Spectator/Caster GUI

Like many others, I enjoying watching @ZaphodX's, @wpmarshall's, @cwarner7264's, and many others' videos of Planetary Annihilation gameplay. In particular I enjoy all of the fantastic events that @exodusesports host. Not two weeks ago we watched @elodea vs @BattleBear and saw some fantastic, high level 1v1 play from two excellent players.

However, arguably one thing that slightly detracts from the current experience, in my humble opinion at least, is the UI for in-game spectators. I heard some time ago that the spectator UI was going to get some love from Uber, so I'm creating this post in the hopes of getting a discussion going. What improvements do we want to see? What features would be most useful for casters and casual spectators.

I believe these improvements are integral to making PA a more viewer friendly eSport. I strongly believe that it has potential to be a popular esport but it needs support from Uber and the community to do so. Exodus Esports are paving the way, the community needs to continually promote and highlight the game using videos etc, and Uber of course need to continue to polish the game and make it even MOAR AWESOME! It's a fantastic game, and I love it to bits, and I am proud to say I kickstarted it. And I listen to the soundtrack sometimes because it is so frickin' great, but there's always room for more awesome!

Here are some of my suggestions:

• A new tab that shows condensed economy AND army information. The eco and army tabs should then be expanded to provide more detail (see below suggestions). One of the things I Find most frustrating is when a caster has his UI set to show the army tab, and I desperately want to see what the eco stats are!
• Army tab: I would love to see more detail in this. For instance, can we have two columns for factories, t1 and t2? And an icon to show if an orbital launcher has been started, and if it has been completed?
• Army tab: more unit composition detail? Point defence, AA capable units, and most importantly, distribution of units amongst air, land (bot/vehicle), naval, and orbital. That would be great! You could clearly see in a 1v1 if someone goes heavy on air and the other goes heavy on land or naval, for instance.
• Economy tab: more detail, again, how many t1 mex and how many t2 mex, same for pgens.

Ok so those are just off the top of my head. I will come back with a screenshot later and maybe edit it to demonstrate how these changes could be implemented etc.

EDIT: I forgot, I've always thought it would be nice for casters to have special hotkeys that would allow them to quickly zoom to one team's units. For instance, say if they want to check if a team has built/is building nukes? Just tap the 'zoom to unit' key, which perhaps brings up a menu from which they can select the unit they want to try and find. It would save them searching a whole planet, nay a whole system, for one thing. Almost impossible to do in large games with thousands of units on screen, and very time consuming.

I particularly like the idea of the condensed 'overview' tab, which shows basic eco and army info in a compact view. Then as you say casters can switch to the more detailed tabs to get full info as required.

You as the caster can do that. But what the viewer may disagree with the timing you look around. A constant display of a simple army overview would be great to get an overview, even the the caster is only showing close up fights. Even more important for air/land/navy/orbital distribution.

moderator chain^

M-m-m-moderator kill- kill- kill.

And storage. Spectator view is nearly useless when I'm testing storage based based mods ;^)

Precisely, yes the caster can quickly count how many t2 factories each team has, but the entire point of this thread is to figure out ways for the viewer to easily find out in-game information. Obviously the caster is in control of the GUI so they choose what is displayed and when, but I personally think there should always be the condensed info tab open at all times so that if you're tuning in to a Twitch stream you can quickly get an overall grip on the game (his eco is stronger than hers, but he has more land units, for instance).
Obviously there is a balance to be struck between too much space used on screen, too much complexity. The interface is nice and clean right now, and a little bit more has been taken up at the bottom with the latest patch, so we don't want to waste precious screen space. But I do think we need to let spectators see more data about the game in play.

I totally agree regarding screen space, as said above. It has to be used efficiently. A more condensed UI specifically for casters could be interesting, with tabs for sections and perhaps a small area which constantly displays the key info.

Another very good point, for large team games when a lot of build power is available, you need to see how much energy and metal a team has stored. They might each have a 100 fabbers, but who's got the greatest amount of resources stored!

It would be even better as a spectator to select a player's factory and see what's in the queue.

Radar ranges would be nice, + a much better notification system so casters can zoom to the sort of action they want, we need to be able to disable notifications for t1 structures being build for instance!

I would personally love to see a Production tab. What units and structures are being built right now?

Yeah, but it might be helpful to have a little team-colored progress bar on the edge of the screen for big things, like halleys, nukes, catalysts, etc. Of course, you'd want all of this hide-able so it wasn't visible all the time, but it might be helpful to have.

Look at how Starcraft 2 does it:

A production tab showing what each team currently has queued is definitely something that I would want the caster to be able to toggle on and off; you would not want that on screen the whole time.

When I get home I will try and use my rudimentary GIMP skills to create some concept designs.

at least for 1v1 I want it to be on the whole time

A huge improvement for casting would be better camera motion.
For example, switching between tactical and free camera isn't smooth, like zooming from surface to orbital.
Also free camera navigation enhancements - like adjustable smoothing/dampening for mouse and key-based movements could really help.