Feature: UI: Clickable alerts and alert stream

Discussion in 'Planetary Annihilation General Discussion' started by coldboot, September 1, 2012.

  1. coldboot

    coldboot Active Member

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    When you receive an alert that someone is attacking, there should be a clickable beacon to indicate the location on the map and minimap. However, since it's easy to ignore in the heat of battle somewhere else, there should also be a box that shows list items for game events that, when clicked or right-clicked, will either move your main viewport or open a new one to the associated location.

    Having this event stream separate from chat is crucial, as teammates can sometimes crowd out important events before you have a chance to read them.

    It would be ideal if there were separate types of events such as chat, attacking, engineer can't do something, that are all tagged with different properties, and a player could assign them do different scrollable windows.

    Perhaps the Uber devs don't have time to implement something so elaborate, but designing event streams to be tagged and separated would help the UI mod effort later.
  2. allot

    allot Member

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    Would be a very nice feature. Maby even it requires a utility building to utilize this?
    And it could also tell the level of threat and such.
  3. archer6110

    archer6110 Member

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    I'd say that would be a REQUIREMENT for a game this large, otherwise you'd never know what was going on anywhere. Just a simple "[planet] [unit] [action]" setup that when clicked focuses on said unit on said planet. So when a group comes under attack "P1 MBT's Under attack" all in red, you click and your camera centers on said tanks that were attacked.

    or "Moon 2 Engineers finished mega thrusters" and you know it's time to get moon 2 rollin on a collision course :)

    If these alerts had a seperate UI that could be sorted by planet, unit type or action that'd make it super easy for people to find out what's goin on. Seperating it into multiple windows with filters (by planet, unit type, action)

    Definately +1 for this idea
  4. redarrow7216

    redarrow7216 Member

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    I think you can't say this yet. Would make sneak attacks less fun. Building a radar should be sufficiƫnt. Though I wonder how complex this game will be using various planets. I guess the devs will be discussing this point very thoroughly as it will likely break or make the game.
  5. linecircle

    linecircle Member

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    I assume the premise for better informed players is so that they can spend more time devising strategy rather than being glued to the map. I agree with this. It makes sense for such an advanced robot race to have fully-integrated information networks.

    To put sneak attacks back into the game, you can make the mobile radar-hiding unit also be a "communications disrupter". If you bring one of those with you for the strike, not only do they not see you coming on radar, enemy units within its range will not have their alerts be heard. Then, maybe after a set amount of time, a different alert could appear: "Warning: lost contact with X", and it links to the last known position.

    Note that this allows defensive uses too: place these comm-jamming units along with ambush units somewhere, and you've created a 'bermuda triangle'.

    When the scale of battle grows so large, victory is going to be more about information and command: knowing what is going on everywhere and being able to have all your decisions executed in a timely manner.
  6. molloy

    molloy Member

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    Great idea. When someone attacks I think it's right that the defending player should be able to get their screen to that location immediatedly, especially when you're talking multiple large maps.

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