Inter-Stellar/Planetary Travel

General
81

I’m playing through Freelancer (again), and I’ve been bumping up against this issue of target icons just sitting on the screen border. They’re triangles in Freelancer, which would translate to this idea really easily: the more obtuse the angle, the more “behind” they are. Distance could then be represented by opaqueness.

Agreed. I’m more than a little embarrassed that I didn’t think of that myself. Displaying the orbit trails very quickly gives you a sense of position in the planetary system. Planet icons could also appear on the HUD once they’re too small to resolve.

82

I meant VR hardware. Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear, etc. The ability to casually look around would add tremendously to a player’s ability to maintain situational awareness.

[quote=“lolsparta4, post:80, topic:455”]
If travel times need to be different for the two games, then how will it be explained? technically and lore wise.[/quote]

I would assume that the movement system will be the same. The only reason to change it is if Infinity:Battlescape has some sort of issues. If there is a change, then the MMO can explain it by saying that the drives have been upgraded because of improved technology or downgraded because of safety issues. Or just ignore the change because nobody really cares that much.

Note that traveling between stars in the MMO is expected to use a different travel system referred to by Flavien as jumping.

[quote=“Kichae, post:81, topic:455”]
I’m playing through Freelancer (again), and I’ve been bumping up against this issue of target icons just sitting on the screen border.[/quote]

I cannot stand those icons, regardless of where the target is. I’d really like to be able to play a space game without having to spend all my time tracking hexagons. Particularly the ones that slide around on the edge of my screen.

One simple solution to the problem of seeing icons instead of ships is to just artificially inflate the ships. Put enlarged, translucent ship models on top of the actual ships. That way I can spend my time looking at ships.

For something like a space shooter, I think VR hardware may be the only practical way past those awful offscreen icons. Given that, players would be obliged to do their own tracking by turning their head. If their ship has a blind spot, it’s up to them to deal with it. If the blind spots are not manageable, then the game designers have screwed up.

83

Oh, sorry for the confusion.
VR hardware would certainly be a boon, and I’ve heard that flight/space sims were some of the genres to gain the most from VR hardware. But we can’t expect it to be commonplace before at least a few years, so there must be solutions that work on a screen.

Apart from the screen border issue, icons are what is used by actual military on HUD and HMD. Though both have limited FoV due to hardware limitations. They are efficient, and that’s probably why they are used so much in space shooters.

But having an inflated ship displayed instead could be a great idea, that should definitely be experimented on.
Instinctively, I would go with a translucent model with a simplified wireframe and/or a silhouette to help fast identification of model and orientation by shape, though other options may work as well. Ideally, this could be set by the user.
Another advantage is that it would help give I:B a distinctive look, something that shouldn’t be underestimated.

You were suggesting the same thing above for celestial bodies, which is in fact used by other games like Kerbal Space Program or Sins of a Solar Empire when you zoom out far enough on the map - and it works pretty well.

1 Like
84

I abhor it when a game requires me to be efficient. That removes the fun for me, and turns the experience into something as serious as warfare itself. That’s just not something that I’m interested in, though I know there are plenty who want as much of that harshness as they can get.

As a mental exercise, what happens when the icons go away? Let’s include the idea of inflated ships so that so long as a ship is in your field of view (and at a range of consequence), you can see the ship.

What tools could the player have available?

  1. A button to keep the view centered on the player’s target. From there, the player has to figure out how to maneuver his ship to get it pointed at that target and/or maneuver relative to the target.

  2. A button to keep ‘ship forward’ centered on the target (within the limits of the ship’s capabilities).

  3. Related to the above, a mode that tells my ship to maneuver relative to the target. If I’m always pointing at the target, then if I press W, I should move closer to the target (within the limit of my ship’s capabilities). S, farther away. D and A orbit right and left. Q and E orbit up and down.

  4. A mode that tells my ship to maintain station-keeping with the target (within the limits of the ship’s capabilities). As the target maneuvers, my ship maneuvers to stay at the same general location. So I can then maneuver relative to the target.

  5. A button to keep the ship’s selected weapons on the player’s target, turning the ship as needed.

  6. Some free look mechanism, such as a modifier key to allow the use of the mouse to look around. Alternately, a set of look-around buttons, such as the numeric keypad.

  7. An on-demand combat radar that can both fill the screen and be stable so that the player gets a sense of everything around his ship - that can be seen by his ship. It’s essentially a third person view with restrictions.

  8. A combination of any of the above,

I figure that there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and that icons are not necessary. Personally, I find that they just produce a mess on the screen. I want to preserve those beautiful visuals that the INS team is working on by not cluttering the screen with a bunch of HUD crap. HUDs are not beautiful. The universe is beautiful.

