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Author Topic: Regional\language setting & Buy\Sell Bugs + Some Feature requests (upd)  (Read 3447 times)

s300pmu1

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Bugs

Currently testing ufoai_2.3-dev_23205_diff_win32 on a system with Intel Q6600 running WindowsXP (RUS), Regional Settings in WinXP set as "Russian".

1) Noticed that though I chose English as game language, the key binding description in Options\Input\Keys are for some reason always in Russian. Perhaps the fact that my WinXp regional settings is set to Russian has caused this; still it is clearly a bug. Screenshot: http://s50.radikal.ru/i127/0903/a2/9f783a58e8bc.jpg

2) Regardless of English language specified in Options\Game\Language, the tip of the day show upon game startup is always in Russian. It reverts to English once I click the "Next" button. Screen: http://s55.radikal.ru/i147/0903/f1/29e93e8b3507.jpg

3) In Buy/Sell Equipment screen, the up-down controls are not aligned with respective item lines and are not clickable: http://i063.radikal.ru/0903/66/c041f24cdf37.jpg

The only way to buy\sell equipment is to use mousewheel, but it takes a lot of trial and error on where to put mouse cursor to increase/decrease values and it works not for all lines on the screen: http://s52.radikal.ru/i136/0903/c8/52465a8f8af4.jpg

Feature requests

[goes without saying, all IMHO, all _kind_ requests]

1) Production screen would be much more convenient if it were similar to Buy/Sell Equipment screen in ufoai_2.3-dev_23205_diff_win32 (see last screenshot in the Bugs section of this message - tabbed acces to different equipment/weapon categories, as opposed to current, where you have to press scroll-barish left-right buttons to switch categories in a succession, instead of picking the one you need right away.

2) Production screen: it would be helpful if next to each qued item, the following were displayed: Quantity remaining to be produced (I guess "Q" stands for it now), Time to produce (in hours or days and hours), and Quantity currently in stores (Is that what "Num" stands for? Very cryptic, if so!).

3) Production screen: it would be great if for each qued item, workers could be assigned individually. Say, I have a "production base" with multiple workshops, and e.g. 40 workers. It would be only logical to have some "separation of labor" so that e.g. 20 would be producting Intem A and 10 would be working on Item B and the remaining 10 would be split producting Items C and D. It has been implemented in some XCOM clones; furthermore, AFAIK, research works this way even now.

4) In all screens where up-down controls are used to increase/decrease values (buy/sell, production, research), it would be very convenient to use modifiers:
Simple click - increase/decrease in multiples of one; Shift-click - in multiples of 10; CTRL-click - in multiples of 100.
This would allow for easy operation by user and remove any need for x1/x10 up-down controls currently used in production screen.
The only thing to consider is adding a tooltip and a tip of the day to inform the user of such functionality.
This one does not seem very critical, but having seen it in some apps, I found it immensely convenient, and it is surely easy to implement.

5) Hiring / Buying equipment: should it not, like base-to-base transfer, require time for the hired personnel/acquired items/aircraft to arrive to base? It puts additional emphasis on timing one's decisions and adds reality.
With personnel, it might be even more logical to do it as follows:
- Have each person assigned a nationality (perhaps this property is there already, not sure).
- In determining time-to-base of a particular person, use various values depending on nationality and hence nation of residence and target base.
This way, if I hire an American to a base located in US, it takes maybe a day for him to arrive, whereas if I hired a European to the same base it would take more time.

6) Pilot hiring screen: Pilots should not be wearing field uniform but rather a g-suit and a PDW holster or something like that. This should add visual differentiation bewtween pilots and soldiers.

7) Hiring (any category): I understand this is veryt tedious and perhaps unrewarding to be polishing small features while big ones are not yet done, but having 20 or better yet thirty more faces for models would really add to the gaming experience. People often associate themselves / attach to a particular character, making it more thrilling in engagements. It is not quite easy to attach oneself to a character if another 100 of soldiers and scientists and workers and pilots have the same face.

