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short list of UX papercuts


aaronbp
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Hi, I've spent a few hours playing matches against the AI and I'm digging it so far. I really appreciate seeing something set in this time period that gives a little more attention to the civs than aoe1. I've made a short list of papercuts that I noticed playing several matches. I won't pretend like I know what I'm doing and comment on the meta, these are just UX issues. They're probably well known, but just in case I'll note them here.

There are some issues caused by the lack of a grid. Broadly speaking, it's extra difficult to tell where there are gaps. Generated tree lines may be easily passable which was surprising, though it seemed like the AI was also unaware of that. It's also difficult to build walls because of the lack of a grid, and I found myself wasting valuable seconds lining things up. One way to mitigate this is to have the building to "snap" to the side of impassable objects when you mouse over them instead of just saying that you can't build there. Also, when you build pallasades through impassable objects, the walls should build right up to the base of that object. It seems like the game was trying to do that, but I noticed some inconsistency, so that may have just been a bug. Actually it seems like the game is too married to the idea of a specific length of sub wall when building long stretches of wall around obstacles.

A global queue would be fantastic. A related sound design issue, I found the sound effect following the construction of a military unit to be borderline inaudible.

The chickens especially are too small. I can barely see them at a normal zoom level. Animals in general are often too small or have too low contrast with some tilesets IMO.

I noticed the ladies will chase zebra across the map with knives trying to stab them and they hardly do any damage at all. That's pretty funny, but probably not what the player would want. xD

I'm not sure what is autociv and what's the engine, so these may not be relevant to you:

Hitting the shortcut to select a building doesn't seem jump to that building.

There are a few buildings that are just the same building but with a different name that for some reason takes a separate hotkey assignment, like a special temple or fortress. This is pretty confusing, especially for a new player like me who isn't intimately familiar with all the civ tech trees

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In youtube you can find some good tutorial for beginners from these two guys:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWgSzCK6CoFgSdbPiKGmJ4A (ValihrAnt)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS-SFei6NFRuGN8CKtAsYrA (Tom 0ad)

13 hours ago, aaronbp said:

I'm not sure what is autociv and what's the engine, so these may not be relevant to you:

Hitting the shortcut to select a building doesn't seem jump to that building.

Autociv is a mod : 

The engine is the the game engine that runs 0ad game (the engine can run other game that are not 0ad) 

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Thanks for those links, Nani! I've been meaning to look up some build orders. I actually lost a few times to the easy AI before I figured out some things like batch training. :blush:

10 hours ago, nani said:

Autociv is a mod : 

The engine is the the game engine that runs 0ad game (the engine can run other game that are not 0ad) 

Sorry, I used some weird syntax there. I meant I'm not sure if the issues with hotkey assignments and selections were just because of the way the mod was coded or because of limitations in the engine.

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