Ground Combat UI improvements

[GizmoGomez]

That'd be interesting, actually. That's a good idea. Have two different grenade "aim" levels, one for throwing straight ahead (like a bullet, where it'd hit cover and things) that you'd use indoors with a ceiling, and one for throwing over objects (the new one) like cover, that you'd use outdoors.

EDIT:

Suggestion post here:

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/6377-Fix-for-Grenade-Throwing-in-Buildings

Edited July 13, 2013 by GizmoGomez

[thothkins]

yes; although I often click around the map for other reasons.

Yeah, it was decent for general nosing around. But yeah, not a disaster here.

[svidangel]

Well, I think people want a mini-map so they can see where the UFO is and some also think you should know where the UFO is because you'd have a location from aerial photos, pilot reports and even civilians calling the police. This solves both problems without revealing the map. It just tells you head Northwest or whatever. Plus it requires very little code and no interface changes i.e. no mini-map has to be designed and implemented.

I think most people's comments were about the mini-map, not locating the UFO before landing. Whole other thread on that. I do miss being able to tell if I killed something in the darkness by looking for those little white crosses! Ah OG...

As for getting around in game, at the moment it kind of sucks vs the original. Minimap let me know roughly where everyone was, and the 1-16 bar only helps if I know where each of the 1-16 actually are at any given time, and there is no visual indication of a soldier's number at a glance. If there were a minimap that showed the 1-16 as little icons, then the 1-16 bars would actually be useful. As it is, I shuffle things around too much and react to the environment and opposing forces rather than having 1-4 go one direction every time, etc. Otherwise I would probably get used to "just knowing" a soldier's number.

In the end, aside from telling me who has moved, the little icon's are fairly useless as an overall tool for understanding the tactical situation and getting around the map. Some of the suggestions for putting role icons on instead of numbers, or just adding role icons might help a little bit.

Would also prefer the Morale be removed and Ammo level be added in it's place, as that information is far more useful at the moment.

[Skitso]

As for getting around in game, at the moment it kind of sucks vs the original. Minimap let me know roughly where everyone was, and the 1-16 bar only helps if I know where each of the 1-16 actually are at any given time, and there is no visual indication of a soldier's number at a glance

Thats actually a really good point. It might be a good idea to show the corresponding number beside/over/below xenonauts. Maybe even put the number inside the green selection circle?

[GizmoGomez]

Just make it a little circle attached to the green selection circle with the number inside it.

[svidangel]

Would really only help if it showed the selector circle all of the time, or there was at least an always on option. Once I select a soldier, which does't take much more time than mousing over it, I can see what number turns yellow (although that's kind of a weak color change too).

[Aaron]

I can see the numbers thing being pretty useful, I'll have a think about ways we can get them in.

[GizmoGomez]

I can see the numbers thing being pretty useful, I'll have a think about ways we can get them in.

This being said, we Need to be able to assign numbers to different soldiers. Them being randomly distributed, apparently, is ridiculous and makes it very difficult to have any kind of organization.

Just putting a menu in the aircraft equip screen, where the soldiers are placed in the dropship, would be best imo. If the number assigning happened in the soldier equip screen it might become confusing when you have multiple dropships and squads.

[Skitso]

I can see the numbers thing being pretty useful, I'll have a think about ways we can get them in.

Suggestion: every time you hover the cursor over any xenonaut or selection bars in the hud, all soldiers would show the green "selected" circle around their feet with white number on top of their head? Also, the white triangle over the selected xenonauts could just show the number...

Edited July 26, 2013 by Skitso

[Lorebot]

Haven't read all 14 pages so I'm not sure if any of these have been mentioned before:

1. Clicking on the Soldier portrait in the ground combat UI should center the camera on that soldier. Can't tell you how many times I've clicked on it by habit when trying to find my soldier again after doing some shooting only to remember it doesn't do that....

2. There should be a way to change what ammo is in a weapon with multiple ammunition types (ie the Rocket Launcher with explosive or stun rockets) WITHOUT actually firing the weapon. It would be great if you could drag and drop ammo onto the weapon in the loadout screen to change what ammo is in the weapon before a fight starts too.

3. We should get a chance to modify the loadouts on our soldiers and vehicles before a base invasion. There have been a few times when I've stripped a soldier of his gear because he was wounded and I needed it for his replacement in the dropship squad and never got around to reequipping him. Then my base gets assaulted and there's time to evacuate the non-coms and fire up the base defenses...but there's no chance to give my soldier a weapon or change what's mounted on my vehicles.

[Solarius Scorch]

Haven't read all 14 pages so I'm not sure if any of these have been mentioned before:

1. Clicking on the Soldier portrait in the ground combat UI should center the camera on that soldier. Can't tell you how many times I've clicked on it by habit when trying to find my soldier again after doing some shooting only to remember it doesn't do that....

2. There should be a way to change what ammo is in a weapon with multiple ammunition types (ie the Rocket Launcher with explosive or stun rockets) WITHOUT actually firing the weapon. It would be great if you could drag and drop ammo onto the weapon in the loadout screen to change what ammo is in the weapon before a fight starts too.

