Resource bars

[Saktoth]

This is possibly the worst resource bar i have ever seen from a noobs-understanding-it point of view. Whatever happened to apple-style-slickness and effecient visualizations?

[Licho]

It ended when I called for artists (like you) to provide textures for styling and got no response..

[Saktoth]

The textures are irrelevant, you could put anything on there and it wouldnt help. The problem is the layout of and amount of info etc. Its a statiticians nightmare.

[Licho]

Lame excuses, i called even for artists to design layout.

This is best i could invent myself. And its your fault for not providing better idea.
Now we are stuck with it.

You can compare with resbar2 which uses original sir mavericks idea and is even more confusing imo.

[Saktoth]

You had 5 or so people contribute design ideas to display the information cleanly and effecienty, myself among them, and beherith even offered you the graphics from his 'res bar plus'. Not to mention the work that has previously gone into res bar design within and outside of the CA team.

If you want to experiment with new ways of visualizing resources as your pet project (CA has many) thats all very interesting, nobody is going to object. If you are trying to make a final default gui for CA that will be attractive and easy for noobs to understand, and are going to blame other devs for not wanting to waste their dev time working on that res bar, it is a different matter.

[Licho]

Your idea sucked.

It did not display same information and was displaying useless information (like storage change which is 0 most of the time).

Also the slider for overdrive just could not work. What would it be setting?

To display this ammount of information this is so far best.

Better is only arrgh restyle which I intend to implement later.

[Saktoth]

I wont say 'Your idea sucks more' (Or maybe i just did). It is well intentioned and i dont have a problem with you experimenting with these ideas, perhaps something will come from it- but if you want to blame other devs for not helping you with it, perhaps its because they dont think its going to work at all as the default res bar.

I specifically said it should be storage change over 10 seconds or so, rather than every resource frame or second, etc. It should be averaged out over a longer period, so that it jumps around less and is larger thats the key to the proposal.

The slider for overdrive would be setting proportion (%) of energy dedicated to overdrive, left being 0%, right being 100%. If not, it can work on an adjusting scale (like current) with the current amount being displayed as a number above the arrow.

[Beherith]

Heres what I think it should look like:
(I apologize to wisse for butchering his artwork, I suck at painting. click pic for larger version)


Some more art would make the more connection between M and E even more direct.

Also, for me, overdrive isnt something thats measured on a bar. Its definately a dial thing, like warp speed or reactor overdrive (amount is bar, delta is dial). Also dials are much nicer for log scales than bars.

[Pxtl]

Run with what you've got. Yes, they're ugly - but they're also informative. If somebody has a better idea of how to represent an income statement graphically, they're welcome to implement it, but Licho's version is good, and far more informative than the traditional TA amount-bars.

I mean, there may be better ways to represent it - personally, I'm fond of the "income over expenditure" approach that was suggested earlier... or the more traditional way would be a set of pie-charts.

Either way, I have an idea of how to make it slightly less ugly - don't use a texture as the bar. Use a single icon and text, and a unique colour for each expendature.

Roughly, you lay out out like this (metal, for example):

.....mex $>.reclaim ^>rdrive #>
..factories &> ............buildings #>ckpile @>

where the first line is income, second line is output, and the random ugly characters are each a single icon representing the type of consumption in case the bar is too short to read the label.

I think SirMaverick's layout is best - income over consumption... although I'd use a void to represent the difference, not red/green. I'd also think that the logarithmic approach is unnecessary - I'd just extend the bars out to use up all the horizontal space, and use the bars to represent proportion-of-consumption, not total income/output - use numeric data for that.

And yeah, toggles. Toggles to turn on/off the breakdown, and toggles to switch the text labels into numeric values (once you learn what each icon means, you can read the numbers). Hovering over a bar always shows the text and consumption.

That's my ideal resource-bar.

[SirMaverick]

I think SirMaverick's layout is best - income over consumption... although I'd use a void to represent the difference, not red/green.

After having seen it in game I think it's more confusing. I don't think new players will understand it fast.

[Saktoth]

I have been playing with the new resource bars for a while now, and i must say, i simply do not notice them. Rather than taking the information presented and adapting my gameplay, i simply ignore it. I only pay attention to the little boxes with the storage amount, and since they are smallery and not on black (the black-yellow/grey contrast is easy to see) i find myself stalling/excessing more. The little tip 'Build BP, get metal' etc are of no use: they only tell me what to do to remedy the short-term situation. Nor are the bars showing flow: I cannot visually compare them easily, there is too much data. Yes there is the little bar below the main showing pull, but i do not notice it at a glance.

