[UI] Battlefield improvement

[mickey_brown]

Somebody has surely mentioned it before, but this is what the game really needs:

A scroll baron the battlefield, or atleast the ability to scroll.
Much like how cards scroll when you go to view your library or graveyard, it would be great for the entire field.
Unlike what i have in the quick paint drawing, it would be better if there was a seperate scroll bar for lands, and a seperate scroll bar for creatures/artifacts/enchantments.
I have quite a few decks (especially my elf deck and goblin deck) that nuke the field with creatures, so that I cant see them at all (they will appear both behind lands and off the screen).
This would be such a huge improvement to the GUI I would totally crap my pants.

[Psyringe]

Hmm, I'm not sure how well scroll bars translate to the PSP controls.

Also, I have to say that my personal experience with scroll bars in Magic games is rather negative. I think Shandalar (the Microprose game) had scroll bars at least for combat, and I constantly missed or overlooked cards because of this. This might just have been a problem of that particular implementation, but I'm not sure.

Generally, I think I'd prefer a "zoom-out" mode, where the engine makes more room for cards by (say) halving their size and distance to each other if necessary. That would preserve the advantage of being able to observe the whole situation at a glance. It might be even more difficult to implement than a scroll bar though.

If anybody wants to implement a scrollbar though, I certainly won't try to stop him.

[wololo]

Generally, I think I'd prefer a "zoom-out" mode, where the engine makes more room for cards by (say) halving their size and distance to each other if necessary. That would preserve the advantage of being able to observe the whole situation at a glance.

Agreed. Scroll bars on a PSP would be difficult in terms of user interaction I think.

[flad_nag]

hi wololo, in the SVN, can the team implement also the "spacing mechanics" that is currently being applied on the battlefield (center portion when battle is on-going) to the creature row and land row?

i notice that if too many lands and creatures are played, the last creatures/lands tend to be way below the psp screen (not already seen). unlike when you try to make all your creatures attack, all of them line-up in the center battlefield. I think this is the same spacing mechanics also being used in the artifact/enchantment area (only vertical). what do you think?

[wololo]

This is actually an ongoing discussion in the dev team and it will be done in the weeks to come I believe

[flad_nag]

and in addition, the span of the 'spacing mechanics' on the battlefield, creature row and land row could probably be extended so that it covers the whole horizontal screen of the psp.

i think the current coverage of the 'red zone' during battle is about 50~60% of the horizontal or so...

[mickey_brown]

Hmm, I'm not sure how well scroll bars translate to the PSP controls.

Also, I have to say that my personal experience with scroll bars in Magic games is rather negative. I think Shandalar (the Microprose game) had scroll bars at least for combat, and I constantly missed or overlooked cards because of this. This might just have been a problem of that particular implementation, but I'm not sure.

Generally, I think I'd prefer a "zoom-out" mode, where the engine makes more room for cards by (say) halving their size and distance to each other if necessary. That would preserve the advantage of being able to observe the whole situation at a glance. It might be even more difficult to implement than a scroll bar though.

If anybody wants to implement a scrollbar though, I certainly won't try to stop him.

I think a scroll bar function would be much easier to implement than a zoom out function, especially considering that the graveyard and library already have scrolling functionality (but no bar). The bar is just there to let you know, "Hey, there are some cards off the screen."
Plus new problems would emerge with a zoom feature (though it would not be nearly as often), eventually you would zoom out so much and everything would be so small youll have a problem of telling whats what, but with a scroll bar you can scroll until the psp runs out of memory, in which case the game has already frozen.
The scroll bar also addresses the problem of creatures appearing beneath lands and things like that. Each type of card has its own area on the battlefield (like usuall) and each area has its own scroll bar. I think this would be very organized. I dont mean to be argumentative for the sake of argument, but I too have played where they use a scroll bar and did not find it difficult to remember to check off screen at all. Anybody who is this forgetful would probably forget to zoom out. Especially if its set up so that only half of the card on the farthest right is being displayed (and you have to scroll to display it) once there are enough cards to start going off the screen.

[Psyringe]

I dont mean to be argumentative for the sake of argument

Don't worry, I don't think either of us is. We're discussing a feature suggestion in order to clearly work out its strengths and weaknesses, that's a good thing imho.

I think a scroll bar function would be much easier to implement than a zoom out function, especially considering that the graveyard and library already have scrolling functionality (but no bar).

Well, there's a functionality for resizing cards already implemented as well (in the deck editor's card display). But both our examples (the graveyard / library list for scrolling, and the deck editor list for resizing) are just one-dimensional lists. I don't think either of us can tell which functionality is easier to implement for the two-dimensional battlefield display, not without actually checking how the UI is programmed and which functions the JGE library provides.

