Welcome to World War II online - Battleground Europe : Free community contributions to a new User Interface design

Oct. 2009

Please sit back, relax, throw some food to the fishes, and take a hour to discover the content of this blog.

The purpose of this input is to introduce new gameplay concepts that could contribute to a fix of persistent issues highlighted during the last couples of years, with a special focus on the User Interface (UI).
Though it will confuse established players, I believe it will be alot easier for new players to understand.

The blog (creative) layout has been designed to make the reading more comfortable (you can easily pause your reading thanks to feature #IDs) as to make search & discuss easier. Use the labels to select a single part, or use the tree on the right to find a specific feature back.
If you are in a hurry, you may just have an attentive look at the screenshots which should be intuitive to understand. The text is just pointing out drawn features or detailing the context.

All opinions and suggestions are welcome. Please, provide feedback (here) in the official forum . Remind that the whole content is a free gift to Playnet.

Since English isn't my main language, please apologize for the mistakes. I hope you will still enjoy the reading.

ZEB
-Un0fficial gameplay architect, advises concepts since 2002-

1.9. Multicrew


New multicrew requestion/join pop-ups

#69. The main innovation brought by the following new multicrew procedure is the ability to define custom crew positions distributed among players.  This will bring  more tactical possibilities (e.g. getting a second crew only for permanent spotting at commander's post), compared to the current system which is definitely "rigid".

#70. A n00b-friendly visual representation of the vehicle is used to make the learning curve less steep then it's currently the case.

#71. Since members of a platoon are all waiting on the same screen when forming up, it would become pertinent to introduce a pop-up window that would notify when another member is inviting us to join his vehicle (first line of screens bellow), or asking permission to multicrew our currently reserved unit (second line of screens bellow). Once a platoon has deployed, or in mercenaries missions, it definitely becomes more difficult to efficiently exploit such a feature (people are already spawned while you're still creating a request), hence still requiring some communication efforts between players.

#72. Though there is currently still a limitation of 2 players, it could later be extended to polycrew.

#73. Joining a multicrewed vehicle cancels our current selection (origin and unit), and our settings are changed to the ones of the initial vehicle owner.

#74. A ML could eventually require its members to polycrew vehicles in order to be approved in the platoon (leadership points could be earned when this happens).

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