The Future of PA: small, short-term tweaks

We have seen some impressive developments by Uber recently (just look at the last PTE! ...huge balance changes, several new units, many bugfixes and poshing...) and these surely need testing time for tweaking and balancing. First of all, my congratulations to the team for this amazing work. With this double forum post "The Future of PA" I want to gather the most outstanding issues that the community has identified over the last few weeks (and in some cases, unfortunately, months) which are agreed to significantly improve the game if properly addressed.

Here is a list of suggestions and comments for small changes that are (in principle) easy to implement and that will certainly have a positive impact in the experience of playing the game and navigating its menus and interfaces.

• More Visually-Powerful Menus. The current desing of menus, specially those which do not involve gamplay-related contents and that have a very visible background (main page, loading screens...) have a rather bland colour scheme and overall feel. An easy way to change this could be to add full-resolution, high-quality backgrounds. As backgrounds high-contrast images will do well or, ideally, a short animated loop of some of PA's beautiful in-game space landscapes. Now that the main menu page has so much useful information (patch notes, top 3 players, video contest winners, twitch) players are likely to spend a decent amout of time there so a more visually appealing background will only improve the rutine of opening PA.
• Unit Database. There is a nice mod that already lets users see all the units and stats, having this in vanilla will be a plus.
• In-Game Timer. The current in-game timer is too simplistic as it only shows the time since the system was loaded, not the actual game time, so it provides only approximate information about the stage of the game, specially during the first minutes. My suggestion would be to have a -2:00 countdown for the time when players are choosing the spawn point that stops when all players are ready (as it is now), then a -0:05 countdown for the commanders to spawn (as it is now) with a sound effect that alerts the players for each second of the count down, then the commanders spawn and the timer starts at 0:00 when commanders first hit the ground, the timer pauses when the game ends.
  

• Hotkeys for Factories. Add some hotkey options for selecting all factories of each type (air, land, naval, bot).

• Display Rank Tag after Ranked 1v1. It is very valuable information for the players and I see this people constantly asking for rank in chat. See below for the simplest implementation of this feature:

• Iddle Fabber Hotkey. Fix the issues of the iddle fabber hotkey not responding sometimes and, please, redefine "iddle fabber" as "fabber with only movement actions queued or none actions queued".

• The "VS" Loading Screen for Ranked 1v1. This is how the VS screen looks like now (note the dullness of the overall colour palette):many simple tweaks may improve it considerably and help build-up the hype for the match:
  • First and foremost, make it last for as long as possible. This is the only screen in which players realistically get to show-off their commander models, hold the screen until the system is fully rendered and ready to navigate.
  • Change the background for something more impactful and exciting.
  • Display a big, animated* "VS" logo in the middle of the screen (*same level of animation as the commander models sliding up and down the screen would be enough).
  • Mirror invert the the right-hand-side commander model so that both commanders are facing each other.
  • Display the commander models with the selected color pattern (the default blue+yellow is all over the place and it becomes a bit tiring). Now that we can select secondary colours, it is likely that players will get attached to some colour combiantion, by implementing this small change the commander models displayed in the screen will feel more personal.
  • Here is a sketchy example of the result of these small tweaks (except colour schemes):

Sounds very reasonable and should not be *THAT* hard to do.

regards,
Sekuraz

PS: Don't quote me on this, I have no idea how PA works internally...

PA had some fancy visual effects in the menus before. The issue with that is that due to how coherent works they cannot be rendered in coherent directly, as that EATS cpu. So it would need to be implemented via native opengl drawing. Probably more work. To add more value to the menus I'd rather see them add a simple chatroom implementation with a "global" chatroom that people join once they open the multiplayer tab.

Also you can configure hotkeys for factories I think.

Personally I think most of these are a waste of time, which I never thought I'd say to Zaphy's suggestion threads!

The only think I'd like to see in terms of UI is a global chatroom and overhauled profile page for each player, makes things more social and keeps people coming back. Profile pages, diverse ladder ranks, and customization is what kept millions coming back to play SC2 and the Halo series, mostly Halo 3 +

You need to check my second entry They are all little details that I thought would be easy to implement, no big wishes here...

How do you do it in vanilla?

Ah right only "select idle factories" exists. I never needed more.

Yes please, really annoying when you queue up fabbers and they move to a rally point, and you can't quickly locate them because they're not technically idle.

Precisely!

Forgot one feature (corrected in-game timer) that I find a bit annoying and is also easily fixed. [Updated OP]