3. We should get a chance to modify the loadouts on our soldiers and vehicles before a base invasion. There have been a few times when I've stripped a soldier of his gear because he was wounded and I needed it for his replacement in the dropship squad and never got around to reequipping him. Then my base gets assaulted and there's time to evacuate the non-coms and fire up the base defenses...but there's no chance to give my soldier a weapon or change what's mounted on my vehicles.

Damn right, all of these. I kinda forgot to mention them because of the more complicated stuff discussed.

Though I'd prefer if only double clicks centred the camera on the soldier. I don't want my camera to jump around too much.

[thothkins]

+1 to Lorebot's points, although I do admit not falling for #1 very often.

[smoitessier]

+ 1 to al those also.

But I could have sworn #2 was already like that, from inventory I thought I've dragged T2 ammo into the launcher and have had the old regular explosive swapped to my back pack, but Yeah would be better to decide in the base before a mission if it's not too much trouble.

[Falkner]

Could we please have the Soldiers Role Icon visible when we select them in ground combat? it;s already visible in the inventory tab so I'm hoping it's not too much work to implement. You already show the soldier's rank in the bottom right corner of soldier's portrait window, i would like to ask if you could you show the role icon in the bottom left of the portrait too It would be extremely helpful to discern who is equipped for a role and what items they carry without rummaging through their backpacks.

That or even a simple text addition to the soldier name/rank text, I.E. Cpl: Morgan Sniper

I mentioned this in the Suggestions and feature requests but I want to be sure it gets noted by a dev because it's such a simple yet important feature to me. I've already tried to mod it into the game but can't get the correct icon to display.

Edited July 31, 2013 by Falkner

[Aaron]

The next experimental contains an enhancement to the "quick select" bar where it shows you the name, portrait and role icon for a soldier when you mouse over their quick select button - it also highlights them in green on the game world. If you then select them it centres the screen on them.

[Ol' Stinky]

Sounds great!

[smoitessier]

Yeah!

[Ishantil]

That will make playing the game a lot easier! I like it!

[Queamin]

nice 8)

[Ol' Stinky]

I like the way it uses a scaled down version of the role icons - I was pleased to see that I wouldn't need to ait for a new version of Aut's role images.

I've got another suggestion (not about the new UI element). Sometimes, a guy's got to lay down some smoke. The problem is that it can be bloomin' hard to make out what's going on. Have a look at this, for example:

It's not too hard to miss the guy in there. While turning him green solves that, there's no way to find out where obstacles/cover are without waving the mouse around. Given terrain destruction, this is annoying; that cover prop might not still be standing after the aliens have had their turn!

Here's my suggestion: a toggle that turns off the fires/smoke plumes and highlights the squares they're on instead. Here's a rough mockup of the idea.

Now I can easily see what lies underneath those smoke tiles.

[Aaron]

I think it might be easier to just force the highlighted versions of units to draw on top of everything temporarily - so in your screenshot the green highlighted soldier would appear on top of the smoke, or if you were clicking on an alien icon they would popup on top of any cover or wall they were behind.

[Ol' Stinky]

Forcing focused units to draw on top of everything would be a good idea to deal with situations where aliens are hard to see, like in industrial trainyards. But I don't think it solves this particular problem.

It's important to see the ground so that you can see the cover. Even if cover indicators were brought back, there's still the problem that not all cover is created equally: there's world of difference between hiding behind a prickly pear with 80hp and a rock with 600hp, or a fence with ~15% cover and a concrete pipe with 75% cover.

Also, I have to go fishing for units to highlight them. In that non-mockup picture there are two soldiers in the smoke - a shieldbearer standing behind a rock (iirc). I'll have to go through the unit tabs to work out which one he is.

And finally, it's important to be able to clearly see how many stacks of smoke I have between me and an enemy. In the mockup, that soldier's pretty well guarded against enemy fire from the north-west, but exposed to his east. That's not too hard to tell in his case, where it's probably only one smoke grenade that's had time to dissipate. But when using multiple smokes to approach an unknown enemy, it can be very unclear how exposed a vanguard really is. I often have to throw multiple smoke grenades at roughly the same spot to be sure that I have a "real" smokescreen going on.

Edit: I guess not quite finally, then. With stun gas, the player needs to be sure that the stun grenade/rocket has generated a cloud of stun gase on the same tile as the alien. If the stun gas has appeared on the south/south-west/west tiles, it's hard for me to tell whether this is the case or not. Maybe this one could be solved with an icon indicator or a discolouration of the enemy unit, though.

Edit 2: Probably a more practical soluition is a keybind that toggles on/off the display of smoke type effects. It doesn't solve everything, but I'd take it.

Edited August 6, 2013 by Ol' Stinky

[svidangel]

Shouldn't be too hard, since we pretty much had to toggle off smoke for that one version where smoke crashed the game.

[Ol' Stinky]

I mean visually only, the smoke would still be there for accuracy calculations etc.

[Sherelian]

I am looking for a button, which will let every soldiers crouch automatically at the end of the turn.

And I'd am looking for the ability to switch the rockets in the launcher before the combat starts.