8 ) Off-base installations: It would be more useful not to name installations as "Installation #x" but rather name them by type as in "SAM#3" or "RDR#5". Using short abbreviations would also make the geoscape less cluttered.

9) Soldier Equipment Screen: auto-equip feature should be more "intelligent": e.g. it always starts with hand slots. If I equip weapons last, it is not cool. Some items such as medkit should perhaps autoequip to backpack always, and hands left free for pri/sec weapons unless all other slots are filled.

10) Geoscape: Introduce optional escort mode so that Firebird can be escorted to mission site by available fighter aircraft which would distract UFOs from attacking Firebird first, giving it more chances to survive. In most armies of the world, transport aircraft are usually provided cover, as long as aircraft are available for that purpose )

11) Geoscape: Having a preview of Radar \ Missile range when placing a base would be great.

12) Geoscape: When placig a new base, a dialog that appears after clicking a spot should have "Base name" field in focus so that the user could type the name immediately without having to click the field first.

13) Use of number keys 1-n (assignable in Options\Keys, preferably) to adjust game speed in geoscape. Much more convenient than clicking small icons.

14) Buy/Sell screen (the tabbed version of 2.3): current tab should be highlighted.

15) Base layout should show as graphic or at least as text which aircraft is in hangars, so as to identify empty hangars at first sight.

16) Soldier equipment screen: When putting an item into a slot that is already occupied, the newly placed item should replace the item in the slot, which then should become immediatly placeable somewhere else.
That is: If I am placing say a shotgun into a slot occupied by a pistol, it should go there, and the pistol should become "active placeable item" which I can place in a ny free spot or just drop back into the available inventory. This would save a lot of clicks and time in equipment rearrangement.
Furthermore, "click-to-pickup-click-to-place" algorithm would augment the "click-and-drag-to-place" algorithm nicely.
« Last Edit: March 08, 2009, 10:58:03 pm by s300pmu1 »

Offline bayo

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Hello.

About some bugs:

2) We should fix that. Maybe we set the current used language after we push the screen. But i dont know

3) I think the GUI in at the moment on work in process

About some features:

4) Who will know he can do it. Then, who will use it. Is it a common behaviour? If not, I dont think its a good idea.
A common behaviour is to press a long time the control. BTAxis also have a graphical proposal to improve it (i dont know if we have it somewhere on the wiki).

8) Maybe not very hard; but very usefull.
« Last Edit: March 09, 2009, 12:03:57 am by bayo »

Offline geever

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8 ) Implemented. Though I didn't use abbreviations; it would be too much for such a tiny feature.

-geever

s300pmu1

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About some features:
4) Who will know he can do it. Then, who will use it. Is it a common behaviour? If not, I dont think its a good idea.

Thank you for your comprehensive response!
As for the up-down control behavior: Well, it can not be considered common from the WinGUI standpoint. And frankly, I would be as much content with multiple controls for ones, tens, and hundreds. But I've seen the behavior I wrote of in a good XCOM clone (UFO: Extraterrestrials), and there I somehow figured it out quickly and found it a very helpful feature.

Indeed, instead of having multiple controls and moving the mouse to hit ones desired, you just have to worry about one - handy both for using it and for coding, I'd believe.
Again, tips of the day+tooltip would care about "uncomonness" of such behavior.

====

One more thing, don't know about that one - if it was reported or not - the text on some screens seems to be misaligned vertically, as shown here: http://i075.radikal.ru/0903/5e/1a8684df44fe.jpg
(red line added by me to show the unevenness).

====

2geever
Great!
Guess 'twould be too much to ask when the pathfinding issue preventing from goin upsatirs will be resolved, which would make dev version both playable and better suited for testing  :-X

odie

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Bugs
3) In Buy/Sell Equipment screen, the up-down controls are not aligned with respective item lines and are not clickable: http://i063.radikal.ru/0903/66/c041f24cdf37.jpg

The only way to buy\sell equipment is to use mousewheel, but it takes a lot of trial and error on where to put mouse cursor to increase/decrease values and it works not for all lines on the screen: http://s52.radikal.ru/i136/0903/c8/52465a8f8af4.jpg

Yes, i agree with this too. A little bit hard, esp when u try selling alot of stuff....

