[Request] Interface improvements

[Zippo342]

Admittedly I have not seen the end interface, however with context from the previous games, I'd like to see some improvements in the design. Seeing as we will be relying on the AI to control most of our fleet, making broad decisions seems in keeping with the design idea.

In X3 when one of your AI ships are in trouble, you are never notified till (if you're lucky) your ship is actually under attack. I think you should be notified as soon as they sight a potential hostile, if they have no standing orders on what to do with them. This notification should have the following functions inside of it:

Option to engage, ignore, or avoid. Option to create a mission based off these parameters as well.

E.g. Your merchant ship sights pirates. It is not yet known if said pirates are hostile. You are notified immediately. You can tell your merchant to seek safety until they clear the area, or you can tell them to ignore the pirates.

If you choose the latter, you can also set up a mission to either defend that merchant, or destroy those pirates based off this info. You already know Where (the merchant's location), and What (either defend merchant or destroy enemies), you just need to declare who. When you choose the mission a prompt is opened to select a rapid response team you have set up previously to move to his location, and specifically those in range to assist.

This would make it easier to handle emergency situations easily as the player. The current system requires you to first notice that there is a merchant in a sector with hostiles ahead of time, then find a squad, and give them orders separately. This is much more bulky to deal with, and detracts from the general immersion in the game, where the suggestion I make allows you to easily give the order without breaking from what you were doing any more than reading the notification.

Edit: Using this design philosophy for the thought process of the AI could as well make enemy factions seem to be more proactive rather than reactive as well. Imagine, Pirate A scans the cargo of a merchant, and sees that it's very valuable. He knows he can't take this merchant on his own, but coms his friends letting them know. Pretty soon a number of pirates from the surrounding area converge on this merchant to relieve him of his wares.

In response to being scanned by the pirate (who in this case did not have a police license. Perhaps some do and purposefully do not engage in the raids so to keep it. You know informant fees from pirates ) He coms local authorities, who send a small patrol out to chase the pirate off. However in short time a larger pirate group comes through to engage the patrol and save their friend, buying them just enough time to hit the merchant before further reinforcements arrive, and get out.

This kind of tit-for-tat action would be possible if you had a more robust AI system, and the messages that come in to the player for their decisions would simply be an easy interface for the player to use the system to their advantage.

Edit2: Another idea I just came up with: Break orders down to different areas. You already do this in X3 to a certain extent where you can give turrets different orders based on target. What I'd like to see is for the main ship/fleet/wing orders to be broken down into subcategories as follows:

Main Activity: Trade, patrol, protect, etc.
Operating range: Home sector + operating range, Sector list, Whole Universe. (Note, the universe can still be divided up into sectors even if you don't jump from one to the next)
Engagment Orders: When hostiles are detected, do you run, call for help, engage them, notifiy player?
Jump Orders: How far must you travel before you use a jumpdrive (if these still work in X:R). Also how much energy do you reserve for emergencies?
Retreat Orders: What situations do you wish your fleet to disengage from automatically? Is it a certain arbitrary power rating of the enemy fleet, or a certain damage level?

The basic idea here is you can combine parts of what we previously used in commands to create our own customized commands for different situations. For the most part engagement orders won't be changed much as a non-combat ship probably won't be ordered into combat, while a combat ship will be almost always set to engage hostiles, but might be told to call for help as well if they're operating singly. This will allow for the player to tailor orders to a degree not possible without creating a huge list of orders to choose from.

Example of use: You give a wing the orders to patrol, the order menu pops up with the sector as it's operating range, engagement orders is destroy all enemies, Jump orders is no, and retreat orders is wing is at 50% fighting strength. You can then customize this as needed. Later you add a few fighters and scouts to the wing and decide to expand the operating area, you can do this without giving the patrol command all over, and you can adjust what % fighting strength the wing must be at before they retreat.

[Harada Taro]

Well, It is an egosoft game... so you are speaking one of their worst point.

-Story / scenario which only will keep you for 3-4 hours and is as dumb as possible.

-Inrterface... They compete with paradox to win the worst player interface ever....

So don't dream. They can do very nice universe, nice graphic and excellent trade system but Interface and scenario they, up to the last game were zero... So Don't dream...

[Zippo342]

Harada, the whole point of this post was to give them an idea on how they could improve this area, while at the same time expanding the AI of their universe. They have been known to take user input very seriously. Just look at all the user created content they included with their later game, which they often improved upon themselves.

[Axeface]

Firstly, Why do people that joined recently always post such rubbish?


Secondly,
@OP: The issue is, if you have a fleet of 1000 ships, would you really want to be notified everytime a ship is sighted? Really? You would be doing nothing but replying to messages.
And herein... is the inherent issue with x-games interfaces. There is so much information, its quite difficult to design an interface to accommodate it. Plus the x interface was 'adjusted' for this info, remember that at first we couldn't even make statons. Rebirth is a NEW game, I think the interface will be great.

