Teamoverlay feedback

[Lakitu7]

In the time since the glorious introduction of Teamoverlay to (gpp) Tremulous, pretty much everyone has disabled it by now, or bound it to some key. I spent a couple days of my life porting/writing/promoting it and I have it disabled too. Why? It's huge and distracting. In small games, it's pretty nice because it's less-huge and you care more where your teammates are, but in large pub games, it's huge and mostly worthless.

Toward the end of the GPP4 thread, some guys came up with some ideas:

How about teamoverlay? It would be great to always see the available basilisks because those are the ones you usually need to know where they are.
Also, how about being able to customize what players you can see in your teamoverlay?

^That would be awesome to have multiple ways to show
Ex:
Way 1) Sort by Highest Score
Way 2) Show Lisks and Grangers First
Way 3) Alphabetical(?)
etc...
Or maybe allow Customization of what it sorts by.

I see no problem putting in a few "modes" if people think they'd be useful.

Currently we have:

• Show everyone in clientid order

These make sense to me:

• Nearby Allies (show allies in ~helmet/sayarea range)
• Allies in Base (show allies near reac/om)
• Support Allies (show ckits / grangers + basis

It's a bit cheaper in code to do lists than sorts, not that sorts are a big deal or out of the question. However, to me, I think at least for these ideas it'd actually be useful to just have the partial lists rather than something like "sort everyone by distance from me" since you'd see people drop in/out as they enter/leave the vicinity and know when your teammates left you for dead.

What other ideas can you come up with, sorting or otherwise? Would sorting by score or alpha or whatever be particularly useful? I tend to feel like if you have so many players that you need to sort, it's already become mostly worthless by too-much-information and too-huge, but do you folks disagree?

We're not going to do anything that gives you more information than you already have theoretically (by enabling teamoverlay and setting maxplayers to 999), but there's no problem making it easier to get to in ways like those above.

Thoughts?

[Superpie]

and to go with it < sshc> There should be some key to toggle it or something

[A Spork]

Well for one, I think how superpie has tweaked it in his HUD makes it alot better for being in the way, but definately some types of sorting things would be nice.
I personally find it awesome for like when the humans are hunting that last Mara and someone spots it, you can tell where they are, so I think it should show not just those who fall into the sorts if there's not many players
IE if there's only 1 basi, if you have it set to support classes, I think it should fill the remaing space with others.
Bonus points if you could like set a key to rotate through sorts/through the list.

[F50]

What other ideas can you come up with, sorting or otherwise? Would sorting by score or alpha or whatever be particularly useful?

If you are a basi, it is helpful to sort by score, the people you want to help, the people who are killing people or the enemy base, are usually at the top of the score list. Similarly it would be greatly useful coordination wise if I could time my attacks with the people on top. I wouldn't ever sort alphabetically though.

These make sense to me:

• Nearby Allies (show allies in ~helmet/sayarea range)
• Allies in Base (show allies near reac/om)
• Support Allies (show ckits / grangers + basis

Other than score, I think that is fairly complete. It could also be useful to show people with the most expensive equipment, the number of tyrants being rather important on the aliens side, and knowing generally whether the team is low on credits/evos is nice.

I tend to feel like if you have so many players that you need to sort, it's already become mostly worthless by too-much-information and too-huge, but do you folks disagree?

Absolutely, though superpie's hud helps a lot.

[UniqPhoeniX]

Align the information properly (incl align health by last number). Like:

Code: [Select]

LoooooongName [400] Location
shortname      [25] Location

[khalsa]

Sort by health

[F50]

Align the information properly (incl align health by last number). Like:

Code: [Select]

LoooooongName [400] Location
shortname      [25] Location

I'm not so sure. If I want to stick the teamoverlay to, say, in the bottom left corner (both clean and volt's hud have room there) then I don't want someone who has an unduly long name to screw up my view of everyone else. What is the limit on name length? I'd rather not make having a name of a specific length (to put text in the middle of people's xhair) a form of greifing.

[Lakitu7]

I think aligning the columns looks kind of strange. What do you guys think?