Plus new problems would emerge with a zoom feature (though it would not be nearly as often), eventually you would zoom out so much and everything would be so small youll have a problem of telling whats what, but with a scroll bar you can scroll until the psp runs out of memory, in which case the game has already frozen.

With both solutions new problems would emerge. Scrolling makes it harder to observe the whole situation, and easier to overlook cards. Zooming makes it harder to recognize a specific card, and can't be done indefinitely. There is no ideal solution since an unchangeable limitation (limited screen real estate) is forcing us to make trade-offs, so the question is which kind of functionality is so important that it should be kept, and which one is less important so it may be traded off.

Personally, I think that the ability to view the whole battlefield is more helpful to the player. While playing, the player is constantly having questions like "How many untapped swamps do I have?", "Do I have another creature that I could use for attacking / blocking?", etc. In a Scrolling environment, the player would constantly have to scroll back and forth to get his answers. That's not very efficient or enjoyable imho. In a Zooming environment, the player can observe the answers to these questions at a glance - even with smaller card pictures, it's easily discernible whether a card is tapped or not.

I agree with you that in a zoomed-out display, it becomes harder to determine the details of a given card (or, as you said above, to determine what's what). However, I don't think that's much of a difference to how the game plays already. I'll explain that a bit more:

People either play the game with text-based cards (the new ones look great btw ), or they use images for the cards. If they are using the text-based cards, then the thumbnails don't give any indication about "what's what" apart from the card's color and P/T values. Players have to navigate to the card, and check out the "big" card display, to see more. Thus, as long as text display is concerned, a zoomed-out battlefield is no less usable than the current one.

If the player uses images, then he gets a visual cue for every card's identity. In the current thumbnails, this visual cue is already too small to discern any details of the depicted scene. Hence, the image's "cue" function is performed by giving the player a pixel pattern which reminds him to the picture that he sees in the "big" card display. And if the thumbnail image mainly functions as a reminder for the "big card" image, then this function can be performed with smaller thumbnails as well (imho). I don't see much of a loss of usability here.

You said that a Scrolling display can be used for extreme amounts of cards, while a Zooming display would become impractical at this point. I agree with you on that general assessment, however I think that a Zooming display will remain practical as long as the positions and states of the cards (tapped, untapped, morphed (should that be implemented) etc.) are discernible. And if you have so many cards that this isn't the case any more (even on a zoomed-out display that's able to show dozens of cards), then you're going to have problems either way - even a Scrolling display wouldn't be very practical to play with, say, 200 cards on the table, on a PSP screen.

So, in short, in my opinion, the Zooming display preserves more important features than a Scrolling display, hence my preference would be with a Zooming display.

The scroll bar also addresses the problem of creatures appearing beneath lands and things like that. Each type of card has its own area on the battlefield (like usuall) and each area has its own scroll bar. I think this would be very organized.

The problem of creatures appearing beneath lands would be solved in a Zooming display as well. There are three distinct screen areas (creatures, lands, enchantments/artifacts). Each of these areas has its upper left corner at a fixed screen coordinate. If the creatures start to be overlapped by the lands, then you can zoom out. Creatures and lands areas still start at the same screen coordinates, but now each thumbnail is smaller, so they don't overlap any more.

I too have played where they use a scroll bar and did not find it difficult to remember to check off screen at all. Anybody who is this forgetful would probably forget to zoom out. Especially if its set up so that only half of the card on the farthest right is being displayed (and you have to scroll to display it) once there are enough cards to start going off the screen.

Yes - as I said, this problem might be one of the specific implementation in Shandalar, which didn't give you good visual cues that there actually were cards off the screen. I agree that the solution you propose would solve the particular problem of making the player realize that there are cards off the screen. It still doesn't help him much with questions like "How many untapped swamps do I have", or "Do I have another creature to attack / block" though - he'd still have to scroll across the whole length of the window to check that.

Lastly, one point you didn't address in your last post is the problem of using multiple scrolling windows efficiently with the PSP controls (which if I understood correctly have no mouse, no click-and-drag functionality, etc.). This seems to be an as of yet unanswered question in your proposal, but since the PSP is the main target platform of Wagic, it's probably important to answer it.


So, to come to an end - I hope I was able bring my points across. I don't think your suggestion is a bad one - you described a problem that definitely exists, and proposed a solution that would solve this problem. I just think that there's another solution that would be even better, probably because I weigh the importance of several aspects of UI functionality differently than you do. Ultimately it will be up to the devs to decide which solution - if any - might be implemented.

