Hi, can somone explain me, how i can diosable the new energy and metal bar. i will for me the olkd back. How can i do?
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i have solved this for me, dont need help again: F11 deactivate "chilli economy Panel Default" deactivate "chilli economy Panel with balance Bars" scroll down activate "chilli Resource Bars classic(mod)"
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It is much easier and quicker for the eyes to watch two lines one on top of the other than two lines on next to the other. I prefer old bars. I never looked at the numbers, I am just noticing whether the bar is growing or depleting, that's enough for me to know whether I am producing enough or not.
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Red flashing when full is bad too, as you think it's depleted and follow an opposite behavior. Green flashing is better and still draws attention (Players will learn green flashing is bad too).
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a negative vote from Shadofury, because I believe that I did not like the new resource bars? What is it for the ne bullshit. Then I can without any justification all your posts negative rate, or even get an explanation?
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Maybe it's just the language barrier, but I keep feeling like I'm seeing your posts complaining about adjusting and refining the UI, and I'm getting sick of it. It keeps sounding like "I tried it for 2 minutes, it's different, I hate it", rather than giving some time to adjust first before comparing.    Connetable: I've mentioned time and again, bars are sub-optimal for player action feedback. Players don't directly control what is in the bars (unlike, for example, the various bars in fighting games), they only control its derivative, which is very clearly indirect feedback. However, they do directly control the gross income and spending (and arguably net income, but that's less monotonic). So if that element, which has the most direct feedback, is the most visible then it makes it easier to understand what is going on as players build economy, build non-economic things, and get their economies smashed.
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I think I might have finally put my finger on my problem... - A bar representation makes sense for energy and metal reserve, but a bar representation does not make sense for income (derivative over time) - Income (gross, net, whatever) can be adequately represented by a number - Making a number bigger and bigger beyond a certain point does not make it any more readable or useful, but shrinking a bar makes it almost useless beyond a certain point - Hence, having a bar which is smaller than the numerical display for change-over-time is not necessarily good, despite the change-over-time being the more important display. Also, I think the display of current storage is, at the very least, only slightly less useful than change-over-time. I find it important to know how much metal I'm storing reasonably often. tl;dr: "It's more important so it must be bigger" does not convince me as an argument.
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Think in terms of someone totally unfamiliar with the interface. The biggest items and the items that move/flash the most are going to grab attention. Since the current default resource bar makes storage and change-over-time (both the positive and negative components) equally sized, just differently positioned, so it is very present.
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Are we talking about the same resource widget here? The current one has a storage bar to represent fullness and reserve. There is a numeric display of the current storage as well as income and pull.
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quote:
Think in terms of someone totally unfamiliar with the interface. |
While I think that aspect is worthy of consideration I don't think it is the most important consideration.
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I've encountered the new split-window bars as the new default and i like them less than the balance bar version with huge income numbers.
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(Just as a heads-up, I don't like criticizing what is supposed to be a final version. I'm really trying not to be negative and unconstructive here. But I must concur that the new version is not really an improvement.)     Shadowfury333, your intention with tightening the feedback loop is clear. I would still argue though that, instead of requiring a player to do things and observe what happens in the UI from them, you could immediately make them understand a part of the UI (the resource bar), since they are familiar with the concept (which virtually any player will be, especially if you use numbers in it). Working out things is way easier when you already have absolute confidence in your understanding of at least part of the UI. That's what the current version is lacking. [Spoiler]Right now, they may recognize the resource bar as "amount stored" and maybe find the correlation with the grey number below it. But expecting a new player to grasp how the red and green number add up to "arrows x 10" in the bar (rounded at 5), which changes the grey number left of the red and green number is illusoric. I think you'll have to agree that this is not as straightforward as it could be.
In my eyes there's too many economic concepts to be understood for a new player that the economy UI can leave any room for confusion. I can see how you conclude from this that showing net is not immediate enough in the feedback, but showing assorted information in various formats without even conveying how they interact/depend is not sufficient.
Maybe it's different for other people, but I immediately loved the resource bars we had when I joined: ZK was the first game that put all the information I ever wanted about my eco in a concise but unambigous manner in one place right in the UI. "That has to be the storage, and those two small numbers (red/green) make the big number right next to them."
I'm not saying what we had was the best thing since sliced bread, there surely is room for improvement. I don't think the current bar went into the right direction though. Really, if your main selling point is "less screen estate used" then you can hardly argue for newb friendliness.
I'm mainly unsure why you are afraid of showing more numbers. As long as their meaning is absolutely clear ("x/y" in the storage bar) and they are not too prominent, they will not create confusion, but they'll be of tremendous help in allowing players to understand things. Read: You can just make numbers you consider irrelevant small and contrast-less. From there, removing them doesn't serve a real purpose.
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it is important to consider what is good for players in general, not just a handful of them. though,all things really need to do here is please the correct 2 people and bam it's a fact that it's the best thing since sliced bread(even if they change their mind later). so now I just spend a lot of time watching, and laughing. I don't even if I get a neg or a rage comment on this post it really is funny to see how you all interact.