The problem is simply that the information presented at any one time is only my current drain, it is not averaged over a longer period. My income and expenditure can fluctuate wildly with reclaim and construction tasks. Seeing the storage lets me average it and know exactly what it is doing.

Ill try and program myself to pay attention only to the little bar at the bottom showing pull (and ignore all the other data...), but i suspect that if i have to do this, most other players will too.

[Argh]

Sorry in advance for the long-windedness. I've read through the various things since I last visited the thread, and here's my POV.

Simplicity is key here. The overall goal is to simplify the UI and make it more nub-friendly. Don't lose track of that.

IDK why people want such complex breakdowns, when that's more properly stuff you need in post-game analysis tools, if you're really trying to pin trends down or refine your game. Or, if you're a pro and you want absolute numbers that get stored in the Infolog to track things... that's all very easy to develop, and requires no visual refinement, since a pro player isn't going to care anyhow.

So, keep the nub situation plainly in view at all times. Just my opinion on this.

I'm nearly done implementing my concept model, with a few minor improvements (and some visual polish) in P.U.R.E.'s UI, and it is simple and easy to understand, and is a fairly big improvement, in terms of easy-to-see relationships.

I use a scalar relationship for the two bars, where they reflect percentages of one another. IOW, if you're using up all of your metal income, the bar on the left-hand side of the display goes completely full, the right-hand is cut down to a percentage of completeness. So you know you're pulling more than your income visually, without seeing the numbers (although they're displayed). So, it's an at-a-glance tool for gauging how well your economy is doing at the moment, with minimal need to actually view the numbers.

This works well, for most changes in income, and is especially useful when showing changes in Energy consumption overall, which is usually where fixed costs are a bigger deal in OTA games, and should work correctly with Overdrive.

The multicolored bars, on the other hand, are visually confusing. Perhaps instead of the bars, have little marker flags that are color-coded, which reveal full numbers underneath if you hit a button? I mean... most of the time... you just need to see the relationship between your income, outgo, and storage. If you have low income or low storage, then you have a different pattern if spikes or stalls occur, and that's visually easy to show with a straightforward color shift on the negative end of the bar.

The only real difference between our resource UI needs (well, until certain things get done on my end) is Overdrive, and again, that should be simple. In fact, it's pretty vital that it's simple, since that's not just a visual, but a crucial part of gameplay.

I don't agree with the dial idea. While it's cute visually, it's hard to control, in terms of click-and-drag. It's like one terrible game I played, where they had literal interpretations of radio dials- spinning them to the right positions was horribly hard to do in a hurry!

Instead, I'd honestly suggest a straightforward slider, where the slider scale keeps changing with income, so that 50% Overdrive drops to 25% on the slider, if real income doubles, with a "hold" button to keep it at a flat percentage of income, if people want Overdrive to be a "tax" that scales with their income.

But don't make the UI complex, to appease the numbers people. They need better post-game analysis tools, or a "pro" UI that can be used as an alternative, imo. I'd keep what you've built thus far as a prototype for "pro" and think harder about how to visually show people things without adding more details that must be visually parsed- color shifts work well, and convey a lot of information, for example, even if they occur at the edge of human vision, while things like numbers and small breakdowns require people to focus their eyes directly on the UI and spend a moment processing that information.

A perfect RTS UI should convey the most important information without requiring much direct eye contact, imo. Audio signals are also potentially useful- a warning tone when you're out of resources entirely, for example, is a good nub tool (although pros who stall constantly on purpose will want to turn it off asap), while a really sudden change in income downwards might warrant a specific sound, if it repeats more than one update, to alert poor nubs that building something that eats a lot of E without the income to support it might be a bad idea, or that that Saktoth they just started building is going to cripple their economy soon

Anyhow, that's where I am at on this. I'll show some screens of my current UI as soon as it's done-done, should be tonight.

[Google_Frog]

I too have discovered that all the information is not that useful. I already have a good idea of how my economy is going from my resource bar using the income/drain/net numbers and observing cons reclaiming/building/whatever.

Noobs are going to be very confused by an economy breakdown bar. I don't think anyone ever doubted that.

The question now is who is this econ breakdown bar being produced for? The only large group of people it could be useful for is players who have a good grasp on the game and want to see where they can improve their economy.

[Argh]

Here's how mine looks/works:



The numbers correspond to Expense / Income and Stored / Storage.

