GameHeart Project, Update 6 - Page 2

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RakeSC2

Norway37 Posts

December 20 2013 21:22 GMT

#21

This things just keeps getting better and better. Awesome work, and thanks for the constant updates.

operwolf

United States324 Posts

December 20 2013 22:20 GMT

#22

This really does look amazing.

NovemberstOrm

Canada16217 Posts

December 21 2013 01:02 GMT

#23

The consistent updates you provide are great, thank you!

feardragon

United States970 Posts

December 21 2013 03:42 GMT

#24

Sick work Ryan! Can't wait for some of these big updates!

GameHeart

286 Posts

December 21 2013 05:20 GMT

#25

Thanks guys!

FYI I have made the upgrade notifications feature that MIT Game Lab created available on all GHLight maps across all regions now.

ETisME

12380 Posts

December 21 2013 14:18 GMT

#26

omg keep up with the good work, be more confident of your work :D

Grumbels

Netherlands7031 Posts

December 21 2013 17:31 GMT

#27

The upgrade window at the right, would it be possible to have it fade out over five seconds instead of just disappearing at once?

Also, instead of showing 1/100th of a second can you just show 1/10th of a second? It's too busy.

howLiN

Portugal1676 Posts

December 21 2013 17:43 GMT

#28

I'm watching the Bitcoin showmatch right now and the notifications are really cool. My suggestion about them is, would it be possible to have them popout a little more when the upgrade is complete? Something like a small change on its size, as in the notification window gets a little bigger when the update is completed, before it fades out.

SidianTheBard

United States2474 Posts

December 21 2013 20:14 GMT

#29

Really glad so many tournaments are now picking up Gameheart. Well done bud!

nrv

United States113 Posts

December 21 2013 22:56 GMT

#30

The team colors thing is really cool, I used to love that mod when you could use it.

Plansix

United States60190 Posts

December 22 2013 01:23 GMT

#31

This man is doing gods work. This is so good. I am excited for every event to start using it.

ahswtini

Northern Ireland22208 Posts

December 22 2013 01:48 GMT

#32

Holy jimmies how do you do this sort of stuff?

iHirO

United Kingdom1381 Posts

December 22 2013 04:46 GMT

#33

Here's some feedback after testing.

GHTesting - STC
+ Show Spoiler +

The Hive fails to load STC at the beginning of the game. Although it will be impossible for a Hive to exist at the beginning of the game and constructed hives correctly use STC, it might be worth checking if there is an underlying error.
The Zoom hotkey is disabled and the map centre contains unbuildable terrain, where it has been edited. Also the 'Arm Silo With Nuke' upgrade and gateways with Warpgate researched could be updated to build instantly. This is only worth changing if this map will be kept for future testing.
Consider updating the Engineering Bay textures to appear brighter (as shown below). Im uncertain if STC is being applied but this structure is noticeably duller than all the other Terran structures.
Consider updating the hallucinations to incorporate the player colour (as shown below). Currently they are always dark blue for both sides.

GHMITTest - STC
+ Show Spoiler +

This is looking much more polished now, really impressive work! Fifteen seconds seems like a decent interval and it prevents more than five upgrades appearing on screen at once.
The upgrade notification handles Chronoboost incorrectly (e.g. if there are 6.5 seconds remaining on an upgrade and Chronoboost is applied, the upgrade will complete in under 5 seconds with the timer counting down faster). Ideally the notification should subtract 1.5s as soon as the boost is applied and then count down normally. It may be impossible to apply to apply this logic to the interface and the difference is only a few seconds so this issue could be ignored.
The upgrade notification doesn't handle paused progress conditions (i.e. pylon power loss and contamination) and simply stops the timer. The text could be updated to show a 'paused' state to notify the audience (as shown below), however the dialog occupies valuable space so another option might be to hide it until progress is resumed.
All upgrade notifications are displayed on screen with 16 seconds remaining instead of 15. Not sure if this intentional or a timing error.
The "Gravitic Booster" upgrade should be changed to "Gravitic Boosters".
The Transformation Servos icon is currently incorrect. I've sent a bug report to Blizzard so this may be fixed soon.
The "Chitinous Plating" upgrade contains an error.
Specific upgrades have an empty 'Completed' progress bar.
Consider renaming the "Protoss Shields Level X" upgrades to "Shields Level X" to be consistent with all the other upgrades that have had their race removed.
The "Vehicle and Ship Weapons Level X" upgrade names have been shortened to "Vehicle/Ship Weapons X" to fit, however all the other the upgrades contain "Level". Consider renaming it to "Vehicle Weapons Level X" as the audience will understand that ships are also vehicles.
Currently if a Terran building is destroyed with an Add-on that was researching an upgrade, a "Cancelled" notification is displayed. Should this be changed to "Denied" or is this condition impossible to check for?
How does GameHeart decide which upgrades to display notifications for, is it a case of first come, first served? Or does it prioritise displaying upgrades from both players where possible?
If a 2v2 version of this interface was developed, how would GameHeart handle the extra upgrade notifications displayed on screen. Would the time be reduced to 10 seconds, or could it prioritise important upgrades first?