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My reduced preference for net compared to gross is more rooted in being able to make clear how much income one has, as that is really important to knowing what stage of the game one is in. I did add net to the last version of my economy panel, but that panel suffered from a lot of varying font sizes and a lack of focus, which I think @Googlefrog did a great job of rectifying in this resource bar. However, and I keep saying this, The resource bar is not a health bar. Go play a fighting game, any fighting game (other than Smash Bros, as that uses a totally different system), and observe how the health bar is directly tied to actions happening to the player. The feedback is instant, and furthermore it is the absolute most important thing that the player needs to watch, as its depletion signals the end of the match. Contrarily, Zero-K's resource bar is a minor piece of information (how much spare metal/energy can I overspend with?) and its state has no immediate bearing on how close one is to losing. It being empty just means the player can only spend within their income, it getting close to full just means the player should get cracking on more units, neither state is anywhere near as serious as an empty health bar. This, on top of it being indirectly controlled, leads me to see no reason to afford it pride of place when there are far more immediately relevant and directly controlled pieces of data that can be prioritized. The current resource bars are patterned after Company of Heroes/Dawn of War/Rise of Nations, which basically show the same as this without the bar or the gross spending. If I could, I'd remove the bar entirely, and just have "current storage/max storage" displayed instead, having it flash when full or in eStall, but since it is necessary for the reserve mechanic I never got rid of it in my proposed design. Frankly, I have no idea what possessed Cavedog (Total Annihilation's developers) to use and prioritize a bar for the resources, but given that they also inflicted the horror of paginated build menus I figure they just didn't have a trained UI designer on the team. The only possible reason I could see is that, without the 1:1:1 build system that Zero-K has, the bar is an easy way to see that your economy has shifted from beneath your feet because your factories are now producing a different unit. Given that having one's economy be on such unstable footing in the first place is a design decision ZK has long since moved away from, I fail to see the justification for a bar over a pair of numbers, given how the level of priority bars command is excessive for this data.
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I like the new eco bar more than the old one. The income/outcome numbers are bigger and easier to read, unlike the old bar. However, I do miss the net spending number. I understand it was very useless because it fluctuated so much, but after taking a few readings you could gauge your economy pretty well("oh I need a caretaker" or "oh I need about 2 more solars"). Now you might say, "@Fealthas can't you subtract two numbers?". I can, and do, but it would be faster to have it all in one place. An idea I had about this net number to reduce fluctuation - Instead of displaying the net for each second, it displays an average net income of the last 15 seconds(adjustable in options for player pleasure)? This would make sense with the "at a glance" economy decision making. About the bars themselves, I agree with Shadowfury333 - They are not very useful as one should always be empty and the other always full, and take up a lot of screen real estate. I would be in favor of taking some of this space to implement a net number. As for resource reserves, I saw BAR have the perfect solution for this. You click a little button in the corner of the eco bar, and set your reserves and energy conversion ratio. The whole bar being there just so you can set reserves seems a little excessive considering you might change your reserves once a game. As for the >>> and <<<, I found those very confusing and unclear in what they mean. What is the difference between < and < < ? 10m / s? 5m / s? Is it based on spending versus income or unrelated to your size of economy?
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Instead of net income, I think I might prefer a metal stall rate that become negative when metal increasing, and a energy overflow rate that become negative when energy storage decreasing. When metal storage decreasing or energy storage increasing they would be shown as 0. I'm pretty sure I can't be the first one proposed this idea so it must have been rejected in the past, why are these worse than net income numbers?
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I think the main problem in this discussion is that different parties have different goals/target audiences in mind. -Part of Shadowfury333's argument seems to be aimed at helping a completely new player understand the economy. -Another (substantial) part of it seems to worry a lot about screen estate, apparently GF shares that concern. -The various players who came here for the actual thread title likely want something more "traditional", they probably don't care anymore about how immediately they control the largest number. -From Skasi's post I infer that there is also a demand for a high information density version. I don't think one bar can satisfy all these at once. About the individual arguments though: Player feedback [Spoiler]
Frankly, I still don't really see why making the player actions have immediate feedback in the UI is important.
-> Do you want players to learn the UI quicker? I don't feel this is the case, the UI is not trying to be intuitive at all.
-> Do you want players to have actionable intelligence? That's what net would be better for. (Negative net e income? Build e.)
As you mentioned, you want to know the "stage of the game". Yes, that's what gross income is good for. But do you need to query that every few seconds, warranting a prominent spot in the UI? I doubt it.
Nobody is advocating against showing gross income and spending. I just can't subscribe to the argument that they should be the most visible things.
Healthbar argument: [Spoiler]I also think the fighting game health bear isn't actually as different as you think. Yes, in most fighting games you only take chunks of damage and thus taking that damage results in change of the HP. But that's the same with building a unit in e.g. SC: It immediately changes your storage.
If the fighting game involved DoT (damage over time) or similar rapidly damaging effects, then what you would need to know (according to your argument) would be how much dps you're currently taking and how much you're currently healing, because that is what your actions influence directly.
And while having full metal or 0 energy doesn't immediately make you lose the game, having a full metal bar means you need to do something. The economic importance of keeping your metal storage low is very significant (I don't have to explain to you why that is).
So, in my eyes, the resource bars are like a health bar: You can see the health of your economy.
(Yes, there are cases when this analogy also breaks down, like getting a big chunk of reclaim. You get the point though.) Just for me to understand: Do you want immediate player action feedback in the UI for a particular reason? Or just because?
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I think the economy is a little confusing to new players regardless, I think displaying it as filling and depleting storage with a net gain and loss number to get you used to the idea that that's what's important is best. Trying to show them bars that display metal and energy balance, when you don't really know where it's meant to be or what that means is sorta bad (Technically, it should be a little more yellow than grey). Though I appreciate the 'Build X' remarks.
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