Building range

[H.A.H.]

How do you know exactly how far your citizen can work? This suggestion shows this whenever you select such a building.

Screenshots:






Currently working on heuristics to make the regions appear a bit nicer, specifically in these situations:




What do you think?

[H.A.H.]

My own opinion on this is the following:

* The fisherman/quary are ugly: they often only indicate single-sized fields or lines. This can be made nicer to outline the actual mountain or lake, instead of the contact point of the citizen.
* When calculating the mountain or lake, it will never extend further than the maximum range of the building; you won't have the whole ocean highlighted whenever you have selected a fisherman next to it.
* Currently, the lines are drawn on-top of the fog-of-war, while it is below the shadow of entities (different than regular build region indicator). I will fix it that it will not draw on any unexplored areas.
* I tried filling the area with color, but this turned out to be very ugly. Transparency is also not used in the game at all, except for the 'modern' shadows.
* While placing a building, the area is not yet visible. This may become an extension to this idea, to help city planning even more.
* To do: Woodcutters/Farmers will also highlight the objects that are ready to cut/harvest in the same color as the region.
* Not sure about color.

And perhaps I want to experiment with changing the flag-color of the selected building to a white flag, in the same sense as selected unit groups. This helps you interpret the indicated region even better.

[Ben]

Thanks, H.A.H, for this. I recently brought this up, my idea was similar to what you have presented (only I didn't have pictures, thus my thanking you). However, if we could implement a "circular" way to show the word-diameter, than that would be much better.

[Krom]

IMHO the principle is good, just dont keep that mode enabled for all houses

1. Agreed, we could take outline and grow it insode the stone/water body by e.g. 10 tiles, to have a nice area
2. Yep, see #1
3. Sounds fine
4. I would suggest to try to make outline solid, with rounded corners (~10px) and a blur inside (example: http://i.imgur.com/FpTZwXFl.jpg)
5. Needs playtesting
6. Sounds good, could be a bright dot/tile within selection highlight

Overall I find the implementation rather nice
Did you write the actual code, or are these photoshopped images?

[H.A.H.]

This is from actual code.

I also should update to show tower range.

[H.A.H.]

Selected house now also uses same coloring technique as the currently selected unit group. I.e. it makes the house flag white (or black, if you have a light flag color), but not your citizens in it.

[Krom]

This is rather superflous and confusing feature because:
A - you always know which house you have just selected;
B - there are no actions within houses that would need to keep menu open for long (risking to forget which exact house you have selected);
C - white waving flag looks like a sign of surrender.

P.S. Sent ticket to Tom to split last post into a new topic.

[T*AnTi-V!RuZz]

I'll just see where this is going. I don't think this needs splitting because you just killed his idea
I might split it later.

[sado1]

C - white waving flag looks like a sign of surrender.

With this logic, Da Revolution's whole city always begs for mercy...

[Krom]

C - white waving flag looks like a sign of surrender.

With this logic, Da Revolution's whole city always begs for mercy...

Good to see you don't have objections about items A and B
I'm talking about single white flag in a city of colorful flags. Warriors standards have different shape and do not resemble surrender flags when one is white.

[Ben]

C - white waving flag looks like a sign of surrender.

HAHA! Nice one Krom poor baker is tired of feeding the town by himself.

[H.A.H.]

A - you always know which house you have just selected;

- The message action "Go To" is also changed to select the subject house. Instead of having a highlighted rectangle around a house, you can see the white flag.
- Whenever you have two houses of the same kind next to eachother, it is hard to see which one is selected and operated on.
- In the case of some houses that show a range, you need a visual indication of which house is selected, namely that changes the interpretation of the range. In some cases, it is possible that two houses share a large range, and it makes it harder to "see" which house actually has the currently shown range.

B - there are no actions within houses that would need to keep menu open for long (risking to forget which exact house you have selected);

- Agreed, however in terms of consistency: whenever you have selected a group, you also see which group you have selected by a white flag. To extend this logic, it only makes sense that a house (which also has a flag) is also highlighted white whenever it is selected.

C - white waving flag looks like a sign of surrender.

- Troops have a white selected flag. Also, the enemy can not see the white flag, so there is no point in surrendering. The color of the selection can easily be changed, so the actual color is not that important.

[Ben]

- The message action "Go To" is also changed to select the subject house. Instead of having a highlighted rectangle around a house, you can see the white flag.

I prefer highlighted. The white flag is easier to miss/ not as readily visible as highlight. In fact, it took me a moment to even notice the white flag on the bakery you showed.

- Whenever you have two houses of the same kind next to eachother, it is hard to see which one is selected and operated on.

Maybe, but then again, there really isn't a whole lot that makes this important.

- In the case of some houses that show a range, you need a visual indication of which house is selected, namely that changes the interpretation of the range. In some cases, it is possible that two houses share a large range, and it makes it harder to "see" which house actually has the currently shown range.

This, I can understand. However, I don't think that it such a big a deal as to tamper with the flag color.

- Agreed, however in terms of consistency: whenever you have selected a group, you also see which group you have selected by a white flag. To extend this logic, it only makes sense that a house (which also has a flag) is also highlighted white whenever it is selected.

I can also understand that you see this as inconsistent; however, knowing what troops you have selected is much more important than what building you have selected, so I can see why Joymainia didn't have this for anything else.

- Troops have a white selected flag. Also, the enemy can not see the white flag, so there is no point in surrendering. The color of the selection can easily be changed, so the actual color is not that important.

I suspect that Krom said that with a hint of "joking" because I'm sure he understands that you didn't intend on the enemy seeing the color change.

@ Tom
It's time for our split!

[Krom]

@HAH: What about house ranges? I think that was far superior better idea and implementation.

[H.A.H.]

I can also understand that you see this as inconsistent; however, knowing what troops you have selected is much more important than what building you have selected, so I can see why Joymainia didn't have this for anything else.

I think that the highlight is already very intrusive; it changes the way the terrain looks and feels very artificial, while the rest of the graphics still resemble a "real" world. The change of flag color is, on the other hand, only a small hint. It is not as if the color of the house changes, and even the people inside the house are still the same color as the player has.

Any player that knows that flags can change color whenever something is selected will not find this change superflous; I tested this change, and initially players are opposed to the idea of the color (for the same reasons you mention), however when the game is animated and one really doesn't "focus" on the color, it is a very subtle hint that increases the accuracy of the building range, i.e., it makes more sense that the range shown belongs to one specific building.

I really think that no player minds the change, and given that the code is already implemented, it is an arbitrary choice if this was to be included in the remake or not: as most of you say that it does not make much difference in the 'normal case', it does enhance the understanding of building ranges.

To accomodate the critisism: perhaps I should recolor the flag and the range so they are the same, and disable the flag coloring if a building has no visible range.

(No need to split topic, I think the topics are very much related.)