GHTesting - TCE
+ Show Spoiler +

I really like the coloured Time Warps and Orbital Scans, Blizzard should definitely implement this in game.
When viewing the replay, all coloured spell effects are replaced with a white colour.
The Nuke icon is only partially set to the player colour and the surrounding red graphic fails to appear around 50% of the time.
Consider making forcefields more visible as the red and blue colours are difficult to see on low graphics settings.
Consider making the Psionic Storm effect dual colour (as shown below) as the current implementation is less unappealing. The original effect has a combination of a blue background with white electrical bolts.
Consider lowering the saturation of the Fungal growth effect as it as it doesn't look 'organic'. Alternatively update the casted 'fungal splash' effect to the player colour and keep the roots green.

General
+ Show Spoiler +

On certain resolutions (Im running on 1168 x 728) the GameHeart 1.62 interface fails to display the upgrades correctly, causing them to overlap with other UI elements (similar to the issue with the Sports Elongated interface). Im guessing this resolution isn't common for tournaments so it could be ignored.
With the addition of temporary logo textures, would it be possible to implement an animated transition effect?
Would it be possible to manage tournament, sponsors and team logos automatically? I was thinking that a central repository could be created (e.g. Liquipedia) and then users can update or add new graphics when needed. Once a week a scraper could check if any changes have occurred and retrieve the new files. This reduces the burden on you and would allow other data to be stored and incorporated into GameHeart in the future. (e.g. Could possibly display a picture of the player temporarily on the map).

Chaggi

Korea (South)1936 Posts

December 22 2013 05:56 GMT

#34

This literally boggles my mind to how awesome it is. Great job

GameHeart

286 Posts

December 22 2013 06:04 GMT

#35

STC

Thanks iHiro! I am pleasantly surprised that you found no actual bugs in the Stronger Team Color mod itself. Every issue you mentioned is either with just the test map or a suggestion.

1. Yeah I don't have the Hive set to texture swap on creation because the texture swap carries over from the hatchery > lair > hive as it morphs. So it would be a pointless use of resources.

2. Actually the thing I would want to change most is making it so the greater spire/hatcheries etc morph quickly. But I can't figure out how to do it using triggers.

3. Yeah the engineering bay does not have any STC textures.

4. That is an interesting idea, I will have to look into it.

GHMITTest

I will pass these along to the MIT Game Lab guys.

TCE

2. That is just a test map issue. Right now all the effects are set for participants only (players) so you can see them when you are testing. But when actually implemented they will all be switched to 'observer' only.

3. I stopped working on the nuke because I decided I didn't want to team color it. I think the nuke icon needs to be red or it just won't feel right. Forgot to remove the work that I had done on it already.

4. Not sure what I can do about this. It won't make any difference for players, and if a tournament is forced to use low graphics setting on their observer computer they probably shouldn't be using GameHeart in the first place. But I do need to do something with forcefields anyways so I will see if I can make them stand out more on low settings.

5. I will see what I can do though the coloring process is kind of makes that difficult.

6. I definitely don't like fungal the way it looks right now. Might have to play with the textures themselves a bit.

General

1. 99% of tournament broadcasts are done at 16x9 ratio so it does not make sense to compromise the design of the interface to support the 1%. All of our interfaces are likely to only work well at 16x9 ratios.

