Testbed Feedback - Battle UI, Localization, Patrols, Delivery quests

[Spitfire83]

Been reported before but during a boarding all battle screen text I.e. sector fire & sails etc became unreadable in no recognisable language. I did f11 in game but forgot to screenshot.

Also when exiting boarding I forgot to put crew back onto sailing etc for  a moment because it wasn't very clear if active or not highlight should be brighter different colour...

[angriff]

Invite to Clan shows blank.  Invite to group shows blank. 

[DeRuyter]

Something I noticed when buying guns and dragging and dropping on a ship. If you drop more than the deck holds the remainder goes back into the warehouse but the ship shows only 4 guns mounted like below. 

Notice the upper and top decks show only 4 guns. This is a graphics problem I think because once I closed all the windows and reopened it displayed the proper amount of guns. 

Here is a shot of the strange gibberish characters that appeared on screen just after the boarding action ended. I think someone else posted this as well.

[Sir Loorkon]

21 hours ago, admin said:

we posted and actually added colored icons to battle ui and they were very distracting and focused too much attention to buttons. same with boarding. it was more colorful in prototype but only looked good in static- when action starts it turned into a bloomberg stock interface and was too distracting. hence - the simple plain boarding ui

I have done some more boardings with the new boarding game and would like to add some comment to my post above. With the old boarding game I had the feeling of boarding in the age of sails. With the new one it feels like doing boarding with an Imperial Star Destroyer (no insult or offend intended, thats realy how it feels for me). The bording UI just looks like 21+ century, not age of sails. The boarding game itself did not improve, its worse than before. I like your intention to get rid of last second clicks but how about a rework of preparation costs to achieve this? Take the old boarding game and show the preparation cost needed with the commands. Devide the 15 seconds in three time zones with increasing preparation costs and make the effectiveness of the commants more transparent. @Licinio Chiavari made a good proposal some posts above. In the current state I recomment not to introduce the new boarding game and leave the old one as it is untill a complete rework of boarding is possible.

Edited January 25, 2019 by Sir Loorkon

[Christoph]

at la Habana we have only spanish fleets at gustavia or christiansted you have big ennemy npc fleets. Is it wanted like that? gustavia is a pve paradise

[Zlatkowar]

On 1/23/2019 at 8:18 PM, z4ys said:

• I would change the pic for bow and stern guns to something that shows the bow+ guns 
• same with gunnery pic. Currently it looks like a dot. A pic of a gun crew would be better
• same with survival. A pic of fire + water woul be better otherwise misleading?
• [V] Firing: From bow to stern = thats so much to read during a battle  "Rolling front" - "Rolling back" was better
• The symbols for "hull" "sail" "crew" etc dmg in the upper center are so small on 1920*1080

Concept is really really nice

 

On 1/23/2019 at 8:48 PM, z4ys said:

• Attack doesnt seem to win boarding when enemy is at 0 moral = bug???
• Its still possible to predict what the enemy has chosen by prep usage and firepower/meele value change in the upper left = That makes it actual the same old boarding just 1000 harder for players who cant read and interpret the numbers.

Sorry for double quoting you but I agree to most of what you said. Overall the UI looks sexier in terms of graphical improvement, but it lacks a bit of clarity in my opinion. I had to use CTRL and hover on some of the elements to make sure it's still the same function as before so I can imagine how much of an issue it could be for new players.

I don't quite get why enemy's action while boarding has been removed, and again, for a new player the "Fk Bk Ok" still looks as unclear as the rest of the UI, and even once the boarding is finished and you have to choose whether you want to leave it, sink it or capture it, a new player will more than likely have to google it to make sure he does not make a mistake. Overall, it has to be a bit more intuitive.

I also agree with Compte de Cornusiac about fleet order options. It's probably off topic if the aim here is just to provide feedback on a specific set of changes, but adding "Protect Targetted Ally" / "Rake Enemy" / "Board Enemy" would really add interesting PvE fighting possibilities.

Finally, the pace at which you find NPC fleet is so satisfying.... I guess it's probably a bit overtuned to allow logging as much info as possible, but I really had fun. Much more fun than on live server where you have to roam for hours before finding a decent target.

[admin]

14 hours ago, van der Decken said:

Just thought I'd check out the tutorial on the testbed and have to ask...what in tarnation is "Firelock volley" command? Apparently it means "Attack", because that was the only button that completed that section.

It you probably are using the custom which has this strange text

[admin]

1 hour ago, Christoph said:

at la Habana we have only spanish fleets at gustavia or christiansted you have big ennemy npc fleets. Is it wanted like that? gustavia is a pve paradise

on testbed?

[Christoph]

Just now, admin said:

on testbed?

yes

[admin]

10 hours ago, Intrepido said:

Is going to be an update of the testbed?

Right now, I dont see anything worth to test for hours cause the changes are minimal, specially to the battle UI, almost same UI that one that was thought in the first place as a placeholder. Now the new UI should continue the legacy of the old one for unknown reasons.

 

you dont see the things under the hood. 

• OLD ui had 4 systems in it which caused lower fps and was very hard to maintain.
• new (old) UI goal is to
  • keep everything the same (to avoid confusion)
  • remove as much text as possible
  • move all elements to new tech (which basically means rebuild it from scratch)

Huge amount of work was done on this ui and it will work better but look the same.

