Amagnon
Sergeant
Reputation: +29/-6
 Offline
Posts: 249
Poh and Pik - Karaoke Girls
|
 |
« on: December 07, 2007, 07:48:41 AM » |
|
Due to this becoming a stickied post I will change the intro.
This is a place to collect ideas and issues with the current user interface and propose improvements. A lot of the initial ideas were mine, but Ive since trolled the boards and collected and compiled ideas of others. So if you see your idea here, please dont think Im stealing it - Im just compliing this to make it easier for Emi, and hopefully your idea will have a better chance to be implemented.
Sometimes the interface is ok, but it has to handle a lot of different things. For example, items. Each item behaves in a slightly different way, but are all operated from the same interface - this means that some items are very difficult to use effectively - especially mining and warp items. So if you see someplace where the inteface is struggling due to complexity - post that also.
A great example of a very successful change to the interface was the Fleet Formation idea - where selected fleets now remain selected.
The list is basically organised as follows;
# Title or subject, Proposal, Current Issues.
Current list.
1. Bases. An UNLOAD ALL button. Typing in and refreshing for each ore and credits is painful.
2. Exclusive Check Boxes. Remove exclusive check boxes where possible and replace with fields for "number of runs". Theres a number of places where these are used and you really want to do multiple things at once. Current list; Sell ship designs, delete ships, install modules on bases. You have to do it one at a time, time consuming and messy.
3. Warp items. Change the warp items to a number of turns of free travel. One way to convert them would be to assume their current percentage was applied to a 50 turn jump - so a 10% item would give 10%x50turns = 5 turns free travel. When you activate the items, the turns go into a "Warp Travel Fuel" pool of turns. You can then travel for free while you still have "fuel". For items less than 2% they would have to be rounded up to 2%, yielding one turn of free travel. This is partially a functionality issue, and partly interface. This would eliminate a lot of the messing around with, and general uselessness of warp items.
4. Mining Time. Make a similar change as with Warp Items. Have a "Mining Turns" pool. Activate your mining items to add to the pool, then mine away to your hearts content until your pool is empty. Also - instead of putting in the target amount of ore to mine, put in the number of turns you want to spend, players then dont have to calculate it themselves. This is partially a functionality issue, and partly interface. At the moment you have to recalculate how much you want to mine wih every item you activate - you have to keep track of whats activated, and iterate the mining process over and over. Its a lot of database queries, where one would do, and a great deal of tedium.
5. Activating and selling items. Extend the list to a lot more items, maybe 100. Make sure the sort button still works when you change pages. Also if you type in 5 runs, but only have 4 items then just activate or sell all those items instead of reporting an error. Have an activate all button - that selects all items even ones on the next page, and then an option to sort them into ascending or descending order. This interface is very average in all respects, its tedious, and difficult to use.
6. Secret Base. Withdraw all and deposit all button. Just a nice thing to have, makes it easy.
7. Pages with Lists. List pages are invariably too short, extend them to 50 to 100 items on a page. This includes resupply for ships, upgrades, designs, buying marines, view/edit ships and so on. In some cases the options and controls could be moved to the top of the page to prevent uneccessary scrolling. Its a lot easier and faster to scroll down then it is to click to the next page. Sometimes you want to select several things at the same time - and they are on different pages, so you have to update or buy, then change pages and do it again.
8. Filtering missions. Allow players to type in an upper and lower limit for encrypt level. Being able to filter by level and by distance woud be excellent, and being able to sort by level and also by distance would also be very useful. The filter is extremely limited, its capped at 150+ which makes it fairly useless after a short time playing, and you cant set it up the way you want - also you cant filter by distance.
9. Clicking on missions. Please add mouse-over details on items. To reduce clicking.
10. Alliance leader stickies, or separate board. Allow alliance leader to sticky a post in their boards, or give them a separate posting area. Sometimes people yabber too much and critical info is lost.
11. Outstanding Counters table. Put a table on the attack signatures page showing who has an outstanding counter on the player, and the remaining time for that counter. Its hard for some people to remember apparently ..
12. Add Upgrades when buying a Fleet. It would be nice if you can just select all the upgrades you wish and build the ship from the buy screen. At the moment when you buy a fleet your prompted to select a power core only. THis is just a nice thing to have, its simpler this way.
13. Commander Abilities and Mothership modules displays. Show the maximum bonus available for each modifier, for example if you have +5% attack, then show the cap or limit as well. Eg +5% (80% cap). Show commander XP needed for the next level. At the moment you have to do a subtraction to figure how much XP you need for the next level. Its nice to know the caps for things, and displayed XP required makes it easier.
14. Display Raw ship values. Show the raw values for a ship in the view/edit page along with the adjusted values. Its sometimes difficult to work out what your base ship design is, and is very useful if you want to modify it to know exactly what your raw scores are. Also a displayed fleet power in the view/edit screen would be useful. THis is nice to have.
Theres a lot of really clunky controls in all the interfaces - they really do detract from the game - having to iterate things when you know exactly what you want from the start is annoying - lots of places that happens.
Can people post any other things that they find annoying with the interfaces.
EDITED** Integrated some posts. Updated the mining turns idea. Integrated Kens idea's.
|
