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Topic: A couple of minor suggestions

Marlhin
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Posted at: 2018-09-12, 16:35

Hey guys!

Been playing Widelands for a while now after replaying The Settlers 2 and I first of all want to thank you all for this great game! To make it even better, I also want to contribute to the project. Unfortunately, I am no programmer or designer. Hence, the only thing I can think of now is to give you guys some suggestions and maybe there are other people who would like to see one of these features be implemented into the game. Hopefully, this is the right way to do this!

Optional fog of war

We already discussed about fog of war in another thread I started where I asked if it is possible to turn the fog of war off like in Settlers 2 Return to the Roots. Unfortunately, the only way to do this is quite cumbersome and very unintuitive. I think it would be a great for the player if there would be an option in the game creation menu (single and multiplayer) to turn off the fog of war. So for multiplayer matches, if the host turns off the fog of war, it would be disabled for every player in the game. I mainly list this feature here because there are other players who would like to see such a feature in the game.

Show building option at mousecursor

One minor thing I miss in Widelands but which can be found in The Settlers 2 is that in S2 you can see the possible building size at the mousecursor (in the case of Widelands, where the yellow cross is). This is quite useful if you do not always want to have those little yellow icons be shown across the game world. At least I do not want to the press spacebar everytime I want to place a building at a position where I already know that there is some proper spot e.g. for my farm just to make sure that I do not missclick.

Utilization at building UI

Another small feature I think would be quite handy is printing the utilization of a building like a forester at the window of the building. You can already see the worker, his/her experience etc but also adding the current utilization would come in handy since I am not the type of gamer who who would always enable the status texts of the buildings (I like to watch at my little people while doing their stuff without any immersion breaking texts over the buildings) and instead of pressing "s" just to check the utilization of a building I would additionally like to click on the specific building and have all necessary information there, like in the later Settlers games.

These are my suggestions I collected after playing two full games. Tell me what you think and maybe we can collect some more ideas to improve the game!

Thanks a lot and have a nice day!


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2018-09-13, 07:16

Welcome to the forum!

Optional for of war is already a wanted feature

For the other features, do you have screenshots so we have a general idea of what it would look like?


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kaputtnik
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Posted at: 2018-09-13, 22:52

Marlhin wrote:

Show building option at mousecursor

One minor thing I miss in Widelands but which can be found in The Settlers 2 is that in S2 you can see the possible building size at the mousecursor (in the case of Widelands, where the yellow cross is). This is quite useful if you do not always want to have those little yellow icons be shown across the game world. At least I do not want to the press spacebar everytime I want to place a building at a position where I already know that there is some proper spot e.g. for my farm just to make sure that I do not missclick.

This was discussed some time ago. I see also disadvantages and advantages for this:

  • Enabling the buildhelp has the advantage to plan where to place which building. Very important in the beginning of a game.
  • Having the buildhelp icons on mouse move can maybe very disturbing, because the mousepointer switches very fast to different icons
  • Later in the gametime, when there is anough space, this can be useful

Utilization at building UI

Another small feature I think would be quite handy is printing the utilization of a building like a forester at the window of the building. You can already see the worker, his/her experience etc but also adding the current utilization would come in handy since I am not the type of gamer who who would always enable the status texts of the buildings (I like to watch at my little people while doing their stuff without any immersion breaking texts over the buildings) and instead of pressing "s" just to check the utilization of a building I would additionally like to click on the specific building and have all necessary information there, like in the later Settlers games.

I think this could be implemented with an additional tab in a buildings window called 'statistics', where the information is shown which is also shown when hitting 's'. No idea if this would be worth the work though. Personally i have always the 's' switch turned on, mainly because it shows me also the manning of military buildings. I find it not disturbing to have this strings on top of a building.

But it is very important to have suggestions like yours face-smile.png So a big thank you face-smile.png


Fight simulator for Widelands:
https://wide-fighter.netlify.app/

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Nordfriese
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Posted at: 2018-09-14, 11:48

instead of pressing "s" just to check the utilization of a building I would additionally like to click on the specific building and have all necessary information there

think this could be implemented with an additional tab in a buildings window called 'statistics', where the information is shown which is also shown when hitting 's'. No idea if this would be worth the work though.

