seeing as vils aren't gonna be the same, it'll only be used for microing battles I assume. So keep it simple, keep it clean. Might be a good idea to arrange the units by health left?

Several unit types selected: AoM style. Show the icon for the unit, along with a number. Makes it easy to just have swordsmen or cavalry selected, which is always good.

Hm, that turned out less in-depth than I'd thought, but I guess I covered it all... sorry bout the double-post too.

[ZeZar]

I didnt know you could do that in AoM. Cool *dobbel clicking Age of Mythology*...