Camera-position sensitive message-display

from Sins Forums
Hello.

Based on the ingame videos I saw I'd like to suggest making the message display in the top center of the screen sensitive to the position where the camera is zoomed in.
The idea is that while the camera is zoomed into a battle the player would like to get critical information about the development of the fight. He would like to be informed if a capital ship is reaching a critical status, or when a carrier is withdrawing it's fighters from a target to defend itself and similar information. However, while being zoomed out such information isn't as important. Other information should be selected, like newly detected enemy movement, important information regarding complete fleets ("Our forces around planet X are being crushed!"), completion of important constructions and diplomatic news.
This also has a positive effect on the connection of the player to his units since this would be a way for the units to communicate their view on the situation, which implies that they actually have a view on the situation instead of being mindless AI-ships.

This basically runs down to the AI department. If the AI is smart enough to know what it is currently trying to do ("I'm a support vessel and I'm being attacked, I should get out of the area of danger!") then it is rather easy to make that information appear on-screen at the right time.
In the process the news screen should move to the top right and use a smaller font, since it is going to contain a continuous flow of information. The flow rate should be user defined. The game then selects the defined number of most important information out of all available news, priorizing news posted by entities on the screen and queueing information that doesn't fit now, but still has a very high importance rating for later display.
15,874 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
Heh, to make it a little more simple - you are suggesting that we get infomation and news from the battle we're currently fighting and controlling, rather than far away unimportant stuff?

Right now the game Tells you enemy Forces are approaching a planet , if it's a single scout or an entire armada of capitol ships. It's slighlty annoying to jump to this little annoying scout ship which is utterly useless thinking it could possibly be a threat.

I would like it to be scalable, or atleast measure the threat before it feels the need to tell me.

There's a kinda system implanted already - On the left hand side of the screen there's a panel with each planets picture on, you can click on it and your entire force in that area will be shown as symbols at the side. If a ship is under attack it flashes, I also believe it shows there health bar it is a nice indication of what's going on.

I have to agree though - Getting more vital and interesting info would be a nice feature, rather than a continous voice spam of " The price on your head has increased!!" Which is thankfully getting reduced.

But it brings up an issue, wouldn't these messages overload you? I mean alot happens on a battlefield quickly, my capitol ship could reach critical statues , the enemy could attack my flank and such all at once , which info would it decide be more important to fit onto the screen? I despise getting spammed with a hundred warnings at once.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
yeah it can be a bit annoying to keep getting enemy approaching messages and to found out its a scout, maybe you could adjust the level of the messages and the frequency of them appearing / heard?
Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
I'll talk about this from a programming point of view, which is more structured and conclusive:
Each entity in the game (unit, planet, construction site, but also your treasury or the enemy radar) can post news based on it's status. A freighter could post the news "I'm being attacked by faction X in system Y", a carrier could broadcast "I'm being overrun in system Z", a planet could send "A huge enemy fleet is bound in, requesting reinforcements", even a fighter states "I'm attacking enemy bomber to assist carrier X".
Each of these messages have an importance rating. The reinforcements-request from said planet has a higher importance than the freighter that is being attacked.
Also each message has the location from where it was sent saved.
All messages, regardless of importance, are stored in a queue. Messages are removed from this queue when they are displayed or when they get old (messages with a low importance have a short lifetime).
Messages are selected for display by using a display-rating that is based of the ratio of importance to distance from camera to the message's position and some other factors to tweak the behaviour. The treshold value for this display-rating that is used to decide wether to display a message or discard it is variable. If there are many messages the treshold rises which has the effect that only more important messages that are closer to the camera are displayed. This mechanism maintains the user defined rate of messages. If there are few messages the treshold lowers and messages are more likely to appear on screen. If the player lowers the desired rate of messages the treshold rises, etc.

By the way think only very few of these messages should have voice-overs. Color-coding should be used to identify very important messages ("very important" = display-rating way over the current treshold), voice-overs should be used to denote messages that have a global effect, like a peace-proposal.