Also, the 'option to ignore or seek safety'. Do you mean that 'seek safety' should automatically mean that they get away? In my opinion that would make the game totally superficial.

I appreciate what you are saying/want but I think it should be taken in a totally different way. I dont think (without serious forethought, such as a satellite network/warning network) that we should even know that one of our ships are even under attack, unless we are fairly close to it. The fact that we knew everything that was going on with our fleet in reunuion>tc is a bit stupid to be frank, how?
We should find out later that our ships have been destroyed imho. All the more reason to protect/train them properly.


All in all your talking about gameplay choices, not interface design. And we dont yet know how communication will work in rebirth, I'm hoping for a total re-write.

[Mightysword]

On the part of the UI, sometime I wonder the reason why it has been bad so far not because the lack of abilities to create a better one, but an artifact reason. I always have this nagging feeling that the X's UI was "intended" to be port to a console since it ultilize next to nothing the advantage of what a PC can do with UI (aside from the gazzilions of hotkeys). And then the "spreadsheet" style of presentation is a very old UI style even for console.

Another reason for me to consider it an artifact because it probably never received an proper upgrade. If I remember correctly, X3 was originally intended as a X2's expansion back until they scrapped it in favor of a new engine. I wouldn't be suprise if the core of the UI's code is dated back 8-10 years ago.

[Zippo342]

@Axeface If they are all in the same fleet, why are they contacting you individually. Furthermore, if you have a fleet of 1000 ships, they probably have orders to engage enemies, which would obviate them needing to call you in the first place. The idea is for ships without engagement orders to do this and involve you as the player from the start.

@Mightysword This interface improvement would be even more convenient for a console port, as navigating the miriad of menus is a pain in the rump for a controller user. You would give the order in the same screen as the message you recieved.

@Brucewarran, I feel you on that. However this is meant to fill in missing engagment orders when hostiles are in the area. This would give you the player the ability to give them on the fly.

Now Axeface gives me another idea. If you have Quick Reaction Forces(QRF) set up already in the area, you can give an overall engagement order to call for help on the merchant, and it will call for a QRF force to deal with the threat ahead of time. However once again, I am saying the original idea is to help deal with missing engagement orders on ships. I.E. they don't already know what you want them to do ahead of time.

[dougeye]

This is another one of those threads that asks for something Ego have already stated we are getting, a "new UI" (read the stickies etc)

By all means when we see the new UI then critisice it and suggest improvements but until then it is pointless asking for something we are already going to recieve lol

[Zippo342]

I'm only asking in hopes that they are reminded that these are things we would like to end up seeing. If they have something good in place then by all means I'm behind them. I'm just giving them ideas on how it could be done if they haven't had them already. Nothing wrong with that I don't think.

[NLS]

Nice topic. (not)

Someone writes something about the control system. Fine as a comment, but then goes straight to Utopia by thinking that the devs will read this (Utopia #1) and get "reminded" (Utopia #2) and even give them ideas (douple Utopia #3 and #4... as I don't think they are looking for ideas in the forum and we are not talking about mods here AND I don't think the game is at a stage -and I say this either in a good OR in a bad way, whatever you like- to actually implement those "new" ideas).

Then someone else comes in and just cr*ps on the whole series (why are you even here man?).

Then everything goes wild (again).

Great.

Good that Gamescom is soon, so we'll all relax one way or another. We'll either get REAL news on the thing and we'll see it really either really in shape (and "any day now") or GETTING in shape (end of 2012, early 2012 release), or... realize it is dead and someone has it on a horse like El Sid. (hope for the first)

[Privata]

I hate it when ppl say that X has a crap story , yes in X3tc it was bad but BTF and X2 had a very good one , and x3r too , just badly executed but there is so much information about each race , but newcomers dont know about that stuff....

[squirrelrider]

[NLS]

So the other posts had a point and mine hasn't.
Right.

Eat your spam ham.

[werewolves?]

It would be good if the devs could work out a UI that functions like a kind of augmented reality system, so if you do have to go through menus it seems more like it is part of your ship interface than a random menu that pops up in your face.

They UI thing I'd like to see the most is drag and drop mounting for weapons and wares.

[BigBANGtheory]

Many games are trying to become interface-less, lets face it you dont walk around with menus overlaying your vision (atleast not yet).

In Rebirth that would I image translate to a cockpit and displays with enough detail to provide the command and control you need, leaving drone VR for the interfaces. It could work well difficult to pull off though...

At this stage Egosoft will have almost certainly nailed down their plans, lets just hope whatever path they've taken they play test the nuts off of it.

[Draken34m]

I would love to see a circular ui for the menu. I saw something similar to this in Eve it makes so much sense to me. It looks like they watered it down since the last time I played but it was really efficient. Even a menu system based off Maya's space bar quick select would better and quicker than the old menu ui. [/img][/quote]