Unvanquished Forum

Okay, yesterday I have played Unvanquished with my friend. And I have some random thoughts from perspective of someone who never played Tremolus.

1. Base position overlay. I have played on 2 GIGANTIC maps. I spent like 40% of my time trying to figure out what is what and where I am. That was not fun. Indicator of friendly and enemy base + distance in meters would be very helpful. Indicator itself will be helpful to find azimuth, meters distance will help to calculate if I'm getting actually closer or not.

1. Make buying gear for humans more readable. Currently I have to SELL rifle/weapon first to SEE what I can buy. My friend were playing for like 40 minutes and he did not figure that out. Why not show all possible guns at once and if player buys one, just ask him:

SELL RIFLE AND BUY FLAMER?

Simpler.

1. Make buying guns less text, add more icons/pics of actual gear. So new players can instantly learn which gun is which one.

2. Add shiny button to change race:

I really needed some time to figure that out :D

1. What does those % mean?

1. Confidence way of display.

Maybe instead of lot of reading, just use some kind of graphical way? Like progress bar, etc. Having to "read" all the time is not cool during gameplay (for me ofc). Simple progress bar would be easier to read "with corner of eye".

That's it for now :p

1. Next to credits value is "twórcy" (creators) instead of "kredyty". I guess that's bug in PL translation.

All in all - love the game.

majkifajki wrote:

1. Base position overlay. I have played on 2 GIGANTIC maps. I spent like 40% of my time trying to figure out what is what and where I am. That was not fun. Indicator of friendly and enemy base + distance in meters would be very helpful. Indicator itself will be helpful to find azimuth, meters distance will help to calculate if I'm getting actually closer or not.

One of the game mechanics is stealth. Such as from moving the base from one location to another. Having the enemy know where the base is at all times, would defeat this purpose.

majkifajki wrote:

1. Make buying gear for humans more readable. Currently I have to SELL rifle/weapon first to SEE what I can buy. My friend were playing for like 40 minutes and he did not figure that out. Why not show all possible guns at once and if player buys one, just ask him:

SELL RIFLE AND BUY FLAMER?

Simpler.

Haha, yeah, everyone went through this in tremulous. I've rewritten this part in the libRocket branch to manage automatically buying and selling items, which will be merged in...eventually.

majkifajki wrote:

1. Make buying guns less text, add more icons/pics of actual gear. So new players can instantly learn which gun is which one.

Likewise. We have plans to implement a pie menu for buying guns.

A WIP shot I took months ago.

majkifajki wrote:

1. Add shiny button to change race:

I really needed some time to figure that out :D

I guess we could rename "Back" to "Change Race"

majkifajki wrote:

1. What does those % mean?

Percentages are predicted mine efficiencies.

majkifajki wrote:

1. Confidence way of display.

Maybe instead of lot of reading, just use some kind of graphical way? Like progress bar, etc. Having to "read" all the time is not cool during gameplay (for me ofc). Simple progress bar would be easier to read "with corner of eye".

It's actually already been done on the dev server. Connect and see if you like it. the bar at the bottom is the confidence bar.

Such as from moving the base from one location to another.

Omg! I did not know, that base can be moved!

NVM then :D

I like the pie menu idea but it should look like a pie.

No problem

(unfortunately the above image is wrong it should be rotated by 22.5 degrees)
center is cancel(as in you previous image). mouse wheel rotates the menu.
You can select by clicking or by moving outside of the outer circle (but that would need a cursor/crosshair).

Such an image is hard to generate dynamically, so I opted to just use circles.

you are right but one can use prerendered pies in the final product. For testing purposes a pie with more than enough sections could be nice

For now, how bout just a straight line of icons? That'll look good with both circles and square icons, and you won't have to worry about complex coding for the circle formation.

I participated in yesterday's game and have more feedback/suggestions ^_^

CHAT

Current chat is really bad :) It mixes up with server infos, it's placed in far corner of screen, I have to stop looking into gameplay area of screen to read it. Could not we go with this for example:

Font color is same for both teams (consistency) but backgrounds are different. Also backgrounds are blocky, so they fit more HUD. That would make convos so much easier to participate.

CONFIDENCE BAR

Yup, I saw new one. And I still do not like it. In my humble opinion it's not very clear, it's very big and spreaded across screen. Why not go compact:

STAGE <X> and progress bar. That's it :) We can move radar and gear icons more on the bottom, we gain some space and more clear screen.

Still have no idea for aliens HUD though.

TEAM OVERLAY

Current TO is far from being "fast2read" imo. Bots blend in totally. Also - do we need all those data? After health points there are some CE points (I don't know what is that) - those are digits as well, so I got two numbers next to each other, it's confusing for me :<

COLORED NICKS

Please, remove it :) It's messes with my eyes and also, excludes one really cool feature. In Urban Terror there are no colored nicks. I mean nicks have colors, but according to team - blue/red.

So whenever some nick is printed out for some reason - I immediately know if this is concerning friend or foe. And also tells me who's on my team :D

HITSOUND

Please, please - I need audio feedback about my accuracy and to learn if I have inflicted some damage with that shot/swing of claw :)

INDICATORS

It would be worth discussing, if key structures of humans should have indicators. Example from Xonotic:

I have little arrow over my flag telling me "blue base". Maybe new players would appreciate something similar in Unvanquished? Like health regenerating pad would have GET HEALTH hovering over it and buying gear thingy: BUY GEAR?