[mathchamp]

As well as being bulky it also overlaps the chat in the upper left corner. Perhaps the default HUD should be modified to move team overlay somewhere else (e.g. to the right side, or down a bit from its current location). Maybe make it so that it scales itself down if your resolution exceeds a certain amount (after a certain resolution it will be the same size in pixels but less as a percentage of the screen size) too. Also if someone's name is longer than a certain amount then crop it down on the team overlay.

The main thing I want to see though is the position of the team overlay moved down so it doesn't overlap the chat. And make it a toggle one can bind.

I also want to see the different information aligned. For example, instead of (where W and A are the weapon and armour/upgrade icons, or the class and + icons for aliens):

Code: [Select]

W A NameOne [4] Alien Base
W A ReallyLongNameTwo [100] Human Base
W A Nme3 [36] Really long target location name
IFeedALot
Have this:

Code: [Select]

W A NameOne           [  4] Alien Base
W A ReallyLongNameTwo [100] Human Base
W A Nme3              [ 36] Really long target location name
    IFeedALot
Or even this (cropping long names):

Code: [Select]

W A NameOne      [  4] Alien Base
W A ReallyLongNa [100] Human Base
W A Nme3         [ 36] Really long
    IFeedALot
My idea (for the team overlay on default HUD):
-align names and health and locations with each other
-crop long names and locations (don't crop excessively though)
-make the entire team overlay a bit smaller if it is still too big
-shift team overlay down so the bottom of the team overlay is always right above the part of the HUD with your health.
-make it newbie friendly to bind it to either toggle with a certain key press or only appear when holding a certain key (akin to scoreboard).

[Lakitu7]

Okay here is what I am committing now (not on servers yet)

* Fix the fact that teamoverlay was being drawn above where the hud told it to be, and it wasn't respecting the right-side bbox either. Make it valign in the center of its bbox.
* Align columns of teamoverlay and pad/truncate where necessary
* Default/GPP HUD: Move cg_tutorial down a little bit and also make it valign center.
* Default/GPP HUD: Move teamoverlay down a little bit and set the scale to 0.85

The end results are:
* It will overlap a little bit with chat text and with tutorial, but only when all 3 are at their maximum designed limits. This is a change from overlapping basically all the damn time like it did.
* Alignment / truncation
* HUD designers can move it around and it'll actually go where they told it to
* Please continue to remember that the whole damn HUD will be redesigned before 1.2 final and that you are free to make your own HUDs as well.


The main stuff I actually wanted to talk about in this post: options about which teammates to show and in what order, is still coming. This was a precursor.

[edit2] In a default HUD I can't just go getting rid of cg_tutorial but in your own huds you can certainly feel free to do so and move teamoverlay down to the bottom left where it will not overlap anything.

[Meisseli]

Make it possible to do fireteams? I'd always like to see in which location Saliva.ddos is

[UniqPhoeniX]

Off-topic: there was some squad feature (showing small triangle above squadmates or on edge of screen if they were out of view) somewhere, what happened to it? And ammo/clips shown on HUD with rectangles/'charge' bar?

[Meisseli]

How about make it basilisks only and whoever you want to add in your fireteam?

[khalsa]

Wouldn't this generally be covered by:

• Nearby Allies (show allies in ~helmet/sayarea range)

[Meisseli]

Wouldn't this generally be covered by:

• Nearby Allies (show allies in ~helmet/sayarea range)

No, I mean being able to add people who's locations you always want to see, not nearby people.

[Plague Bringer]

Wouldn't this generally be covered by:

• Nearby Allies (show allies in ~helmet/sayarea range)

No, I mean being able to add people who's locations you always want to see, not nearby people.

Let's have a party system and get some MLG action going on, too. Maybe we can get our own Machinima channel!
(MW2 references)
It'd be nice to see grangers, rants, and basis regardless of their proximity  to the player. it'd be REALLY nice to have an overlay like superpies (toggleable, ofc) that shows up regardless of whether or not there's a wall between the players, too. maybe one for the OM, aswell? we should definitely have OM health on the overlay somewhere.
and.. uhh.. builders and RC health for hummies.