[Marquis de la Fayette]

Hello gentlemen the developers

I tested with interest the beta version. Frankly, that's good. I particularly appreciate:
- new missions (travelers and letters)
- the new battle interface (it's perfect)
- the new boarding interface

In my case, no bug.

Just a comment maybe ... I think it would take:

1) be able to capture travelers but ONLY in boarding
2) that some couriers (more dangerous to carry) are in fact a message with important information just for that carried the traveler (eg: location of a wreck, location of a rare product, location of an abandoned boat to capture, etc.).

Thanks for reading me.

Sincerely, Marquis de La Fayette. OCB

[Guest]

@admin i suggest adding back rolling frontfire and backfire and just instead have a tooltip explaining what rolling frontfire and backfire is

[admin]

5 minutes ago, Wyy said:

@admin i suggest adding back rolling frontfire and backfire and just instead have a tooltip explaining what rolling frontfire and backfire is

for the new player it will not matter. he would never know rolling front and rolling back existed and will only see  Bow to stern   Stern to bow. Which to our opinion explains how guns fire a little better.

What am i missing?

[OjK]

6 minutes ago, admin said:

What am i missing?

You might check the post I made before (the long one) 

Having both contrary words in one line is bad design (totally not intuitive) 

[OjK]

From Bow

From Stern 

That would be enough. Don't put contradictions in one line 

[Hullabaloo]

First Impressions of graphics:

Liking some of it. Particularly the rudder/fire/reload shock indicators. 

What I don't like:

The Damage indicators are designed to fit in the top bar I understand that, but they are too small (at least on my screen 2560 x1440) they are tiny for such important information.

The Wind Indicator is nice but I preferred the old sails. These ones overlap when they are set at opposites (looks odd) and are more curved and It seems harder to line them up exactly with the wind to neutralise sails. The old one felt more precise.

The Only indication that you have taken crew off sailing/gunnery etc is the (tiny) number slightly greys out and counts down! This is not enough. It should be the whole square/button or at the very least the icon inside the button or better use of colour. Again at my res these numbers are small and this is vital information.

When cool down is on, you get the timer icon but lose the icon that indicates what it actually is. It doesn't matter so much for vets but for a newer player you cannot tell what it is that is cooling down unless you remember. 

Knocked out cannons are only shown by the number reduced by one. Why not also show a red number for the number of damaged cannons

The use of colour generally could be better. The cooling used to be in yellow now it just greys out. It is too uniform so important information doesn't stand out.

The boarding window is ugly, full stop. This needs to be reworked completely. I've done excel spreadsheets prettier than that. Again, uniform colours, no icons. Looks like that was rushed.

The armour structure indicator in the top: L & R really? I can tell my left from my right thanks and not very nautical. P and SB would be better and a B and S too if you need any of it.

Overall it's an improvement in some ways, but it's just too uniform in colour and vital information does not stand out. 

 

[Hullabaloo]

12 minutes ago, OjK said:

From Bow

From Stern 

That would be enough. Don't put contradictions in one line 

Use of colour?

[Hullabaloo]

21 minutes ago, Banished Privateer said:

Give option to turn off Random mode. 90% of NA players hate it and accidently use from time to time. Causes a lot of annoyance.

THIS. I do this all the time and have lost fights because of it. It's made worse because when in aiming mode there is no visual difference from Rolling front (bow to stern). I have yet to work out any possible use for random fire mode.

[Christoph]

7 minutes ago, Hullabaloo 'The Thief' said:

What I don't like:

The Damage indicators are designed to fit in the top bar I understand that, but they are too small (at least on my screen 2560 x1440) they are tiny for such important information.

 

there is a canvas size option now in the settings allowing you to increase the size of the icons and windows.

[Hullabaloo]

5 minutes ago, Christoph said:

there is a canvas size option now in the settings allowing you to increase the size of the icons and windows.

cool i will try that out. ty

Yeah ok, but it makes everything bigger. So in order to make the damage indicators a reasonable size all the other icons are massive.

Edited January 25, 2019 by Hullabaloo 'The Thief'

[Angus MacDuff]

Why do I have to hit "repairs" in order to see my timers?  Couldn't the timers always be visible? 

[admin]

Testbed will shutdown until next week for long maintenance, patch deployment and improvements based on your feedback and based on your bug reports. It will reopen early next week.

[Miaowi]

Shame - I was going to grind the 25 pve sinkings and boardings this weekend. 

On the flip side happy that you guys already have sufficient data for a remedial patch

[Zlatkowar]

46 minutes ago, Rickard said:

Bow to stern Stern to bow is the better option indeed, rolling backfire and rolling front fire was just confusing to people with knowledge in nautical terms.

Testbed version is confusing to casuals, or people with limited English vocabulary. I chose the wrong option on few occasions while testing yesterday evening. I don't know how much they want to make this game accurate in technical and nautical terms, I'd just suggest to weight in the utility VS user friendliness of such changes and to find balance between these two.

[Zlatkowar]

6 minutes ago, admin said:

Testbed will shutdown until next week for long maintenance, patch deployment and improvements based on your feedback and based on your bug reports. It will reopen early next week.

Oh damn  I was only half way through the sinking/capturing part. Will it reset on monday or can we keep current count?