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-

1.2. Side HQ - Squad selected


[SIDE HQ]
   - Welcome screen
  - Squad selected
  - Town selected
  - Platoon selected  
[PLATOON HQ]
  - Mission member display
  - Mission leader display 
[BRIGADE HQ]

____________________________________________________________

   Currently no useful informations about squads can be found if you're not member of it, since part of the information contained in the "squad tab" has not been made public. The design of the recruitment window added in the 1.26 patch also missed the point of helping players to judge the efficiency and ideology of a squad, or leaders to know where squads were currently operating and how many members were active. The new design tries to fix these issues.


 
Typical side HQ display when selecting a squad in the list

#21.   When selecting a "Mobilized permanent squad" in the mission list on the left, further information about the squad is displayed on the right. The purpose is to allow players to easily learn about active squads before deciding to join academy (feature #26).
Notice that here it doesn't display details about their selected mission, while it will in the brigade HQ (see topic 1.7) since such informations would be more relevant for brigade members.

#22. In the squad information screen you can find a paragraph where squads tell about their ideology. Eventually consider a place to put a squad icon.

#23. A squad website address is made public as well.

#24. Some useful wiretap information is displayed, such as active members since the beginning of the current campaign and combat stats. These kind of informations allow new players to better judge a squad before joining it. It would also require squads to do their best to remain attractive.

#25. Current squad missions are listed, showing where the squad is operating and how many members are involved. Each mission has its own ML to make coordination easier for OICs.

#26. The current "recruitment tab" has been replaced by the "Join academy" display. It contains the list of current online recruiters and playing in a squad mission. They can be joined by non-squad affiliates like it is currently the case, though I would not allow squad chat access.
If a recruiter is playing in a traditional platoon or a support mission instead of a squad mission, he should not be listed as nothing guarantees that he's indeed involved in a squad-operated maneuver.

#27. A "check for events" button would send you to the "event tab" (feature #20) and list planned activities related to the selected squad. This would allow anyone to synchronize with the squad agenda. However I made the assumption here that events would be made public and that the calendar would gather all events of a side.

#28. Remind that you can use the filter display at the default screen to only have the list of squad missions displayed. This could be done by unchecking "deploying platoons" and "deployed platoons" in the filter options (feature #19). Sorting displayed results by population (feature #8) then gives HC a useful overview of currently mobilized squads.
The reset button cancels the squad selection and thus displays the default welcome screen, though it doesn't reset the display filter nor the ordering criteria. In other words, you just get the interactive map back and need to re-check all filter options to get the first screen back. This could sound slow, but such a procedure allows more research abilities. It is not expected that many players often use of this filter.

1 comment:

  1. I would see something more simple, just a list with ingame squads, their language, their specialization etc. Clicking a squad would then just show its presentation text.

    ReplyDelete