85

You’ll note that I considered the inflated ship as an interesting alternative idea that should definitely be experimented on. That said,

It is not the game that is asking you to be efficient, it’s the players (and designers) that are asking the UI to be efficient. A good measure of efficiency of the UI is how much you think about it, for example, the less the better.
This is why FPS HUDs look more like Half Life’s than Doom’s, for example.

Icons (when done right) are good at giving the important information fast without obstructing the view. Look at a fighter’s HUD: while primitive by game design standard (many are at least 20 years old, and militaries tend to be conservative on top of that), they don’t obstruct view that much or look that cluttered.
With modern game design and aesthetic experience, you could get a pretty transparent UI (as in, you don’t think about it) that shouldn’t hide the game proper (and its great looks) much.

Now, let’s come back to this inflated ship idea. In essence, they pretty much are evolved icons. Instead of drawing an abstract or stylized shape representing the ship, you draw the ship itself.
What information does it bring?

Like icons, it tells you there is something there, and where it is (I’m assuming both are done in a way that shows the order of distance).
Like icons, it tells you what it is - for icons by identifying the shape and remembering what it is associated with, for ships by direct identification. Note that identifying a ship can be harder than identifying the simple shape of an icon, because a ship is a more complex object that require more effort to analyse. This is why I recommended drawing its silhouette and/or simplified wireframe on it as well - the simpler shapes would give a fast identification, while the ship itself would still be visible.

Unlike icons, it shows its orientation in 3D, simply by looking at where it is pointing.
Unlike icons, if there is visible damage or visible activity, you can identify it. So you know if it is fleeing you at full-speed, or if one of its engine has been blown.

As a disadvantage, though, it may make harder to see what’s happening with several close targets, as overlap would be worse. When you see a bit of a triangle, you know it’s a triangle. When you see a bit of a ship, it can be harder to guess what ship it is.
Another disadvantage is that you cannot rely on icon shape to identify friend and foe - and colour may or may not be relied upon, as it must be playable by colour-blind people.

86

The game is asking me to be efficient because the game designers want it that way. Nothing is preventing game designers from coming up with inefficient UIs. ARMA 3 has an inefficient UI. You are required to look around if you want to understand your surroundings. The same is true with every simulator of aircraft prior to modern HUDs. They are inefficient, and require the player to make up the difference.

I prefer the ARMA 3 approach because it does not empower players to excess. That is one of the great tragedies of modern game design: empowering players. Everyone has the same information - they have all information. So everyone ends up making the same decisions. The result is what I consider to be trivialized gameplay.

The upside is that with trivialized gameplay comes accessibility. If the game is simple to play then anyone can play it and succeed. If a segment of gameplay relies on a player’s skill to maintain situational awareness, then only players who can keep that sense will find success. Then there’s success in the hangar, but I don’t want to even consider that side of things.

The ships themselves are evolved icons. Note that the inflated ship approach was intended to eliminate off-screen information. If you’re chasing a ship and it gets out of your first person view, it gets out of view. I can imagine having tracking aids for your target, but not for everything in your vicinity.

[quote=“ThornEel, post:85, topic:455”]
When you see a bit of a ship, it can be harder to guess what ship it is.[/quote]

You’ve just described two awesome advantages. Now there’s a reason to fly in close packs, and to send scouts to find out what’s going on in those packs. Also, to have players communicate with each other.

87

I wouldn’t call it inefficient.

I haven’t played ARMA 3, so I will assume it is the same kind of UI than Red Orchestra 2: one with very little information, to be closer to what a soldier would perceive in this situation. So no helpful icon telling you “there is a machine-gunner hidden behind this wall”.
This UI is actually pretty efficient: it doesn’t take a big part of your screen like old FPS, nor does it requires you to constantly look at an UI element or another to get the information you need while you should be focusing on enemies around you.
Oh the other hand, it gives you very little information, as part of the game is precisely to look at things “with your own eyes” and remember how many bullets are left in the magazine. But that is not an UI choice, it’s a game design choice.

I personally feel that the game should give the player awareness of their surroundings, which includes if there are ships behind them, or what is the composition of a nearby ship pack.
Not only I feel that having all the capital information displayed on screen is better, particularly in such an environment and gameplay where it is very easy to be disoriented (no up and down, constant changes of orientation and speed…), but I feel that it would give a far too big advantage to those with TrackIR or VR helmets.
And again, this isn’t an UI design choice, but a game design choice that will then drive UI design choices about how to display the remaining data. It is also a game design choice that about all space shooters I played went for (if with inefficient UIs such airplane-like combat radars) and IMHO for good reasons.

An inefficient UI is practically never a good thing in a game. Once it is decided what data should be showed to to the player with how much precision (and how obfuscated), the UI has to be as efficient and transparent as possible (‘efficient’ include things like aesthetics here).
UI design concerns may also force game design choices, but in an opposite way: if it is impossible to display the chosen data efficiently, game design may have to be changed to account for it.

1 Like