MWIF Game Interface Design

[Shannon V. OKeets]

Here is another screen shot after the boundary lines have been improved. Notice that Hungary is still neutral and that Vichy France controls a lot of Africa.

[Caquineur]

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets
What you get at this resolution is a better understanding of the convoy routes.

This a great tool - in fact, all 4 pictures are great !
Can you freely switch between type of terrain/control/weather display ?
If so, it's [8D] and !

[micheljq]

I like the forth one with boundaries lines and colors for major powers control particularly. [:)]

[brian brian]

yeah, that one looks like one of those Time-Life maps showing how much the Axis held in 1941 when it looked scary

[Froonp]

ORIGINAL: Caquineur
Can you freely switch between type of terrain/control/weather display ?

Yes.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

Now that I have the global map large enough to use for doing something functional, I will give it more utility.

Here was an easy one to do: objective hexes are now shown in fuchsia on the medium resolution global map.

Next up is to eliminate the 'Markers' global map (showing saved oil and build points when that optional rule is being used) and replace it with a Production global map, showing factories, resources, and links between them.

Once I get the Production global map finished, I'll look at redesigning the system for routing resources to factories, or saving oil at different locations. That will be a challenge since the scope is more or less world-wide and involves 3 elements: the resource, the factory, and the link. For each element there are multiple occurrences.

[MajorDude]

Very nice indeed! [:)]

[Shannon V. OKeets]

Here are a couple more global maps at double size. What I have added is a 'production' version of the global map. This one is for the USSR so the areas controlled by the enemy are shown in gray, while friendly and neutral countries are shown in white. You can not route resources through hexes controlled by the other side. You can see that the Axis controls Norway, Finland, Greece, and Madagascar.

There are 5 possible colors for resources/factories under the control of the USSR.
- Bright green indicates factories that are operating at maximum.
- Orange indicates hexes where some factories are working and others are not.
- Red indicates that none of the factories in the hex are working.
- Resources are brown for non-oil and fuchsia for oil. Oil can be either oil resources, synthetic oil plants, and saved oil points. Note that the first two are not shown if they are damged from strategic bombing.

On the global map the cursor is pointing at a Brown dot. As shown in the Main form, there is a single non-oil resource in the hex (63, 72).

[Shannon V. OKeets]

2nd and last in series.

Here the CW has been selected. Besides the non-oil and oil resources (the cursor is pointing to an oil resource in Canada), there are also the factories in the United Kingdom (a mass of green dots).

The convoy routing is also shown (first number in the sea area is the # of convoy points.

Somewhere in the new code I have added the border lines between sea areas have been lost (I'll have to fix that).

Next up is to add rail lines that are being used for shipping resources and link between ports and the sea areas. My goal here is to shown each resource (say in Canada), the rail lines to the port, the overseas link to a port in the UK and the last rail line to a factory, which is green.

Notice the non-oil resource in Africa for the CW, and the oil in Iraq.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

One more before I take a dinner break. I've got the sea area boundaries functioning again.

I am trying to decide if putting in abbreviations for all 83 sea areas would be worth the effort. They would have to be terse and a small font (e.g., for the Baltic and Med. I guess I could make them a toggle on/off if it looks too cluttered.

Notice the saved oil in Hawaii and the oil resource in Alaska.

[Froonp]

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets
Here was an easy one to do: objective hexes are now shown in fuchsia on the medium resolution global map.

[/quote]
That's really great Steve. A very good use of the global map.
Any chance of having the objective hexes in red instead of fuchsia (red is the usual color of objectives on the map) ? I suppose that having them red, and at the same time having Japanese possessions and units red too would be confusing.

Will it be possible to cumulate more than one view ?

For example, the view with the colors for who controls the countries, with the production view ?
Or the view with the colored dots for the units on the map, with the production view ?
Or the view with the colored dots for the units on the map, with the objective cities ?

[Froonp]

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets
I am trying to decide if putting in abbreviations for all 83 sea areas would be worth the effort. They would have to be terse and a small font (e.g., for the Baltic and Med. I guess I could make them a toggle on/off if it looks too cluttered.

Why not, I'm sure I would appreciate that.
But if you do that, there will be one person here to ask you to add country names too while you are at it.
Isn't the information that is displayed on the Main Form while the mouse cursor is hovering the places on the Global map enough already ?

Also, will it be possible
- to have the unit in hex for display the units under the cursor on the Global Map ?
- to have the flyouts appear, when they are activated,, when units hare hovered in the Global Map ?

