P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3

[Argh]

Er... the current UI shows the gross and the net, in the area next to the big Materials and Power signs.

The first number is the net, the second is the gross. IOW, if you're producing 255 Power, but are using 265, then it'd read -10 / 255.

What about that is counter-intuitive? I mean, I can put labels on it, but it's pretty obvious, if you play for more than a few minutes.

[AF]

Theyre just numbers, theyre not obvious and tbh most users are a little haphazard guessing what numbers are and relying on them incase theyre wrong.

Instead show the income and the ougoings with a + and a - before them in green and red with income then expenses below it. Then next to these 2 items put the net income/outgoing figure so that its as high as both of them. Colour code this value green/amber/red according to it's value. This should instantly make these values much more intuitive by a vast amount through convention alone.

[Argh]

The text system in Lua's not really able to mix colors in the middle of a string, and I haven't the foggiest how to get the true size, in pixels, of a given gl.Text object, so most of what you're saying is a non-starter unless I implement a whole new way of doing that stuff, which I have no interest in doing.

Moving things around to different boxes for income/net, income/gross, sure, but then the text is going to have to get awfully small, or I'll just have to have a strict digit cap, i.e., anything over 5 digits becomes "99,999+". It's manageable, but I still fail to see the point, when I can just document the UI for total newbies (maybe in Help O' Matic and Brief O' Matic)... and most veteran RTS players will pick it up quickly anyhow whether I tell them or not- it's really obvious what's being shown there, frankly.

[Google_Frog]

easy to understand at a glance

Coloured income, drain and net numbers would be a lot easier to understand. The current one has no colour and doesn't display drain.

Have you fixed the bug where the income is displayed as 0 when stalling or exessing?

[Argh]

Hit game. Massive sales. Only shows storage and net.

Do I need to dig up a lot of other screens, or what? I can see doing a color-shift, to get players to pay attention ("hey, that's red now, something's wrong with my income")... but you do NOT need every last detail about your economy in a RTS. I do not like the idea of cluttering this up with a lot of stuff, people. Simple is good.

[AF]

Im not asking you to add stuff, everything is already there, its the representation and arrangement I find fault with!

And indeed I do not know how you would allow different sizes and colours in a string but you don't have to because they aren't the same string, they're 3 individual strings! Also they dont need 3 separate boxes! They can all occupy the same box!

See I thought the black boxes represented display panels of some sort, and we dont use an entire display to show a single digit unless we're counting the US governments debt.

[Ironfire]

Hit game. Massive sales. Only shows storage and net.

However, that game has no constant drain of resources. You instanly buy things, and wait them to be built

[Argh]

True enough. I'm mainly just concerned about information overload- a UI with too much information is a lot less newbie-friendly than one that doesn't have enough. I'm working on a way to show all of it in a way that's reasonably intuitive... and user-friendly.

[Forboding Angel]

Illegible help-O-matic is illegible.

edit: love the Starcraft-style button layout.

Right click>view image foo!

[Pxtl]

1024, fool.

[smoth]

Hit game. Massive sales. Only shows storage and net.

However, that game has no constant drain of resources. You instanly buy things, and wait them to be built

they still take a bit to be built. The difference between starcraft econ on a money map and TA is only the delay for resources per second. So a project could do this. I am currently looking at doing it sans storage.

[KDR_11k]

The comparison still fails because there is no drain stat (and DoW has no repeat button). In DoW the res gain only depends on the income sources you have (usually captured checkpoints and generators) and it's only spent when you click a button to do so. In the TA economy all kinds of things drain resources even when you haven't touched them in a while.

I'd say a good way to add newbie friendlyness would be to kill the TA econ

[Argh]

Well, it could be killed, but I'd have to rehash the economy and remove the Repeat function, or replace it with a Lua equivalent. Tempting, but I'm not sure I want to do that yet.

[AF]

Why would you need to remove the repeat button? There are still circumstances where iy would be useful.

The side effect of this is deterministic resources.

[smoth]

I still want to remove repeat from gundam but it is always met with H8...

[Decimator]

I still want to remove repeat from gundam

HATE

[smoth]

See.. ;_;

[KaiserJ]

for the love of god when do i get to play this qq

[Argh]

Um, you can play RC3 right now... see the first post. RC4... when it's done. Dunno yet, was thinking it'd be fast, but it's not turning out that way.

[Argh]

Ok, finally got done fixing up the UI for now.

As for the random musings about converting the economy model... meh.

I think a true SC-style pay-as-you-go system would be just fine for factories, and Repeat isn't a big deal there, but what's the point?

Mechanically, it'd just be like setting them on CanBeAssisted=0, except it'd be more likely to have goofy results during periods of scarcity. Seems like a stupid idea to me, frankly- after quite a lot of thought about these issues, it's quite clear why Repeat isn't a function that you see in non-OTA economies... it's because it basically breaks those economic models.

The only way around that that makes any sense is to have a queue, per player, that tracks which build order was last made, and holds off all build orders until that price is available.

Seems like a huge amount of bother, for something that really doesn't have a lot of payoff. Imagine, if you will, the huge issues with making that queue management "smart", and handle stuff like canceled orders, etc., correctly. If I go that route, then it pretty much has to be the classic, "no repeat, you can set up a queue and that's all" model for factories. Not the end of the world, but I think that the amount of whining I'd hear would make it less than worthwhile, frankly.

That said, I'm leaning increasingly towards getting rid of the exponential factor of stacking build assist units around factories. It'd certainly cut the spam-factor way down, and forcing people to find room for more factories doesn't seem like a terrible thing, either.

On the other hand... doing insta-buy, non-insta-complete buildings is not a big deal. Did an experiment with that, and it's really quite easy to accomplish seamlessly. I'm actually pretty tempted to just go ahead and implement that- it'd split the economy in interesting ways from both classical models, and I think it'd keep the strengths of both- players can set up constant-drain behaviors and instant-cost behaviors. People will have to "save up" for important buildings, among other things, and it should make a lot harder for people to stall, because they're going to be forced to pay more attention to the numbers.

Oh yeah, and in other news... I'm finally getting around to redoing the MortarTank.