CombatSuggestion SimpleAndIntuitive

the idea is to make combat intuitive by making it "simple" and "obvious"

• "simple" means only a few simple rules, instead of complex damage calculations
• "obvious" means a good gui that shows you what you need to know without having to read a whole manual or get a degree in rocket sience before you start to play.

• you start the game without reading any manual or readme
• a welcome message pops up and tells you the movement and fire keys, and that you get more help when pressing f1
• pressing f1 shows a keyboard map and other short help texts
• keyboard lay out should be simple most things are done with the mouse, using buttons and menus that are self descriptive and have tooltips on mouseover
• everything should be as obvious as possible
• rightclicking something (gui-element or 3d object) opens a contextmenu with further options
• moving the mouse over something shows a tooltip with a name or short description
• tooltips can be multiline and contain images
• the amount of damage you do is not magically calculated, but exactly what's written under the weapon icon
• for every "condition" (slow,blind,..) you or the enemy has, there is an icon on the screen that has a tooltip when you move over the mouse, and pops up a description dialog when clicked.
• your state that is relevant for the combat is just a few values displayed in the hud (hull,shield,energy) , not a vast array of different systems that can be broke and that the new player doesn't know what is for what.
• there should be an icon for every weapon, and under it a colored numbers for damage, enery need, range, and a bar visualizing cooldown/recharge, the numbers should have seperate tooltips to make it obvious what the color means
  • the weapon should have a tooltip displaying the name and infos when you move the mouse over it (e.g. what conditions the weapon causes)
  • clicking the weapons toggles autofire/normal/disabled for it (weapons in autofire are fired at the selected target automatically all the time, if it is hostile, enabled weapons can be fired with space) (this can be visualised by a colored border, and written in the tooltip or a red cross through it if disabled)
  • the context menu that comes with rightclicking the weapon contains a button for further info of the weapon
• equipment that has one-time-use button or can be enabled/disabled (e.g. stuff that consumes energy while active)

should also be listed on screen, either as icons like the weapons, or in a special list and has similar tooltip-descriptions and easy use like the weapons

• there should be two lists of ships in the hud, one for nearby enemies, one for friends/teammates, and they should display infos like distance, hull,shield,energy so getting an overview over the battle is easy.
• players can "call" a single target with a keystroke that gets specially marked, and that all other players can select with a single keystroke, the "call" itself is announced visually and audibly when it is done, and means something like "please concentrate on this enemy", there is only one call at a time (this is actually from playing guildwars, where it has prooved to be very useful)

Ghoulsblade 21:46, 31 August 2007 (CEST) :

A primary goal for me is that sfz (in its default configuration) is very intuitive to play for people new to the game.

i'd prefer to implement combat as simple as possible at first, as there are other areas of the game that should be well developed as well.