[Froonp]

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets
One more before I take a dinner break. I've got the sea area boundaries functioning again.

These new Global Map functionalities are amazing and look very promising !!!!

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: Froonp

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets
Here was an easy one to do: objective hexes are now shown in fuchsia on the medium resolution global map.

That's really great Steve. A very good use of the global map.
Any chance of having the objective hexes in red instead of fuchsia (red is the usual color of objectives on the map) ? I suppose that having them red, and at the same time having Japanese possessions and units red too would be confusing.

Will it be possible to cumulate more than one view ?

For example, the view with the colors for who controls the countries, with the production view ?
Or the view with the colored dots for the units on the map, with the production view ?
Or the view with the colored dots for the units on the map, with the objective cities ?

Thanks.

The dots are very small and the colors difficult to tell apart. I was worried about players who have trouble differentiating green from red. Since the terrain map contains a lot of green, I went with fuchsia for the objective hexes.

I don't think the small dots work on the Units or Control variations of the global map. That's because both of those use a lot of different colors, not leaving enough color(s) for showing other stuff. You will notice that on the Production variation I am using gray (enemy) and white (friendly/neutral). That was intentional so the different colored dots will stand out - always against a white background.

I am going to do the rail lines as even smaller black dots (center 2 by 2 pixels within a 4 by 4 hex). I'll have to see how that turns out - according to theory they should look dotted.

My new "after a good night's sleep" idea was to make the entire path to the factory blink when a resource is clicked on. Of course, I am not sure how to code that yet, but I think it should be dramatic and readily visible. In general I dislike blinking, but I think this would be a good use of that functionality.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: Froonp

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets
I am trying to decide if putting in abbreviations for all 83 sea areas would be worth the effort. They would have to be terse and a small font (e.g., for the Baltic and Med. I guess I could make them a toggle on/off if it looks too cluttered.

Why not, I'm sure I would appreciate that.
But if you do that, there will be one person here to ask you to add country names too while you are at it.
Isn't the information that is displayed on the Main Form while the mouse cursor is hovering the places on the Global map enough already ?

Also, will it be possible
- to have the unit in hex for display the units under the cursor on the Global Map ?
- to have the flyouts appear, when they are activated,, when units hare hovered in the Global Map ?

We can't do the country names - there are 252 of them and some of the longest names are for countries with the fewest hexes.
---
I decided the sea area names should be added. ADG had to come up with names for all 83 sea areas and some of them are obscure and/or ambiguous (East Coast comes to mind). Having the names visible will help with the task described in the next paragraph.

What I am grappling with presently is to provide a list of resources & factories concurrent with a large portion of the double sized global map, all within a 1024 by 768 pixel frame. I would like the player to be able to click on the name of a resource (unused) from the list of resources, then click on a factory city name, and lastly click on a series of sea areas, thereby defining the route from the resource to the factory. As the path is created, the program would report it back to the player using the sea area names. Once I get this up and running, I'll show you what I mean.
====
EDIT: About the Units in Hex display, it already does that for individual hexes and I have it down as a 'bug' that it does not show all units in a sea areas. Doing the Flyouts that way is a new idea. I am not convinced it is worthwhile though. The flyouts only show 9 units/page which is rarely enough for sea areas. And if you are looking at land hexes, you should be using the detailed map, not the global map. However, having the Naval Review Details form update as you click on different sea areas would be great. I'll look into doing that.

[paulderynck]

About seeing a path from a resource to a factory. It is very dynamic. It may be one way at the start of a turn and a different way at the end - due to convoys being sunk or moved and resources and rail lines changing control. And without the construction engineers option, captured red factories produce for the side they are owned by at the end of the turn. The final situation right before production is really the only important one.

I don't see any point in a player allocating resources to factories until the beginning of the production phase. What would really be awesome is if you could open a view that showed your current production and the game optimized what production would be and how resoureces were routed based on convoy locations at that instant. It would also optimize based on whether the Oil optional is in play. And it would have to satisfy all the lend lease rules for all lent resources and build points. This may be a pretty tall order. Keeping in mind that FREX in Oil games, players will sometimes forego building the maximum in order to save oil, maybe the program optimization wouldn't always be what a player would choose if he has some longe range plan, anyway. So manual intervention would always have to be available.

So first of all, Steve, can you provide a quick description of how you see players using the convoy/resource view tools and how players would go about determining the number of build points they will produce.