Bugs
2) Production screen: it would be helpful if next to each qued item, the following were displayed: Quantity remaining to be produced (I guess "Q" stands for it now), Time to produce (in hours or days and hours), and Quantity currently in stores (Is that what "Num" stands for? Very cryptic, if so!).

3) Production screen: it would be great if for each qued item, workers could be assigned individually. Say, I have a "production base" with multiple workshops, and e.g. 40 workers. It would be only logical to have some "separation of labor" so that e.g. 20 would be producting Intem A and 10 would be working on Item B and the remaining 10 would be split producting Items C and D. It has been implemented in some XCOM clones; furthermore, AFAIK, research works this way even now.

4) In all screens where up-down controls are used to increase/decrease values (buy/sell, production, research), it would be very convenient to use modifiers:
Simple click - increase/decrease in multiples of one; Shift-click - in multiples of 10; CTRL-click - in multiples of 100.
This would allow for easy operation by user and remove any need for x1/x10 up-down controls currently used in production screen.
The only thing to consider is adding a tooltip and a tip of the day to inform the user of such functionality.
This one does not seem very critical, but having seen it in some apps, I found it immensely convenient, and it is surely easy to implement.

I agree. The current production mode and interface seemed a bit unintuitive, esp for manpower deployment. Btw, do not know if u folks noticed this strange behavior - If you stick to just 1 production workshop with (10 max) workers, the progress is unbearably slow. But if u were to just build 1 more workshop, and pack it with workers, the progress is exponentially FASTER! Gosh.... did the mathematical algorithim work out correctly??


Bugs

8 ) Off-base installations: It would be more useful not to name installations as "Installation #x" but rather name them by type as in "SAM#3" or "RDR#5". Using short abbreviations would also make the geoscape less cluttered.
I agree with this. Can the programmer tweak this to SAM#1 for sam installations, UFO Yard #1 for UFOY, and Radar#1 for radar sites. What do u thnk?

Bugs

11) Geoscape: Having a preview of Radar \ Missile range when placing a base would be great.

YEAH! Lol. I so agree. (Implementation is yes to confirm, no to cancel)

Bugs

12) Geoscape: When placing a new base, a dialog that appears after clicking a spot should have "Base name" field in focus so that the user could type the name immediately without having to click the field first.

Yes, this is also a logical suggestion i agree with. My reason being that you will definately want to name your base almost immediately, and hence, no sense no being given that choice by default when setting the base up.

Bugs

16) Soldier equipment screen: When putting an item into a slot that is already occupied, the newly placed item should replace the item in the slot, which then should become immediatly placeable somewhere else.
That is: If I am placing say a shotgun into a slot occupied by a pistol, it should go there, and the pistol should become "active placeable item" which I can place in a ny free spot or just drop back into the available inventory. This would save a lot of clicks and time in equipment rearrangement.
Furthermore, "click-to-pickup-click-to-place" algorithm would augment the "click-and-drag-to-place" algorithm nicely.

I have some opinions on this....
Is it possible to code something like this:

Double clik on item for equipping.
If goggle, goto eye.
Else if armor goto body.
Else if granades (1 slot expendable item), goto belt.
Else if medic kits, goto holster,
Else goto hand (this includes wpn, ammo).
If there is weapon in hand, 2nd weapon goes to backpack.
Else, all items failing criterias goto belt, holster, backpack, in that order.

What do u thnk?

PS, did i remember wrongly? I believe wpns might be rotated to fit into a pack better. I believe this is implemented???

PS2: (Nope this is not the console), i noticed some wpns have odd shapes, eg. Rocket launchers or sniper rifles, hence, you might want to default these to backpack at optimal space. I know the programming for this is going to be nightmarish, so drop it if its not viable for just that 2 3 4 items. :P