Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling
- Thread starter Lord Thanos_foh
- Start date
A user interface function in WoW which I don"t think has been mentioned yet, is automatic range checks between players. I"d say this goes into the user-interface-playing-the-game category. Especially for healers, but also on a lot of boss fights where you damage or give nasty debuffs to the players that are too close.
Information like this should be read from the graphic game world and not automatically presented in the user interface.
Information like this should be read from the graphic game world and not automatically presented in the user interface.
Having read this thread from day one, it will be interesting to watch the product evolve and observe how community feedback and input from veteran gamers like most people here - from the start - influences the design decisions for better or for worse.Ngruk said:
I don"t understand why being able to know how far from a mob you are by having the information on your UI is a bad thing. I liked how the Vanguard UI told you how far away your groupmates were and how far away you were from the mob without any mods at all.Casti said:
Totally agree. Until the day when we get games in stereo vision so that we can accurately judge depth with our binocular vision a range cue makes complete sense.AndersJ said:
That is one of the hardest things about flying a flight simulator since you can"t actually tell how close the ground is on landing. Same thing when you go to shoot/cast. You have no way without depth perception to judge distance unless there is some kind of visual cue.
Big_w_powah
Trakanon Raider
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While I think "you are 63.42122134231 yards away" is a bit much, I like EQ2"s system: Spell/ability has a red shade to if if you"re too far away to use it, in full color if you"re close enough...
Thats all you really need.
Thats all you really need.
How can you not tell how far something is away in a 3D game just by looking at it? It"s 3D. That"s what three dimensional means. I can"t think of a single time in my years of gaming that I"ve thought, "My god, if only the UI would tell me how far away that thing is!"
The trend in UIs is to dumb things down, but it"s getting to be a bit much. I don"t know how I"d feel if my buttons were allGREEN = YES U R CLOSE ENOUGH AND UR MANA IS GOODandRED = NO U R WRONGall the time. I mean, do we need to remove player thought about everything?
Once you"ve got radar and all logic checking on the buttons, you can literally play a game without ever looking at the screen. Something about that ain"t right, son.
The trend in UIs is to dumb things down, but it"s getting to be a bit much. I don"t know how I"d feel if my buttons were allGREEN = YES U R CLOSE ENOUGH AND UR MANA IS GOODandRED = NO U R WRONGall the time. I mean, do we need to remove player thought about everything?
Once you"ve got radar and all logic checking on the buttons, you can literally play a game without ever looking at the screen. Something about that ain"t right, son.
Soygen
The Dirty Dozen For the Price of One
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As a melee and namely a monk, I never cared about how far stuff was from me in EQ. Pulling I would just inch up or throw a ranged item until shit aggro"d and fighting I just stood as close as possible and attacked. As a caster with ranges on different things, I can see a distance read-out being more useful though.
Because if you had a clue about 3D you would realize that we DON"T play 3D games. They are actually 2D as far as depth perception is concerned.Wash said:
Binocular vision which I mentioned is what gives depth perception. When both eyes see the same thing at the exact same distance on a flat plane, there is no actual depth perception of anything within that picture that can give a visual clue as to distance from the viewer since everything within the field of view is actually the same distance away from you.
If that totally confuses you then I suggest you do a bit of reading on the subject and get some education. Just because you can "run off into the distance" in a game DOES NOT MAKE IT 3D!! as far as your brain is concerned when trying to judge distance.
Tell you what, drive around in your car all day with one eye covered and see what happens (hope your insurance is paid up) better yet try it on a motorcycle or bicycle. That is the same effect as looking at a monitor and trying to judge distance.
I"d say the real problem is the binary range limits. IRL I can"t look at an object and tell you that it"s exactly 32.174 yards away, but it doesn"t matter because my "Throw Rock" ability doesn"t have a magical range limit of 30 yards. Instead, there"s a fairly smooth reduction in my ability to hit the object with a rock as it gets further away. In WoW, you need the range indicators because it combines much worse depth perception with a much higher need for precision. If you tried to do C"Thun positioning IRL, I can pretty much guaruntee you"d fail horribly (while Gruul would probably be doable).
You would just need a IRL cthun warner, a giant red light that beeps loudly telling you that you are too close to another and are about to fuck over 39 people.
I have noticed that my computer screen is flat, and that the little men running around are not actually inside it, yes.karuden said:
I don"t know what to tell you; maybe your brain looks at a game and can"t tell the difference. Me, I look at a 3D game (like EQ), and I know exactly how far away something is. Am I alone here? None of the people I played EQ with for years ever had a problem.
Lines converge towards the horizon; things get larger when you get close, tiny when you get far away. Just like in the real world. It tricks the eye and it"s so natural that I"ve never even thought about it, in all my years of gaming, until I read this thread.
Soygen
The Dirty Dozen For the Price of One
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It"s 3D in the sense that the size of objects increase as you get closer, thus allowing you to gauge their distance. I never once thought I needed to have a UI display tell me the distance of a mob in EQ. You found out something"s aggro range and could eyeball it after that.
Cybsled
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Ya Soy, but we were puller monks. It was second nature to us. All the "afk until stuff comes to camp" players never learned that critical skill, and thus would typically get everyone killed when they aggro"d something that should not have been aggro"d.
I drove all the way home with one eye closed. Some how I"m a super human who can maintain depth perception with just one eye. Bizarre.
If you actually studied vision, you"d realize how silly this sounds. Even with one eye closed, you still have some depth perception. To determine depth, your brain uses both monocular (one eye) and binocular (two eyes) cues. Some cues not mentioned that are very common for example are overlapping cues (you can tell if a car is in front of a tree or behind a tree just by how they overlap), and shadow cues (how large a shadow is helps the brain determine the distance away from you it is, relative to other shadows in a scene).karuden said:
You can judge distance/depth in 2D very well, and if you studied illusions, you can see how powerful the brain is in determining depth. You can never determine theexactdistance away something is, but you can"t do that in real life either with a real 3D scene.
***Although, the original poster might have a visual disorder, so it"s perfectly possible he"s unable to determine depth at all in 2D scenes.