Issues With: The User Interface (UI)

AreaOfEffect · #1 June 8th, 2008, 02:31 AM

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Jazzepi said:I think the UI is terrible. I'm happy to take a shot at the whole thing. At best I would call it manageable, but mostly it's just /bad/. It's difficult to find commanders, difficult to find important provinces, blah blah blah.

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Xietor said:I do not want to turn the Kingmaker Game Thread into a general forum thread for dominions III. So even though i started it with a UI suggestion, mine was game related. heh.

JimMorrison · #2 June 8th, 2008, 02:37 AM

Errr, I'll start then.

1. It would be nice if when you are composing a message, at the top it would say "Message TO XXXXX", currently it says "Message FROM XXXXX", which makes me want to cry, as I already know what nation I am from..... but if you misclick on the list, you are SOL.

(There's 100 that are more important than this one, but I thought I'd bring it up since it's hopefully actually an easy one to deal with.) <3

AreaOfEffect · #3 June 8th, 2008, 02:52 AM

Personally, I agree that massaging via the user interface does lack basic editing functionality.

Also, as we found out in the Kingmaker game, there is a message cap. If that cap is reached, which it clearly can, then all other messages are lost and scouting information, such as the strength and type of nearby indy provinces, is lost with it. Everyone in the Kingmaker is diving blindly into provinces with no information available all because over 21 nations in a 60 player game made a prophet.

Apparently each nation was informed about the declaration of the prophets individually and so individual message was created for each nation for each time this happened. I would be grateful if this feature could be removed with a fix somehow. Reevaluating world-wide messages as a single message rather then a message copied a number of times equal to the nations playing would be ideal. Though I'm sure this is prohibited by a great deal of existing software design and code work.

That said I would settle for a simply consolidation of prophet declarations into one message for each nation. So if one nation declared a prophet in a turn, it would appear as normal, but if two or more declared a prophet, then simply say in a single message:

X is now a prophet of Y.
Q is now a prophet of P.
<so on and so forth>

Xietor · #4 June 8th, 2008, 03:14 AM

Now that we have a proper forum, there is one crucial thing that may not be easy to be fixed that really needs to be fixed.

And that is identification of the province and commander that is killed by a mind hunt. Presently, in the endgame of a 300 province game, i own 4 capitals and 50 or so provinces with many many commanders and scouts spread out all over the map.

When i lose a commander to a mind hunt i get a message that "Shal lie has been mentally attacked. He was slain by the attack." or words to this effect.

The game provides no mechanism for me to know who the heck shal lie was amongst my 100 plus commanders and scouts, or what province was targeted. It would be nice if the game could somehow capture Shal Lie's last moments, showing him sleeping on duty or whatever in province "x", so i can see who he was, what gear he may have had on him, gems he may have been carrying etc.

I am sure Dr. P and llamabeast between them could resolve this issue if they were entrusted with the project!

Meglobob · #5 June 8th, 2008, 03:34 AM

The prophet messages are not needed at all, you should simply get a message reminding you of who you made prophet and no messages at all who every other nation made there prophet.

An individual nations prophet should be a secret, only known to them.

I agree with Xieter about such an such as been slain with no visual record. It drives you mad when mind hunt/seeking arrow, murdering winter, flames from the sky/fires from afar hit you and you after spend ages figuring out what you lost.

A little battle replay showing the flaming bolts (or whatever) coming down on you killing your units would be excellent. Then you could click on goto province so you know where it is and view the units on the battlefield so know exactly what you lost.

MaxWilson · #6 June 8th, 2008, 04:24 AM

I like the fact that prophet announcements are public. It's thematic in the case where you're in contact with the other nation. In other cases, well, I guess you get the information over PretenderNet just like you get the score graphs.

+1 to the Mind Hunt/Fires From Afar/etc. suggestion. A battle replay would indeed be ideal, although there are corner cases where that would be strange indeed (such as when a mage casts a spell that kills himself, like Banquet for the Dead).

-Max

Sombre · #7 June 8th, 2008, 04:47 AM

Remote site searching spells should take you to the province they searched when clicked, not the mage that cast them. That's a bit of a no brainer. They might also create problems with the 'message cap' if you're using too many of them per turn, though I can't see how they could be consolidated really.

This is a relatively minor fix which is the only type of fix I shall mention in this thread - there are so many improvements that could be made to to UI, but focusing on things that could at least conceivably be changed by the devs in a patch makes sense.

Griefor · #8 June 8th, 2008, 05:23 AM

Quote:

AreaOfEffect said:Also, as we found out in the Kingmaker game, there is a message cap. If that cap is reached, which it clearly can, then all other messages are lost and scouting information, such as the strength and type of nearby indy provinces, is lost with it. Everyone in the Kingmaker is diving blindly into provinces with no information available all because over 21 nations in a 60 player game made a prophet.

This seems to me not to be so much a UI problem as a problem with all the seemingly arbitrary limits in Dom3.

Dominions 3 does not scale well at all. The game has a unit cap, a message cap, and who knows what else there are caps on. This is totally unnecessary from a programmer's point of view. Why are there caps? Sure, the size of the data is less controlled without these caps. But reaching the unit cap kills a game anyway, so it's not like the cap actually contributes anything besides killing the games it deems to be "too large to handle" just because they reached some arbitrary cap.

llamabeast · #9 June 8th, 2008, 07:18 AM

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Dominions 3 does not scale well at all

That's probably a bit harsh being as we're able to play things like the megagame, which are _vastly_ larger than was ever envisioned, with only minor problems.

Still, it would be very nice if some limits could be removed or raised.

Xietor · #10 June 8th, 2008, 12:39 PM

that is true, of course. problems encountered in Kingmaker
are not universal issues with dominions III. Dominions III was not designed to play with 61 nations on 1 map.

That said, the issue with mind hunts killing commanders and not knowing who died or where-that happens in every dominions game, except maybe a small map blitz.

I would also like to add, lest we forget, that 99 percent of games sold that do not require a monthly fee, are not continually updated and improved.

The fact that KO, JK, and everyone involved with releasing new patches continue to do this for the fan base is greatly appreciated!

There is a fine line between making recommendations and *****ing, and since we all love KO we want to err on the side of making recommendations(though my love for KO is suspended if I catch sight of demons in my dominion!).