[mickey_brown]

Scrolling makes it harder to observe the whole situation

By scrolling back and forth you asses the situation.

]Personally, I think that the ability to view the whole battlefield is more helpful to the player. While playing, the player is constantly having questions like "How many untapped swamps do I have?",

Well in all honesty I find it much less likely that somebody will nuke the screen with lands. Having the screen covered with creatures happens often because of tokens (for example queen ant lets you feed as much mana as you want into ant tokens). However something else I would like to suggest to strengthen the GUI would be stacking instances of the same card atop one another (each one being a little bit lower, but covering most of the card behind it). Players do this when they play in real life. It saves space, and is very organized. But of course once so many cards are stacked it takes up to much verticle space, so you only stack so many cards then you start a new stack next to that (just like players do in real life). For example I tend to make stacks of 4 with my lands.

In a Scrolling environment, the player would constantly have to scroll back and forth to get his answers. That's not very efficient or enjoyable imho.

Yes but in the zooming environment players would constantly be zooming in and out. With how tiny the psp screen is, the truth of the matter is you wont have to zoom out very much before you are no longer able to even see the power/toughness on the picture-less cards., for that reason players would probably only zoom out for a moment, then zoom back in. It wouldn't be any more efficient.

In a Zooming environment, the player can observe the answers to these questions at a glance - even with smaller card pictures, it's easily discernible whether a card is tapped or not.

As the image gets smaller (which is very quick) it would actually become hard to tell if a card is tapped or not, since the dimensions are less extreme.

even a Scrolling display wouldn't be very practical to play with, say, 200 cards on the table, on a PSP screen

Actually you could scroll through 200 cards very quickly by simply holding left or right.

Lastly, one point you didn't address in your last post is the problem of using multiple scrolling windows efficiently with the PSP controls (which if I understood correctly have no mouse, no click-and-drag functionality, etc.). This seems to be an as of yet unanswered question in your proposal, but since the PSP is the main target platform of Wagic, it's probably important to answer it.

Left and right allow you to scroll through permanents in one specific area (such as creatures), up and down move between different areas (between creatures and lands, ect...) However, i was sort of thinking they same thing with your zooming proposal. What buttons would the user use to zoom in and out?

There is one major problem that you seemed to miss with the zoom feature. How are you supposed to tell if there are creatures off of the screen?

As you can see by this screen shot. When the scroll bar is removed, there is no way of telling how much stuff lies off the screen. So even in a zoomed interface, the existence of a scroll-bar is still needed. Now it would be really nice to have both, but it would be wise to start with a scroll bar. I know C++, VB, Java, and several other languages, and I can tell you that coding a scroll-bar is pretty easy.

Plus I just remember that there is already a scroll bar in the deck editor.

Scroll bars on a PSP would be difficult in terms of user interaction I think.

I did not mean for the user to interact with the scroll bar. I meant for it to be the same as the one that already exists inside the deck editor. A scrolling mechanism exists by moving left and right, and a scroll bar displays beneath the cards to show the user how much lies off the screen. It shouldn't be hard to implement or execute considering one already exists within the game.

[Psyringe]

I think we both presented our preferred solutions, and the parts where we disagree, reasonably well already - so I'll try to just reply to those aspects where I think you might have misunderstood me, or where you explicitly asked something.

Edit: Re-reading my post, and this prologue, before I submit it, I can't help the feeling that I thoroughly failed on that. Sorry. )

Scrolling makes it harder to observe the whole situation

By scrolling back and forth you asses the situation.

Yes - that was my point. I didn't say that it would be *impossible* to assess the whole situation in a Scrolling environment, my point was that it would be *harder*, because - as you say - you have to scroll back and forth to do so.

Well in all honesty I find it much less likely that somebody will nuke the screen with lands.

Yes, definitely. That's why I didn't limit my examples of questions that the player is concerned with to "How many untapped Swamps do I have", but also always mentioned "Do I have another creature to attack / block". Of course both are just examples - there are many more questions that are relevant for the player and that (imho) would be harder to answer in a Scrolling environment. Another one is the question "How many creatures should not attack this turn because I'll need them for defense in the next one?". That would be especially tricky in a Scrolling environment, since it requires a comparison of the contents of two scrolling windows, and sometimes neither of the two will be able to show all creatures.

Btw, your suggestion to display land in stacks is very good imho. This could free up a lot of valuable screen space. We'd have to define how lands with enchantments on them are displayed though, since these could screw up the visibility of lands in stack. I guess that when you're playing, you simply remove a land from its stack when your opponent casts "Cursed Land" (or something similar) on it - that wouldn't be impossible to implement, but of course it needs a programmer who's willing, capable, and as the time, to do it. The last criterion is the one that currently blocks the most ideas.