[UniqPhoeniX]

Shouldn't show RC health without taking ckit IMO, if ppl are too lazy to pick ckit for 5 sec to check base health, that is their problem and they deserve to lose.

[Plague Bringer]

Shouldn't show RC health without taking ckit IMO, if ppl are too lazy to pick ckit for 5 sec to check base health, that is their problem and they deserve to lose.

It's Arachnid.
You're away from base.
Your team sucks.
You want to know what's up.

Code: [Select]

player: hey guys, how's base?
player: OM almost down.
player: should i come back to def?
player: uhh.. guys?
Aliens win.


[UniqPhoeniX]

Are you supposed to win in such scenario?

[KillerWhale]

Superpie's mockup is damn sexy, if it's possible.

The truncation and alignment looks nice, but it may still cover up chat if you have a 12 person team.
Perhaps reducing the size of the chat text a bit would make it less intrusive and fix these problems with the teamoverlay.

[Plague Bringer]

Are you supposed to win in such scenario?

1. Defend
2. Rush
3. ?
4. Profit!

[mooseberry]

Shouldn't show RC health without taking ckit IMO, if ppl are too lazy to pick ckit for 5 sec to check base health, that is their problem and they deserve to lose.

It's Arachnid.
You're away from base.
Your team sucks.
You want to know what's up.

Code: [Select]

player: hey guys, how's base?
player: OM almost down.
player: should i come back to def?
player: uhh.. guys?
Aliens win.


That sounds fine to me. Players shouldn't be given information about everything instantly. That removes the benifits of teamwork, communication, and awareness, something which should be kept important.

[Colynn']

+1 for Superpie's idea.

And for the actual teamoverlay, it would be nice if the colored background could be removed, it's disturbing and not very sexy.

[Cadynum]

[ img ]
and to go with it < sshc> There should be some key to toggle it or something

Excellent mockup.

[Lakitu7]

"Show teammates in base" cannot be implemented practically. There's no good metric for "is in the base." Using some distance-from-reactor/OM is fairly unreliable since it can show people on the other side of walls and a fair bit away as being "in base" and I'd rather not have the feature than have it frequently tell you your base is safe when it is not.

Superpie's idea also cannot be implemented practically. Clients do not know the locations of other clients that are out of vis. This is for very *good* reasons of bandwidth, framerate, and wallhack-prevention, and should not be changed. We could theoretically transmit the relative positions from each player in the teamoverlay-info messages, but those do not update rapidly enough, so you'd see people jerking all around. Making those messages update rapidly enough to do this would be a bandwidth nightmare.

No, we're not going to show buildable statuses to anyone across the map. If your team is not communicating, they should lose.

[F50]

"Show teammates in base" cannot be implemented practically. There's no good metric for "is in the base." Using some distance-from-reactor/OM is fairly unreliable since it can show people on the other side of walls and a fair bit away as being "in base" and I'd rather not have the feature than have it frequently tell you your base is safe when it is not.

Lets change the definition for a little bit. Lets say allies near base, or better yet, sort allies by proximity to the reactor. The best metric is "in the say_area location in which the base is in", but "in range of RC" would be fine, if it was also sorted by distance to the reactor, and the map had location markers.

[khalsa]

Using some distance-from-reactor/OM is fairly unreliable since it can show people on the other side of walls and a fair bit away as being "in base" and I'd rather not have the feature than have it frequently tell you your base is safe when it is not.

[Lakitu7]

I thought of loc ents too but they're even more unreliable unfortunately.

[Plague Bringer]

I always thought locations would be better handled being defined by brushes. Locations would be incredi-precise this way (though I doubt it's possible).

[F50]

Using some distance-from-reactor/OM is fairly unreliable since it can show people on the other side of walls and a fair bit away as being "in base" and I'd rather not have the feature than have it frequently tell you your base is safe when it is not.

Sorry, I'm not being clear. Finding near-nearest teammates to base is not a problem in a map with loc_ents. Sure it would have no meaning without loc_ents. But even in the current teamoverlay one of the uses is to see if anyone has the same loc_ent as the RC/OM. Sure there is no foolproof way to do it, but otherwise perhaps being able to scroll the teamoverlay to do this kind of search manually would be a good idea.