A few comments on UI and design

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A few comments on UI and design

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All Forums >> [Current Games From Matrix.] >> [World War II] >> John Tiller's Campaign Series >> A few comments on UI and design

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A few comments on UI and design - 8/13/2008 10:51:46 AM

borsook79

Posts: 477
Joined: 6/29/2008
Status: offline

Not having played the game "in the olden days" I am obviously judging it from a perspective of a modern gamer. While the game is great there are a number of a very questionable design decisions, especially as far as the UI is concerned:

-no mouse wheel functionality - it would be great to be able scroll lists, text and zoom-in and out with it.
-only a few functions have a button (and I'd say not necessary the most used ones) the rest is accessed by the top menu. Not a bad thing in itself, but who came up with the idea that the menu should be hidden by default? It's extremely unfriendly for new users. It should be visible and then hidden by the "m" key not the other way around.
-many options - unit bases, thermometers, etc etc are not remembered by the game and you have to switch them on each and every time you start the game... very tedious.
-autosave in campaign games does not allow you to play two campaigns at once. Why??
-no real save in campaign games - maybe this is realistic, maybe reloading the same scenario 20 times is cheating, but why forcing this on players? Even if you consider normal saves "cheating" why do you care what people do playing in single player?
-tutorial requiring simultaneous reading of the manual - why can't the text be placed in pop-ups at the start of each turn?
-file encryption - cheating in MP should be prevented, but can't this be done via the game comparing the checksum of the files used by both players? This method works for 1000000 other games... And even if the idea does not appeal to you, why can't the game use encrypted files in MP and unencrypted set in SP?
-undo is completely disabled when using FOW - why can't we undo moves that did not lift the FOW from a single hex?

Post #: 1

RE: A few comments on UI and design - 8/13/2008 10:56:08 AM

marcbarker

Posts: 1213
Joined: 7/6/2008
Status: offline

Nice Comments..... I agree with you whole heartedly....PBEM whould be encrypted...have One Platoon, and weapon etc. Be read and password protected for that function only and have another open ended for the Single player...Why can't the PBEM read a separate structure?

Just Curious

(in reply to borsook79)

Post #: 2

RE: A few comments on UI and design - 8/13/2008 1:26:11 PM

scottintacoma

Posts: 192
Joined: 1/25/2008
Status: offline

Borsook,

I am not sure they went that deep into the game. Mice did not have scroll buttons, or where just getting them when the original was released. I believe the team has spent its time working on correcting errors, not recoding everything from scratch.

Scott in tAComa

(in reply to borsook79)

Post #: 3

RE: A few comments on UI and design - 8/13/2008 1:47:04 PM

borsook79

Posts: 477
Joined: 6/29/2008
Status: offline

quote:

ORIGINAL: scottgibson

Borsook,

I am not sure they went that deep into the game. Mice did not have scroll buttons, or where just getting them when the original was released. I believe the team has spent its time working on correcting errors, not recoding everything from scratch.

Scott in tAComa

I have obviously never seen the source code, so I have no idea whether amending any of these is possible or not. That said I'd say at least some of them should be fairly simple things to tackle, even if mouse wheel support is not one of them.

(in reply to scottintacoma)

Post #: 4

RE: A few comments on UI and design - 8/14/2008 2:24:16 AM

rich12545

Posts: 1705
Joined: 10/31/2000
From: Palouse, WA
Status: offline

Mouse wheel for zooming should be easy to add. I just asked about it again. They recently added it to TOAW so it should be doable here.

(in reply to borsook79)

Post #: 5