Faction Preview in game lobby

[softcoder]

I have added a mini Faction PReview in the game lobby (in the SVN version last night). How it works is each time the faction is changed for your slot it will load the custom faction loading texture in a small box to the right. This is helpful to identify quickly how the faction looks.

[ElimiNator]

Cool! sounds very good. 

[Omega]

How big is the image loaded? Also, could you post a screenshot of what this looks like?

[titi]

I don't like it that much
We already have  too little space in the start menu yet. 2 days before it took me some time  to cleanup the menu to get some more space.
Although it looks good I would prefer it without picture!
On the left you need some space for the chat which is more important than the picture, so the central block should really be moved more to the mid.

But I will try to find a better setup ...
maybe it can be done.

Menu in general:
Probably we should think about removing some of the other switches from the menu again:
- "Pause for lagged clients" should be default, I think it can be removed from the menu
- "Server controlled AI"  is default and the option to change it should be removed too ( because its still not stable when its not this way )
- network send frame count is 20 by default now and I think we learned, everything else doesn't give us much benefit. so remove it too.

Fog of war/ View map at end / Pathfinder / Port should only be shown with "advanced option" enabled and maybe it should be shown on a "faked" second page .
But all this is much trouble for the moment and maybe not worth it.

 

[ElimiNator]

Maybe you could move some of toughs things into the .ini file? (I like the idea of previews)

[ultifd]

How big is the image loaded? Also, could you post a screenshot of what this looks like?

Well, I think right now we still need to think about the lobby...what settings need to be there, size, etc. So of course right now it is not perfect or final...

Anyways, it looks like this right now:

I have added a mini Faction PReview in the game lobby (in the SVN version last night). How it works is each time the faction is changed for your slot it will load the custom faction loading texture in a small box to the right. This is helpful to identify quickly how the faction looks.

lol , thought you made it default at first... 

[tomreyn]

I'm pretty much with Titi there, both about the faction preview and the options which can/should be removed from the lobby screen.

I do appreciate the efforts spent on integrating the faction preview and I think it's not generally a bad feature, but I think that:

• these images are way too large, and while they just refer to the human player, they span all rows
• to me map previews would be much more important than faction previews, since there are not that many factions and it's rather easy to learn them, but it is and remains a nuisance not to know whether you are going to play a F4A or a cooperative game map (i.e. will team players start close to each other, and which player will start where on this map)? When I was playing with Nebososo the other day it took us ~20 minutes to find a four player map which works for 2vs2 (in the beginning we started and restarted games several times, then Nebososo ended up searching one by loading them in the map editor)

[claymore]

I agree with tomreyn. The effort's appreciated, but this isn't really a good use of the space. The factions are pretty easy to learn imo.

Replacing this with a map preview would be so much more useful, for new and old players alike.

[softcoder]

No problem the feature will stay in the code but be OFF by deault and can ber toggled via a setting in glestuser.ini:

FactionPreview=true

The map preview may be a little more challenging.

[tomreyn]

I think all it really takes for the map preview is to map, in a quad whose constraints resemble that of the map, the starting locations of player slots. This might be easier than having to plot the whole map. I assume that  all of constraints of a given map, and starting positions of the various players could be extracted form a maps' XML code somewhat easily. This could then be used to draw a schematic of the map on the lobby on the fly.

An alternative option would be to have map makers accompany their maps by a graphics file which can be quickly loaded into the game when a map s displayed in the game lobby.

But this may still be much more complicated than I can think of, I simply could not tell...

[ultifd]

Now it looks like this:

Anyways, probably in the end of all of this... I think I'd rather have the preview...(anything is better than a rainy day in the glest lobby) and maybe in the future map preview too. Although that would be complicated in more than one way...

[Psychedelic_hands]

I have an idea 

What if instead of the Loading screen we just make little icons for each of the fractions?
We could make flags/coats of arms for each of the fractions pretty easy.

[treba]

hehe, maybe you r already tired of it, but again, an other map format would be helpful at this point.
if it was a container, the map editor could just save the the map as it is displayed in it as little jpg, which is included in the container. so you have easy access to a preview and someone, who builds a map like labyrinth, where the players should NOT see the map before, can just replace it with some other nice preview.

greetz

[titi]

@ultifd: yes I changed the layout a bit and I think its ok now. It still has to be done in the connect menu, where it still loooks strange in my opinion.
If it looks like this, should the default be with "Faction Preview" now?

( @treba, map previews are really no reason to change the map format! )

[treba]

true, only another reason