I think I like the idea of big upgrades and key buildings being announced, perhaps similarly to Dota 2 where when a player purchases a big item, a box pops out of the right side of the screen showing what they bought. + Show Spoiler +
It's obviously too much if this is done for every upgrade and building, but maybe storm, stim, charge, blink, dt shrine, ht shrine, robo bay, fusion core :D, infestor den, (first) spire, ultra den, greater spire, etc. With expansions you might only show them before a certain time or if they are actually expos (not macro hatches or orbitals in the middle of nowhere...dunno this could be hard).
I think this would be a cool feature that helps the viewer interact with the game more effectively, and I don't think the casters would be hurt by this (rather helped).
I just thought about something.. we keep seeing BIG mine hits BIG tank shots BIG bane hits BIG storms... wouldn't it be awesome if the game would show how many units died / how much dmg is done or how much ressources that single unit killed?
On October 08 2013 02:15 Enema wrote: I just thought about something.. we keep seeing BIG mine hits BIG tank shots BIG bane hits BIG storms... wouldn't it be awesome if the game would show how many units died / how much dmg is done or how much ressources that single unit killed?
Someone emailed me about a month ago suggesting that I add a feature where an observer can press a button and a small window would open that would keep track of all of the units/resources killed while the window is open. I really like this idea but unfortunately it is only possible with GameHeart Classic.
Screen space is always a big problem for overlays. My suggestion: put semi-relevant information into a ticker. I dont need to know the mapname, scorecount, eventname, stage of the tournament, wins needed etc all the time. all these things could appear in one single box.
On October 08 2013 01:28 eskashaborn wrote: I think I like the idea of big upgrades and key buildings being announced, perhaps similarly to Dota 2 where when a player purchases a big item, a box pops out of the right side of the screen showing what they bought. + Show Spoiler +
It's obviously too much if this is done for every upgrade and building, but maybe storm, stim, charge, blink, dt shrine, ht shrine, robo bay, fusion core :D, infestor den, (first) spire, ultra den, greater spire, etc. With expansions you might only show them before a certain time or if they are actually expos (not macro hatches or orbitals in the middle of nowhere...dunno this could be hard).
I think this would be a cool feature that helps the viewer interact with the game more effectively, and I don't think the casters would be hurt by this (rather helped).
So what is the project you're working on? Maybe you could show a quick description of what the project is at the very top? Like one to two sentences?
Edit: I just don't get what GameHeart is, and it seems like you've had previous version released. But this is my first time hearing about the whole thing.
On October 08 2013 08:12 CecilSunkure wrote: So what is the project you're working on? Maybe you could show a quick description of what the project is at the very top? Like one to two sentences?
Edit: I just don't get what GameHeart is, and it seems like you've had previous version released. But this is my first time hearing about the whole thing.
some stuff might be different as this was a little while ago but here is a video showcasing it.
It's a custom UI used by dreamhack and many other tournaments.
On October 08 2013 08:12 CecilSunkure wrote: So what is the project you're working on? Maybe you could show a quick description of what the project is at the very top? Like one to two sentences?
Edit: I just don't get what GameHeart is, and it seems like you've had previous version released. But this is my first time hearing about the whole thing.
Way to be out of the loop! Gameheart is some kinda whatchamacallit spectating UI that lets the organizers do various fun stuff like customize logos and layout.
On October 08 2013 19:51 sztanpet wrote: where is the version control repo? surely its opensource right?
GameHeartClassic and GameHeartLight are saved as .SC2Mod and .SC2Interface files respectively. The files are compressed archives in Bilzzard's own MPQ format. You can think of them as similar to zip, rar, or tar files. It doesn't really make sense to use a traditional version control system (git, svn, mercurial) to track changes to the files.
I hope that GameHeart.org will eventually have a downloads section listing all the published versions for download. Until then, the .SC2Mod files are available for download via battle.net and .SC2Interface files are being published in their existing TL thread. If you want to see what's in them you can pop them open with one of the many free and open source MPQ Readers/Editors.
And thank you ShadesofGraylin for explaining the situation. I use dropbox to manage all of my files for GameHeart. It doesn't make a lot of sense to use a public repository but yes GHClassic is already available to anyone to see if they download it from battle.net (sorry it's uncommented and confusing as hell but I will be reworking it quite a bit during this project). GHLight does not exist yet. I am building many smaller test files right now which you can find on the arcade by searching GHTesting though they will probably not be of much interest to anyone at the moment. I am currently just trying to figure out the exact structure for my mod files to be as efficient and easy to understand as possible.
Currently I am working on the Logos system as I said in the blog post. The new and old versions of GameHeart use different methods for selecting logos so I am trying to find the best way to combine them to make the entire system easier to manage and update.
On October 08 2013 01:28 eskashaborn wrote: I think I like the idea of big upgrades and key buildings being announced, perhaps similarly to Dota 2 where when a player purchases a big item, a box pops out of the right side of the screen showing what they bought. + Show Spoiler +
It's obviously too much if this is done for every upgrade and building, but maybe storm, stim, charge, blink, dt shrine, ht shrine, robo bay, fusion core :D, infestor den, (first) spire, ultra den, greater spire, etc. With expansions you might only show them before a certain time or if they are actually expos (not macro hatches or orbitals in the middle of nowhere...dunno this could be hard).
