Random WIP 2006-2011

[camo]

needs to be more distinctive in colours - imagine mr. nub searching the button in the heat of battle.

Yeah, a lot of pictures were black-white and i just ran a colourize over them to make them look at least a bit more... colourfull. (Real reason: The script failed for b/w-images)

Are colors really a good help for you? I couldn't tell a single colour of a single game right now. More like the position and basic shapes. What would you suggest for colours?

pew pew nazi needs teamcolor on helmet + boots to allow for pink

Custom GUI, using ingame-screenshots or nice pictures and an automated script to make them uniform.

its chili, i can tell by the tell by the teal colored background on one of the icons!
Nah, nice one, custom gui is one of the things that come up all the time

+1 to pink. At least I'm using it every game.

I would be glad, if chili would use a gl.Rect to highlight selection. My script fails when being called after a TexRect-call. (Thus, selecting the first unit for screenshots )

[PicassoCT]

depends - colours have different meanings in diffrent cultures.. so they are not transporting meaning alone. Still best to go for text - and shape, that much is true.

colour=green (movement/growing/building/repairing/healing/guarding)
colour=blue (freeze current state/ cold/sky/infinity/retreat/lack of aggression/defend)
colour=red&orange (warning signs[also includes warning signs, strong contrast in general by the way]/ danger/fire/selfdestruction/ hold under danger)
white (colour of celebration in western culture/colour of death in china)

So how would i go for Icons? Give them words- boring old words, readable, self-explaining, unique. Then shoop around them something based on that colourscheme. Selfexplaining pictures are not enough.

Also, sort them by actual use, searchtime and humblenubfriendlyness.
Always remember, the pros wont use half of those icons (shortkeys anyways) so you make a gui for the nubs.
Easy to reach icons (those on the corners, who dont shift the screen when you overreach)
What icons are used the most? Depends on the game again. But if you use icons for movement and fighting, you are fucked in Spring anyway. So movement in general goes upwards. Always expect misscomunication. For example the Fight-button, does in other games work as a attack button, leading to tanks firing on the ground. Nubs wont use it, for lack of knowledge.

Settings are most important for units in factorys, so inside a factory they go into prime position, outside they go down- wrong! Your Gui needs to be congruent , meaning every icon is at a expectable place, doing a expectable function. If you think of programs which screw up the gui, you always end up with incongruent programs (cause of bad translation or similar stuff) were a key in one situation does this, and in another mode suddenly does that. This isss theeee evilz purest form. Avoid at all cost.
Good Guis actually risk moar user-work before allowing overcharged icons.

[camo]

So i would split this up for different aspects of the gui.

1) Basic commands. Move, Fight, etc.
I thought of not showing most of them at all or maybe make it an extra widget, which can be disabled. I mean, as a nub you select units, send them by rightclick on ground or rightclick on enemy units to attack it. As an advanced player you use the shortcuts. Does anyone ever press the "Fight" or "Guard"-Button? At least for me there are many buttons I never ever pressed.
If they are visible, Text with image-background was my idea, too. Images would be more classical like a sword and not fancy-shapes noone understands. Colours? Still have to play around.
Only icons that are input and output (switches) deserve an existance. Even if you shortcut them, they give information about the current situation.

2) What was actually shown on the screenshot: Buildings/Unit-Chassis, Weapons, Modules
Before I had the round buttons, i had different borders depending on the field/purpose. The script understood the units meaning and assigned a proper border. Example:

b_bg_building.png (306 Bytes) Viewed 4045 times

Ingame, I noticed something: Within a context it's always pretty much the same.
Think of a tankfactory. It contains Tanks. Different ones, yeah, but all drive on ground and would get a green border for example. I could make different borders for fast or slow ones, but assigning a colour to a rather special trait of a unit wouldn't work imo. Before you assign the colour to a function, you already learned what the _unit_ is for. Same for weapons: Splitting them up in antiground/antiair/close-combat/arty/support could work, but it's still very alike. So I dropped them.

3) Research: Only in here I could think of more use of colours. Like new weapons, new chassis, ammunition-enhancers, economy, ...

[KaiserJ]

[knorke]

is that the vehicle with the gripper arm from a hundreds pages ago?
I should not have to zoom in to find out.

Different ones, yeah, but all drive on ground and would get a green border for example.

Maybe you could layer multiple images to actually show off what components a unit is made.
ie like

(turret, chasis and body would be different layers on top of each other)

[PicassoCT]

Question is, wouldnt it be easier to make a single unit for every possible variation?

AND THEN.. disguise them as user-choiceable...

[SirArtturi]

KaiserJ, seriously, that beats everything I've seen around here so far!

When that thing is released, nobody can say anymore that spring maps are ugly and our tech is dated - all you need is talented people...