The bars are a simple percentage of Expense / Income on the left, Income / Expense on the right, capped at a value of 1.0 (iow, if your metal income is 2.0, it caps at 1.0, so that it's basically full).

In this example, we are pulling a lot more Metal than we have as income, so we have a full bar on the left and a very small bar on the right- a sure sign we're going to stall as soon as we're out of stored Metal!

Energy presents a more complex picture. Once again, we're negative, but that right bar is more than half full- we can see that probably we're just going to stutter a bit, and slow our econ down, but that ultimately we're going to stall on Metal before we stall on Energy, if storage of both is equal (which, in pretty much any game design based even loosely on OTA, it never is). And we know all of these things at a glance, without having to focus on it, and without having to read the numbers- but they're there, if you need the details, and I'm sure adding a "pro option" to break it down, show graphs, whatever... could be added, but I just think it's entirely un-necessary, frankly.

All of this is in a tiny fraction of the screen space, no matter what resolution you're on, and the labels are clear and pretty obvious, no manual required to know what some abstract symbol is. I sometimes feel like I should label the relationships, but figure it's shown like most games show it, so probably not.

Anyhow... this is all just my opinion, but this is probably the next part of the general UI cleanup I'm doing on P.U.R.E., and I thank Licho for getting the pot stirred up on this topic.

[Licho]

I like it, I understood it visually though I had to read text 3x to make sense of it.

It does not show absolute quantity of the flow which is what i wanted to display, so you are back to using number, but at least have easy information about potential stall/excess.
You caould represent the same information with just one bar displaying bigger and smaller pulls in those case (red to the left side).
Since you always max one of the bars, using 2 is imo not needed.


Regarding small icon warnings - they are supposed to have audio, asked for sounds files already.

I planned some more experiments with resbars but frankly im not in a mood to work on it due to overwhelmingly negative responses. Its probably a failed concept.

[Argh]

I like it, I understood it visually though I had to read text 3x to make sense of it.

Hmm. Maybe I should go ahead and put labels above those items, make it explicit, or think through the presentation a bit more. I am always pretty insensitive about these issues, since I usually have a pretty intuitive grasp of what these kinds of displays mean, but you're right, it's non-obvious.

It does not show absolute quantity of the flow which is what i wanted to display, so you are back to using number, but at least have easy information about potential stall/excess.

No, it doesn't show absolute quantity on the bars, because I felt that scaling issues would be potentially confusing.

The storage bars (behind the storage numbers) go from left to right with percentage of storage used, giving a way to track that flow, and gives you another visual indicator of where your economy is heading. I'm tempted to move the storage numbers somewhere else- above them, maybe?

Anyhow, I could do a secondary bar display, I suppose, or give myself a wider slot there, and show how much income is left, scaled vs current storage.

But most players mainly need to know when they've exceeded their income- and, as a nub-training tool, it's easier to explain to nubs that they should keep spending until they see the second bars appear, imo- it gives everybody a simpler feedback loop.

Since you always max one of the bars, using 2 is imo not needed.

Actually, it has a purpose- really!

Due to the way that Spring reports the numbers, if pull is greater than income, we can show the percentage of income over pull, but when income exceeds pull, then pull reads 0. So the dual-bar indicators give you an immediate visual feedback, for when you've exceeded your income. You don't even see the second bar until then, so it gives you a very blatant, "hey, you're running out of Stuff" message, basically.

Anyhow, I'm going to add some basic visual indicators, like flashing bars when you get near zero or are stalling in a major way (say, 3:1 or greater) and an audio buzzer when you hit zero resources, then I'll release the current version of SimpleGUI's source to you, to compare notes.

[Licho]

Heres what I think it should look like:
(I apologize to wisse for butchering his artwork, I suck at painting. click pic for larger version)


Some more art would make the more connection between M and E even more direct.

Also, for me, overdrive isnt something thats measured on a bar. Its definately a dial thing, like warp speed or reactor overdrive (amount is bar, delta is dial). Also dials are much nicer for log scales than bars.

I think we could use something like this for now, until some more nub friendly advanced resbar is created.
I like the dial for overdrive. There is no control now, so its just passive indicator and for that dial is superior.

[Licho]

And even for flow resbar, dial is better than bars. Dial could show metal and energy income in log scale easilly while standard horizontal bar could show storage.

And tooltip could show advanced information about income and spending.

[Saktoth]

Please keep an overdrive control. D:

[Google_Frog]

Please keep an overdrive control. D:

Update to old revision then copy the widget to local lua. Only 1 widget can talk to overdrive at a time though.