[Ullern]

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets

ORIGINAL: Froonp

ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets
I am trying to decide if putting in abbreviations for all 83 sea areas would be worth the effort. They would have to be terse and a small font (e.g., for the Baltic and Med. I guess I could make them a toggle on/off if it looks too cluttered.

Why not, I'm sure I would appreciate that.
But if you do that, there will be one person here to ask you to add country names too while you are at it.
Isn't the information that is displayed on the Main Form while the mouse cursor is hovering the places on the Global map enough already ?

Also, will it be possible
- to have the unit in hex for display the units under the cursor on the Global Map ?
- to have the flyouts appear, when they are activated,, when units hare hovered in the Global Map ?

We can't do the country names - there are 252 of them and some of the longest names are for countries with the fewest hexes.
---
I decided the sea area names should be added. ADG had to come up with names for all 83 sea areas and some of them are obscure and/or ambiguous (East Coast comes to mind). Having the names visible will help with the task described in the next paragraph.

What I am grappling with presently is to provide a list of resources & factories concurrent with a large portion of the double sized global map, all within a 1024 by 768 pixel frame. I would like the player to be able to click on the name of a resource (unused) from the list of resources, then click on a factory city name, and lastly click on a series of sea areas, thereby defining the route from the resource to the factory. As the path is created, the program would report it back to the player using the sea area names. Once I get this up and running, I'll show you what I mean.
====
EDIT: About the Units in Hex display, it already does that for individual hexes and I have it down as a 'bug' that it does not show all units in a sea areas. Doing the Flyouts that way is a new idea. I am not convinced it is worthwhile though. The flyouts only show 9 units/page which is rarely enough for sea areas. And if you are looking at land hexes, you should be using the detailed map, not the global map. However, having the Naval Review Details form update as you click on different sea areas would be great. I'll look into doing that.

All great ideas.[:)]

Have you considered using some sort of symbolism instead of just colors for some of the resources/factory/used/unused and different types?
Example of what I am thinking of: Say Bright green is not just bright green but have a dark vertical line on the left. In fact all factory hexes can have a dark vertical line at the left to indicate they are factories, but have different colors. While resources instead have a dark horizontal line at the bottom, in addition to colors for different types.

?

[Shannon V. OKeets]

ORIGINAL: paulderynck

About seeing a path from a resource to a factory. It is very dynamic. It may be one way at the start of a turn and a different way at the end - due to convoys being sunk or moved and resources and rail lines changing control. And without the construction engineers option, captured red factories produce for the side they are owned by at the end of the turn. The final situation right before production is really the only important one.

I don't see any point in a player allocating resources to factories until the beginning of the production phase. What would really be awesome is if you could open a view that showed your current production and the game optimized what production would be and how resoureces were routed based on convoy locations at that instant. It would also optimize based on whether the Oil optional is in play. And it would have to satisfy all the lend lease rules for all lent resources and build points. This may be a pretty tall order. Keeping in mind that FREX in Oil games, players will sometimes forego building the maximum in order to save oil, maybe the program optimization wouldn't always be what a player would choose if he has some longe range plan, anyway. So manual intervention would always have to be available.

So first of all, Steve, can you provide a quick description of how you see players using the convoy/resource view tools and how players would go about determining the number of build points they will produce.

As you state in your post, optimization is in the eye of the beholder. The program handles the trade agreements, since they are mandatory. Then it rails non-oil resources to factories, which is a no-brainer. But for the rest, there is the Production Planning phase (not part of WIF FE per se). The Prod. Plan. phase was inserted in the sequence of play expressly to enable players to do what you are asking for.

I am still in the process of figuring out how to improve that phase. I redid the PP form extensively last spring, and I am working on the map graphics for routing resources now. Then I'll go back to the PP form and look at how to use all the different buttons for saving oil and routing resources. I am thinking along the lines of merging the lists of resources and factories portion of the form with the double size global map.
=========
Here is the global map with the sea areas named.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

2nd in a series of 5.

Here are Japan's convoys. I chose a very bland background color for the sea areas that do not contain units from the selected country. Otherwise the map would be a blaze of red. But for areas that do contain selected units, I used the major power's color to emphasize those areas somewhat more.

[Shannon V. OKeets]

3rd in a series of 5. Here the convoys and sea areas names are shown against the terrain map.

I still have problems with the cross over from column 359 to 0 in the middle of the Atlantic. Those should read North Atlantic, Brazilian Coast, and Verde. Note that they are all missing part of their image. When there are many types of units in a sea area, the number above the names can become quite long. Those would also be truncated if I don't fix this - so it is more than simply a cosmetic problem.