2. Eh maybe? Not a high priority to me. A fade in/out maybe but anything more than that adds a lot of complexity.

3. No that is not possible unfortunately. Perhaps if Blizzard gives map makers access to a player's clan decals through the editor. Maybe they already do? I haven't looked for it. Maybe they will add more stuff like that in the future for clans.

iHirO

United Kingdom1381 Posts

December 22 2013 12:40 GMT

#36

On the EU server there is an awesome arcade game called "Unit Tester 1v1" (there's also a separate single player version). It has all the buildings already constructed for ease of use and every unit, upgrade and transformation occurs instantly. So if you could apply STC to that, it would be great.

Ender985

Spain910 Posts

December 22 2013 13:57 GMT

#37

I've been waiting for team colored timewarps since they were first introduced. I don't know about coloring unit-neutral spells like forcefields or psi-storms, since they affect all units the same regardless of who casted it, but I always thought it's specially important with timewarps since they only affect enemy units. Coloring scans might be a good idea for late TvT where there are scans everywhere, to get a better sense of who sees what.

Also I loved the implementation of the important upgrade timing notifications! The only thing I would do is add a glow effect of some sort to the notification when it is completed, rather than simply changing the countdown number to "completed"; it would help it make it more visual if player 1 +1 attack completed 10 seconds before player 2 +1 carapace.

Also great idea with the sponsors showing during the start of the map, look forward to see it in play!

Overall great solid work, keep it up!

SoniC_eu

Denmark1008 Posts

December 22 2013 14:01 GMT

#38

Such a cool blog :D
Excited with all these changes and so much work being done! I hope you get to enjoy xmas, and take a little break as well. A little play doesnt hurt, when you are working hard.
<3

shiroiusagi

SoCal, USA3955 Posts

December 23 2013 01:19 GMT

#39

I am really liking that sponsorship display, that's pretty damn awesome.

philiptan

19 Posts

December 23 2013 06:13 GMT

#40

Representing the MIT Game Lab here.

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone! We're really happy working with GameHeart; Ryan and Ahli have given us tons of help with advice and code. Big thanks to TotalBiscuit for the first real-world test of our code!

For the curious, the notifications are designed to allow you to customize their look using your own observer UI. Position, size, background, and opacity are all adjustable in XML. You can even hide the decimals by making that font invisible or hide all the notifications by default while keeping the rest of the GHLight features on-screen.

Reducing decimal points and duration are likely changes for the future. Observers can currently show/hide all of the notifications with Ctrl-Shift-N. Animations (glows/fades/slides) would be great but may be a lower priority than porting some of our other MIT Overseer features (e.g. in-game graphs) to GameHeart, if Ryan wants them.

For now, we're just looking closely at VODs to spot bugs and our top priority is to fix them. A big THANK YOU to everyone who has linked and identified problems! We're really curious about how the notifications looked for casters using non-English language packs. If there was a non-English stream for the Scarlett/Naniwa showmatch in which you spotted any kind of problem with the upgrade notifications, send us a link! (Any other tournament VODs which display our notifications would also be helpful.)

And to iHiro, bug hunter extraordinaire, some answers to your questions:
+ Show Spoiler +

2. Yeah, Chrono Boost is tricky because it'd mean we'd have to keep track of when Chrono Boost started, whether it'll expire before the research is complete, etc. Not impossible, but low-priority for us until it becomes a noticeable deal in actual matches.

3. We used to have an "interrupted" status but that word is confusing... it's too easily interpreted as "denied". "Paused" works the other way, it implies that the player willingly put their own upgrade on hold. (We're trying to accommodate viewers who may not play SC2.) Any suggestions for an alternate word would be great, but we may also try a graphic, like a big padlock.

4. Not intentional but the numbers displayed are still accurate. We're probably changing the timer duration in the future.

5. 7. 9. 10. All fixed and uploaded to GHMITTest (and probably to all NA GHLight maps, if the mod/pod system works as designed). Thanks!

8. This is a real bug but we haven't been able to consistently reproduce the problem. In our testing, the bug doesn't always seem to happen with the same upgrades... does it for yours?

11. We just noticed this as well. It's probably possible but messy to code a "Denied" condition in this case, because we'd have to maintain a table of every Terran building (past and present) attached to a Tech Lab to figure out whether it's still alive. Low priority but it is admittedly an irritating edge-case.

12. First-come, first-served.

13. We don't intend to implement this for 2v2, but my first guess is that we'd format the XML to make each notification smaller and halve the duration. Putting each team's notifications on opposite sides of the screen might be an option, but may collide with the leaderboard.

Thank you so much for your thorough testing!

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