Shannon V. OKeets
Posts: 22095
Joined: 5/19/2005 From: Honolulu, Hawaii Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: marcuswatney quote:
ORIGINAL: Neilster Won't the unit indicators change in these situations? Even new players will soon learn to keep a close watch on these. For me, the important thing would be to show the supply status of hexes not units. I'd like to see a supply 'front-line', which means illuminated hexsides depicting the forward edge of supply, rather than big crosses on every unit or hex. I'd also like to see some shading (left and bottom?) around units that are stacked, thickness proportional to size of stack, to give a visual cue to the number of units in the stack. I find the numerals atop the unit do not stand out, especially when there are mountains nearby (e.g. the unit in Gibraltar). Can a player personalise stacking priorities? For instance, in all games, I automatically stack aircraft on top, then land-units then navy. Indeed, I also prefer to stack naval units on the nearest hex-dot. Yes, of course the ships are in the port, but doing this lets you sense at a glance whether your fleet dispositions are sensible. A customising facility like this would be welcome. Displaying a supply frontline would be a lot of new code. In particular, it would require determining which way is 'front'. Usually easy for a person to do using his eyes, but imagine having to figure it out with your eyes closed using only your fingertips - for the whole map. That is how the computer works it out. The status indicators for units cover a lot of other stuff, like whether they are disorganized, providing secondary supply, merely out of supply or isolated, "in flight" over a hex, and so on. These are discrete and simply not shown if everything is honky-dory. That is, the absence of indictators means all is well. I played around quite a bit with thickness of the shading to show # of units in a hex. There simply isn't any room within a hex for doing that. Stacks can be sorted. It can be done individually, by stack, or for all the stacks on the map. There are a variety of choices [I have never looked at the code for this, it was part of CWIF when I strted work on MWIF]. EDIT: I forgot to mention, placing units around on the map where ever you like isn't going to happen. Far too much code depends on the counter/unit's map location - think in terms of 10,000's of line of code.
< Message edited by Shannon V. OKeets -- 3/21/2008 2:30:28 AM >
_____________________________
Steve Perfection is an elusive goal.
|