Since the information shown by »S« is just one short string, it could also be possible just to add this string to the title bar of the building window (like "Tavern (50%=)", "Outpost (2 soldiers)")

Personally i have always the 's' switch turned on, mainly because it shows me also the manning of military buildings. I find it not disturbing to have this strings on top of a building.

Me too. I guess most players have this enabled most of the time…

Show building option at mousecursor

Not quite sure what you mean here. That the buildhelp icon for the field that is pointed at is always visible, regardless of whether buildhelp is turned on or off? That could be useful, but it would look jumpy and disturbing IMHO. -1 for that, unless it would be optional.


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dreieck
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Posted at: 2018-09-14, 12:58

I want to add to this:

Because it is not easy to remember for each tribe how different training-levels translate to real strength, and because defense and full health value can be subsumed into one value and evade in a statistical consideration also, I would like to have on the icon above the soldier something displayed which makes it easy to compare real soldier strengths also between soldiers of different tribes:

  1. The current attack value (damage points an attack would inflict),
  2. the effective statistical health, i.e. the current full-health-value scaled with the current defense and evade ratio (HP/((1-DE)*(1-EV)) (where DE and EV as a proportion is in the range [0..1])).

Not sure how to do it nicely; could be tiny font numbers (bars are difficult because maximum length can differ a lot from tribe to tribe).

Edited: 2018-09-14, 13:55

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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2018-09-14, 19:00

Those numbers would probably be too tiny to read... maybe we could have a tooltip. Some creative icon redesign might also solve the issue.


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Marlhin
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Posted at: 2018-09-15, 10:43

Nordfriese wrote:

instead of pressing "s" just to check the utilization of a building I would additionally like to click on the specific building and have all necessary information there

think this could be implemented with an additional tab in a buildings window called 'statistics', where the information is shown which is also shown when hitting 's'. No idea if this would be worth the work though.

Since the information shown by »S« is just one short string, it could also be possible just to add this string to the title bar of the building window (like "Tavern (50%=)", "Outpost (2 soldiers)")

This would be a nice solution!

Show building option at mousecursor

Not quite sure what you mean here. That the buildhelp icon for the field that is pointed at is always visible, regardless of whether buildhelp is turned on or off? That could be useful, but it would look jumpy and disturbing IMHO. -1 for that, unless it would be optional.

Here is a screenshot I took from Settlers 2 Return to the Roots:

Buildhelp at Cursor

Exactly what you meant! In this screenshot the overall build helper is turned off but you can still see the buildhelp icon at the specific field you are pointing to. Although I am no expert, I think that making this features optional, once it is fully implemented, via a checkbox in the options menu wouldn't be too difficult.

@dreieck: Thanks for your input! This would also be some nice additional information but as you've already noticed it is quite difficult to properly show the information to the player.


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Nordfriese
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Posted at: 2018-09-15, 12:38

Those numbers would probably be too tiny to read... maybe we could have a tooltip. Some creative icon redesign might also solve the issue.

I don´t think showing them over the soldiers´ heads could look good. How about showing them in military building windows? There is currently one line of training level info for the soldier that is pointed at; we could have another line underneath showing the exact numbers.


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GunChleoc
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Posted at: 2018-09-17, 14:26

Marlhin wrote:

Show building option at mousecursor

Not quite sure what you mean here. That the buildhelp icon for the field that is pointed at is always visible, regardless of whether buildhelp is turned on or off? That could be useful, but it would look jumpy and disturbing IMHO. -1 for that, unless it would be optional.

Here is a screenshot I took from Settlers 2 Return to the Roots:

Buildhelp at Cursor

Exactly what you meant! In this screenshot the overall build helper is turned off but you can still see the buildhelp icon at the specific field you are pointing to. Although I am no expert, I think that making this features optional, once it is fully implemented, via a checkbox in the options menu wouldn't be too difficult.

Thanks for the screenshot.

How about we have this when the overall buildhelp is switched off, as the default view? The option could be a radius, just like we have for the editor tools.


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hessenfarmer
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Posted at: 2018-09-17, 20:10

2 quick ideas for preventing the cursor being to jumpy:

a) have 3 options for the build help: on, off and on cursor
b) only show the icon if the mousepointer hovers longer than 0.5 seconds on the same spot.

Perhaps both can be combined.


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