Hrm, if I'm going to debate with you, Saktoth, I'd rather debate about SWIW balance
Either way I don't particularly feel like being dragged into a prolonged debate - the topic is interesting, but I feel the result is unlikely to go anywhere, as I'm effectively being forced to 'defend' my mod.
In my opinion, resorting to playing with radar blobs is sort of like admitting that your graphics are unsuitable for the actual game and giving up.
I don't think it is a cop-out at all. I think in an RTS, your job as a designer is to ensure your players always have full control of your units.
Consider this image:
piccie
Which highlights the challenge I face in dealing with the Star Wars universe. Can you honestly tell me, at a glance (you can by squinting, but we don't expect our players to play with magnifying glasses), which stormtroopers are light ones (with the basic weapons), and which ones are the heavy ones (with the flamethrower and eweb). The one's that are firing don't count!
A player needs to be able to identify these very quickly and with little difficulty, both if they belong to him, and if they don't. The decisions made when facing a heavy infantry and light infantry are significant, and their relative impact on the battle is also significant (each having a particular effect on the game which needs to be considered).
Your primary suggested solution here, from the other thread, was that I needed to make my textures 'high contrast'. KDR reasoned clearly that I cannot really do so given the universe I am working in (should I brightly colour my stormtroopers?). As a general comment for all mods, the original disagreement that created this discussion (that is, that pure yellow and white on the construction vehicle would make playing easier for players then dirtying the yellow and ripping the black a little bit) - I do not agree that sacrificing realism in texturing for bright and highly contrasted textures is a necessity for player control. My arguments, which were somewhat drowned out in the thread (and fair enough, it was a derail) where:
- That the simple dirtying of a texture does not make it unreadable from a distance. All my textures, and any textures of any texturer worth their salt, will contain a reasonable amount of contrast on the model. It creates interest, highlights elements of geometry, and makes it easier to distinguish from afar. What I was suggesting did not compromise this.
- That the primary means of identification for units is through their geometry, rather then their texture. Take a look at the screenshot I provided earlier. All my vehicles are reasonably dark and reasonably grey (As military vehicles tend to be). I can still easily tell them apart at a glance, purely because of their geometry.
- That, on top of this ability to identify units through geometry and then textures - there exists a complex radar identification system that allows players to control their units.
I see no flaw in simply giving players a means to identifying their units from a distance using radar icons. It is simply the next level of UI, and not a failure of the visual design content at all. I played supcom competitively for about 6 months after it came out. The icons were a brilliant system that allowed me to control the battle from afar. It gave me the strategic information I needed to make decisions on the larger scale, which is precisely what the UI needs to do.
Saying that the gameplay is 'unplayable' without dots at that level is not a direct criticism of the game. SupCom, and now Spring, have simply been pushing the boundaries of scale in RTS's.
It is the next logical step to use radar icons. At the scales you can view units in both Spring and SupCom, we are talking infantry being a pixel wide, and tanks being a handful of pixels wide. You can make your tanks neon green and you won't be able to tell them apart at that distance.
Yes, to an extent unit information conveyed by a direct view of your units is lost -
but - by the stage that your units have converted into radar dots, that sort of information is no longer relevant to you. The radar dots cull what I consider to be 'tactical' information in favour of important 'strategic' information. (I should also note as a side point that at the stage where radar dots are necessary, you would need a magnifying glass and a freeze frame to work out most of the stuff you note as being important)
When the survival of individual units is important, and their positions on the field is directly relevant, I will
zoom in and control them. When I need to make larger decisions regarding swathes of units and deployment zones, I will zoom out and control the radar dots. You are simply transitioning between two zones of control, both of which are important, and neither of which should be compromised for the sake of the other.
Further, I agree that potentially my work will be missed some of the time due to dots; but I think the likelihood of my work being seen in a game is far greater if I can provide players with a game that is playable, fun and challenging - which requires a broad and encompassing UI.
I also disagree on the homeworld example. It was a stunning game - but the scales are ultimately totally different, and the decisions required (given the map has little to nothing actually in it other then resources) are very different. You typically have a number of larger craft which can be readily identified (well, to an extent, I always battled to tell frigates apart), and fighters which were generally either moving in convenient groups (to the extent that in HW2 you could only build them in groups), or in an enormous mess in a battle.
Battle control in homeworld could typically be incredibly messy and confusing; the saving grace was the excellent unit AI - in that you could select a fighter group, tell them to behave 'evasively', and they would do so, which was really all the input you needed, apart from the occasional 'concentrate your fire here'.
Further, if you watch competitive players playing homeworld, you'll see that Homeworld also has an icon system, and that most of those players will typically be controlling units using icons exclusively too, because they need as much information to be conveyed from a distance as possible, as quickly as possible.
[to counter the possible retort - yes, information is lost through the switch to radar icons, as you noted, but at the stage where icons kick in,
almost all useful information is lost anyway. Icons simply return as much important information to the player as possible, and is relevant, allowing them to make strategic-level decisions]
