Arty Tanks are Confusing: Why using every tank means misusing every tank

Am I the only one who likes the aesthetics of source (I understand there are limitations to it outside of graphics also) More than more modern games and engines?

 

If anything you could just change the engine type in the scripts. That way only people that know how to change it back will be able to build them

 

You can get the graphics of the Source Engine on newer engines. You could port HL2 to Unreal and you can still have everything look mostly the same if you did it right. Hell, just look at Empires vs L4D vs TF2 vs DotA. They're all on the Source Engine and their differences stick out far more than their similarities. Aesthetics is easily one of the lowest priorities of selecting an engine because they're one of the most cross-engine parts of a game.

 

Maybe I just love the hl2 textures/props that have been used as a base for all the maps/mods that I like the look of. But the physics and everything of hl2/css feels really precise and that is the main thing I like I guess. Modern games always seem to handicap the player to show off how modern they are (recoil in some games is the biggest offender to me)

 

Source is only meant for enclosed, arena style maps. That's why games like Quake 3, CoD, and CSS (all based off of id tech) all take place in close-quarters combat. I've said this many times before. Empires would work much better in every way if it was on an engine that wasn't crippled by such a limitation as BSP trees.

 

port empires to minecraft we could have maps 8 times the size of earth!

 

Or just play warfare on Arma II

 

Did you even read his post?

The next thing you tell him should've been, "don't ever fix the gui or provide ten years of full time support."

 

new games are bullshit with its roided characters and slow as fuck movement

also white people jumps

 

I think the menu is the same.

You can press v and access the menu anywhere (handy for redoing your custom loadouts). It simply won't build a vehicle if you aren't standing in a vf when you do it. Likewise, it won't recustomize if you aren't in a vehicle and on a pad. I believe the menu is the same either way.

But that's just speculation. I'm interested to hear from candles.

 

It's honestly a question of implementation details, which I'll gladly bore everyone with.

The simplest way is to check if the player is the commander when the chassis list is generated. If they are, they'll see all the vehicles. If they aren't, then artillery won't be on the list. Because the only time the game says that a player is the commander is when they're in the CV and you can't (normally) create vehicles if you're already in one, the only way to access artillery at all would be to be in the commander interface. But yes, Lazybum is correct. You wouldn't be able to recustomize your tank with such a simple solution because you would be unable to select the chassis in the first place to customize your tank.

I could reasonably make the check to see if they're the commander or on a repair pad, using the reasoning that if they're on the repair pad then they can't be in a vehicle factory. If I take the function that checks if a tank is on the repair pad and tell it to look for a repair pad from the perspective of the tank, then it can simply run that every time the list is generated to see if the player is the commander.

However, this leads into another issue where if a new player presses V on the repair pad, they'll see artillery in the menu, but they won't if they're anywhere else. Suffice to say, that'd be very confusing. And because the simple fix was to remove the chassis from the list, then another issue arises. If a player opens the menu on the repair pad and then runs over to the VF, they'd be able to make an artillery tank because they were on the repair pad when the list was generated.

So from that, we then run into the option of possibly running the checks at the end, where it runs through the whole process of customizing and what not, but only lets you actually build it if you are either the commander or on a repair pad. I wouldn't want to go with this option because it's inherently confusing to players. Many players don't understand the concept of a restricted VF. This is caused either because the mechanic is inherently hard to grasp or because it doesn't happen often enough for anyone to experience it. If it's the former, then obviously the idea of being able to select but not build a chassis due to some non-obvious gameplay decision should be reduced due to adding borderline needless complexity to the game. If it's the latter though, then the argument can be made that the solution is to increase the occurrence of such events.

There are a lot of factors that go into something as apparently simple as this. And that's not even all the options or details, those are just the ones I have the time to type out before class. Suffice to say, implementation can be easy in this case, but the side-effects might not be.

 

Shit, you've thought this through.

I wouldn't just removed it from the player vehicle menu and call it a day. Yeah, you can't refit them, but that's fine.

Let the com worry about making sure the arty is perfect the first time around and don't bother the plebs with any mention of arty.

 

um... why not just have it check if the player is com OR currently in an arty when the list is generated? Doesn't the fact that they are in a vehicle get tacked on to their player info?

 

Yeah, I try to fully think things through before I actually do anything. I can spend 10% of my time coding and 90% of it debugging, or I can spend 30% of my time planning, 10% coding, 20% fixing and the remaining 40% becomes time free.

I did think of simply not letting people configure artillery tanks, making them a one-time deal. The issue is getting older players to adjust to not being able to refit them and newer players to understand that artillery tanks aren't your normal tank. It seems like a "Let them eat cake" scenario, but it turns an accidental customization from a simple refitting to what could possibly be a very expensive, very useless tank.

Because that, inherently, leads to the same issue as before. People being able to sometimes see artillery in the menu and sometimes not able to see artillery in the menu. If you think Empires in unintuitive now, making menus change depending on your current state is one helluva' curve ball.


By the end of the day, my goal is to try and keep the game from becoming more complex while still improving it. Part of that means making the intuitiveness of a change a priority, and part of that means minimizing a reliance on assuming that I know how people will think. Those two parts come into conflict because to make something intuitive, I have to assume what others think is intuitive. If I don't assume how people think, then I can't make things intuitive. And "people" refers to both new players that are having their first go at things and old players that haven't played in a while. To a player that's taken a long break, something as simple as vehicle refitting being changed is a dangerous thing, because they won't notice that it's changed until they need to do it. And generally, if someone needs to refit an artillery tank in particular, it's because they really need to do it.

 

maybe make a seperate outfit menu for when you're on a repair pad? Then you would just press the hotkey, and it would show up a build menu only for the vehicle you are in. That would get by having to navigate to your own vehicle in the normal build menu.

 

They'd still have the problem how they can sometimes see artillery and sometimes not, but that might alleviate it enough to make it worth it.

However, I'd have to look into the specifics of the vehicle customization menu. Which is quite possibly the single more terrifying menu in the entire GUI, at a whopping 5183 lines and 182KB in size.

Like, my stomach is churning and I actually do start feeling nausea when I read parts of it.

 

May the force be with beerdude.