In a Scrolling environment, the player would constantly have to scroll back and forth to get his answers. That's not very efficient or enjoyable imho.

Yes but in the zooming environment players would constantly be zooming in and out. With how tiny the psp screen is, the truth of the matter is you wont have to zoom out very much before you are no longer able to even see the power/toughness on the picture-less cards., for that reason players would probably only zoom out for a moment, then zoom back in. It wouldn't be any more efficient.

Mmh, then I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one, or implement the feature and find neutral testers. Personally I expect that players will find little reason to zoom back in as long as they can still observe a card's states.

I also think that you underestimate the amount by which the thumbnails could be shrunk. Currently, the P/T display (a) makes up about one third of the thumbnail's area (that's a generous assessment that takes into account that there may be two-digit numbers involved), (b) uses a font that is bigger than (for example) the font used in the scrolling messages in the title screen, and (c) uses a layout that doesn't make use of much of the available space. I think it should be possible to shrink the thumbnails in a zoom-out mode considerably, without sacrificing efficiency, by (a) shrinking the card size, (b) switching to a slightly smaller font for the numbers if necessary, and (c) switching to a different layout (P above T, instead of displaying both side by side) for the very small cards. I'd need to run tests to give a definitive number, but I'd expect that by utilizing all options it will be possible to have four cards (six might be achievable as well, but would be stretching it, so let's go with four) in the space that's currently used up by a single one. Coupled with the better space utilization that's already implemented in the SVN version (due to better battlefield layout), and that's planned to further improve, this would allow for at least 90 creatures and 30 lands to be displayed in one player's battlefield (give or take some depending on the number of enchantments / artifacts in play). Add some more creatures in case a "land stacking" feature (as you suggested) gets added. This number would imho be sufficient - I'd expect you to have won a game before a display limit of 90 creatures becomes relevant.

However, as I said, these are currently speculations. I'd need to run tests to get any definitive numbers. Feel free to disagree.

As the image gets smaller (which is very quick) it would actually become hard to tell if a card is tapped or not, since the dimensions are less extreme.

Again that's something where we'll have to agree to disagree. The cards have an aspect ratio of 1.425 : 1 - at this ratio I'd expect people to be able to discern the difference between a "standing" and a "lying" pattern at much smaller sizes than relevant for this implementation.

even a Scrolling display wouldn't be very practical to play with, say, 200 cards on the table, on a PSP screen

Actually you could scroll through 200 cards very quickly by simply holding left or right.

Not if you're actually looking at the cards (imho) and comparing them to others while deciding what you're going to do with which card. Navigation in a grid of (say) 30 x 3 cells will always be faster than navigation in a line of 90 cells - especially when you can observe the whole grid at a glance - which makes it much easier to home in on the information you're looking for, because it has a visual cue on the screen all the time.

However, i was sort of thinking they same thing with your zooming proposal. What buttons would the user use to zoom in and out?

Home / Select probably, but it's not that much of an issue for the zooming proposal imho, because (if I'm assessing the situation correctly) players will not switch between zoom levels much anyway. Actually an auto-zoom feature (zoom out automatically when a card gets printed outside the visible area) might do the trick pretty well.

There is one major problem that you seemed to miss with the zoom feature. How are you supposed to tell if there are creatures off of the screen?

Well, the whole point of a zooming display is to prevent creatures from going off the screen in the first place. Or, to put it differently - instead of first failing to display all relevant info on the screen, and then applying a visual cue to inform the player of this problem, I'd rather prevent it from happening in the first place.

So even in a zoomed interface, the existence of a scroll-bar is still needed.

Imho that is not the case. A scrolling bar would only be needed if there were more creatures in play than the zoomed-out display could handle, and I think that the numbers I listed further above are big enough to do without a scroll bar. It would still be nice to have one in the case people want to have more than 90 creatures on their battlefield, but I don't expect that this will happen very often.

As I said, there will be a threshold at which a Zooming display would be less practical than a Scrolling display. In my current assessment, this threshold is somewhere beyond 90 creatures in one player's battlefield. Below this threshold, I think that the advantages of Zooming display (being able to observe the whole situation, easier comparisons between cards, quicker navigation) weigh in stronger. In my opinion this is good enough, and I think it would be unwise to give people a less efficient display for 16-90 creatures in order to give them a better display for 90+ creatures.

However - the whole discussion is a bit theoretical as long as nobody's there who's going to write code for either of the two solutions. Meaning - I do enjoy the discussion (and it helped me to sharpen my own understanding of the subject, so thanks for that in any case), but it might very well remain a theoretical one.