[camo]

[...]
Maybe you could layer multiple images to actually show off what components a unit is made.
ie like

(turret, chasis and body would be different layers on top of each other)

Now we have a unit with more than a weapon. 2 Might be difficult to show properly, but with 4 it will become impossible in the size of a buildpic. The buildmenu shows a path to the final unit anyway. So you constantly see, which chassis you chose, which slot1, slotn.

Question is, wouldnt it be easier to make a single unit for every possible variation?

AND THEN.. disguise them as user-choiceable...

Same like above: Units can have "unlimited" slots from the script itself. Current maximum i could think of is 4, but it might happen to have a 8-Slot unit as well.
Lets assume 10 Chassis, 10 different weapons for each of the 4 Slots
Would be 5^10=100000 different Units. No, I will not premodel them ;P

@KaiserJ: Awesome. No. I can't use words as a reply.

[PicassoCT]

oh, it spring? Sorry KaiserJ, assumed you took one of those glamour shot from a vidya game company and posted it for trollin. Therefore got the Ignore you deserve. Guess have to grab a shovel and a swap and clean that egg and tomatosalat up i threw in silence. Jelly? No im not, never was... never willbe.. okay, im jelly.

[smoth]

It's spring note the distortion from the pod system:(. we need behe's roam...

[SirArtturi]

sweet tears drops down on my cheeks. I love how you used those pipes. I actually tried placing smoths pipes in your last similiar map but they didn't fit in. Still thought it would make your maps even more awesome and alive and it really seem it does!

One question, which can be a slightly critical: What are those red tiny things out there? I'm not sure if they are good there.

But, on the other hand, couple suggestions: You could maybe make features like boxes, and such, for example air conditioners, machinery etc. that would be placed on the walls (or to the ground). It would be rock the map even more alive...

Actually I thought an air conditioner feature already exist. Maybe it's smoths...

[smoth]

Nope I have nothing like that, but I need to. I feel the harbor set needs further expansion, some one else will have to do the tdf defs tho as I am not, that is if I expand that set... It is pd you guys can expand it if you want :/

[KaiserJ]

knorke : well spotted, it is indeed that very same gripper



thanks though all of you guys; ton of work went into it and its not over yet; nice to hear you guys are as stoked as i am.

many moons ago (actually around the time you made seths ravine artturi) i made a very basic sort of layout for this map... had some building models from other things too (zk missions mainly) so i atlased, added, and here is the result

those red features are reclaimables... giant hollow boxes filled with a mineral-rich ferric goo; to commander it tastes suspiciously like red kool-aid (ohh yeahhh) but they probably won't be there in the final... would make that ledge just a smidge too juicy for a reclaim-n-rush

all pipes/features will be available for everyone to use... i have some sort of sick obsession with with pathing so i didn't make any "large building" type models... i tried plonking in some of smoths, and while they looked good, i wasn't super stoked about the results. may use some of the smaller ones though

still to go:

-ssmf... distro tex is done, just needs detail tex
-features... 5 more "boxes" to add
-metalmap... anyone inclined, either PM me or mention it in this thread and i'll send you a heightmap to draw metal on; ive spent so much damned time on this that i want to make sure it plays as well as it possibly can; input from pro players/designers is crucial
-final texture render... adds mex spots / geos / bruces ramp transitions
-hide easter eggs

amazed how much new stuff i've learned along the way with this one

can't have so many nice comments without showing more, so here goes :D ty again dudes for the warm fuzzy


although it looks nice, im changing or removing these pipes from over top of the maps largest and likely busiest choke

the back bits got about a million little platforms to fly your boi to

[Warlord Zsinj]

Looks real nice kaiser

now make coruscant

[smoth]

Looks real nice kaiser

now make coruscant

no you.

[KaiserJ]

honestly, its doable; the hardest bit would be designing the nicely shaped buildings with curves/angles etc to fit nicely with the heightmap (so we don't get the ugly distortion)

edit: the fact that xnormal can give me beautiful 16-bit depth and fits perfectly into my process of mapping gives me seemingly limitless power; i feel like a viking that got handed a rocket launcher

[bobthedinosaur]

wow. those are awesome kaiser

[Cheesecan]

Nice, could be commercial quality.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Yeah, I'd always wanted to do one, it'd just be a huge amount of work for a gimmicky map. Especially once I saw agorm's tree map and realised you could have huge building features like that, as well as the 'void' floating island type maps. I'd do it as something like the old 'over crude water' style map, but instead of having sea bits I would have void, where you just see the big building features disappearing into the distance, and then you'd have a spectacular skybox showing the metropolis continuing forever below and around. Totally possible in Spring currently, but a lot of work.

However, what you've done + orange filter + clouds = cloud city

[SirArtturi]

I'll surely help you with the metal map, just give me the heightmap and I'll introduce my vision how it would play best.