I think this would be a cool feature that helps the viewer interact with the game more effectively, and I don't think the casters would be hurt by this (rather helped).
That would be a most welcome idea
That would be great for casters and the audience
I think the system you guys are describing is already being implemented actually. It was one of the stretch goals in the IndieGoGo campaign and the goal was met. You can see a mockup of what the notification might look like here.
I love GameHeart and how much it has brought to the game. I think it's a great UI that focuses on the important stuff while leaving the trivial stuff out.
In regards to the sailing video, I think that StarCraft has a relatively simple goal, make the opponent leave, but the way to get to that goal is SO diverse that it cannot be easily communicated with a non-fan within a few minutes without an EXTREMELY obtrusive UI that takes away from the game, which, obviously, needs to be avoided. I really like the concept, but I'm not sure how StarCraft, or GameHeart for that matter, goes about doing that.
I brainstormed some thoughts about the sc2 interface, some of which can probably only be implemented by Blizzard.
Questions:
One problem with minimal user interfaces is that beginners might find it hard to understand what is happening (e.g. the name of the unit, how strong it is, etc). Do you think tournaments should provide streams with different interfaces to cater to all types of viewers?
Is there sufficient space on your user interface to handle exceptional conditions (e.g. Imagine a late game ZvP where the zerg has neuraled a probe and is building one of each unit and upgrade for both races)?
It might be possible to attract more sponsorship into sc2 tournaments if animated textures (e.g. adverts) were embedded into the map or projected onto billboard doodads, is this feasible in Gameheart? Or possibly add textures that slowly fade out (e.g. the map name).
I realise that Blizzard have performance reasons for not doing this (which may be alleviated in the future with hardware advancements) but do you think unit and building models should more visibly display damage to spectators so that health bars aren't needed?
When watching replays, I pay particular attention to when the Idle Workers tab is highlighted; should this information appear in the UI in some form or is just extraneous? I know GomTV has a pop up which displays the amount of time workers are idle but their interface is really crowded.
Ideas:
I wonder if the Unit Supply data could be better presented graphically as a percentage bar or circle (possibly with animation effects when the supply block, exceeded or max conditions are met). It could provide a more intuitive way of showing spectators the difference in supply between players (maybe even store two colour states to visually show how much supply has increased or decreased over the past minute), though I suspect most spectators will find this annoying.
Some games are decided without players ever mining gas (e.g. canon rush, 6 pool vs cc first, etc), so the interface could be made marginally more minimal by only adding the 'Gas' icon and data to the UI once the player begins mining.
Some custom UI's display the player's APM (e.g. 234), and although the data isn't particularly useful it can be a good way of showing how much pressure the player is under. A different way of representing this could be to show a waveform over time to highlight extreme micro over the player's general performance. The y axis could also be a relative value set by either player's highest peak APM (e.g. for two bronze players the graph height might start at 40).
XP is often disabled using the game settings and is fairly unintuitive (e.g. what does 125 XP mean?), but it can be a useful way of showing in game how many resources were lost in an engagement. One way of making it more visually appealing might be to replace the floating XP values with mineral or vespene gas icons (where each icon represents a specific amount of resources), this has been used fairly successfully in other video games.
Having the saturation count floating above a base slightly ruins the visual appeal of the game, so I wonder if there is a better way of displaying the information. Maybe the text colour could change when say 16/24 workers is reached, or replace the text with "Optimal" (other effects for maximumly saturated or over saturated could also be added). Another alternative would be to remove the saturation overlay and visually represent on the map, the route to each mineral and gas with slots that are filled up as a worker is added.
One cool idea for the full size mini-map window could be to show real time heat map information (e.g. Where have units died on the map, worker deaths, spells used, etc). I would imagine this would be extremely difficult to implement and take up a lot of game resources.
The mini-map has some scope for displaying information in a cleaner fashion:
Inactive creep tumours could be removed from the map (as seen in the HotS campaign) or darkened to be less noticeable. They don't really add extra information to the game and make it harder to see active tumours and army units, they can also be inferred by the presence of creep and that the player has visibility).
I'd quite like to see a production building rally point icon added to the mini-map, though this may increase clutter.
Overlapping sensor towers could be cleaned up by removing redundant information (e.g. Like this mockup). Too many towers being built (especially in TvT or team games) can make the minimap extremely cluttered and they are currently deleted if more than 16 are built. Also the sensor rings could be set to player's colour instead of white.
Once a player has achieved victory, it would be cool if the camera (possibly in monochrome) panned across the map and every unit/building that was destroyed in game was represented where it died with their death model. This is probably extremely hard to implement and there may be performance implications for especially long games.
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/64uH2PU.png)
I think it's a great UI that focuses on the important stuff while leaving the trivial stuff out.
