EPTSC2 UI, prepare to be Dota 2's bitch. - Page 11
| Forum Index > SC2 General |
|
aintz
Canada5624 Posts
| ||
|
Doodsmack
United States7224 Posts
| ||
|
Kralic
Canada2628 Posts
| ||
|
Roggay
Switzerland6320 Posts
| ||
|
Inex
Bulgaria443 Posts
SC2's in-game user interface is close to perfect. It's the best in an RTS game to date. BNET 2.0 on the other hand is BAD. So if we are talking about the main menu, then yeah I guess it's bad, but the in game UI is just brilliant, no complaints there. | ||
|
Steveling
Greece10806 Posts
It was so sexy and easy, chat channels? done, spectating any pro you want any time you want? done, awesome friendlist? done. I can't wait to see what they will do with the clan features. It's such a shame that bnet2 sucks ass. And to give you a comparison between the two companies. Neither game had time stamps in chat. In dota2 after some whining and a couple of threads in the dev forums we now have time stamps. We all know how that turned out in sc2. | ||
|
papaz
Sweden4149 Posts
Blizzard knows that SC2 lacks in UI department. Recent Blizzcon showed some improvement and I'm confident they will improve. What I wish for is that Blizz development time is too long. Granted their products are outstanding but so are Valves and they somehow are really fast. | ||
|
SoBeDragon
United States192 Posts
I really hope that battle.net gets re-vamped with HoTS. They really have a lot of work to do, and I hope they don't push their lacking UI to the back burner for too much longer. @OP - Thank you for taking the time to write this and to point out the competition and the differences between these 2 products. I found it to be informative and helpful. | ||
|
willoc
Canada1530 Posts
On February 07 2012 06:04 papaz wrote: Granted their products are outstanding but so are Valves and they somehow are really fast. Valve = fast? I don't think you've done your research: Valve Time. They've been working on DOTA 2 (a simple game compared to SC) for quite a long time too... Both companies take their sweet time and cancel projects as they see fit. Remember how long and how many iterations it took to get to Team Fortress 2? Where is Half-Life Episode 3? Half-Life 3? Please don't take this as a bash against Valve as they are my favorite game company along with Blizzard. Quality Assurance is probably the biggest similarity between Valve and Blizzard. | ||
|
coldasice
Australia208 Posts
On February 05 2012 09:04 Kipsate wrote: 2 Basic images from the interface. ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Qiej9.png) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/WVdRK.png) It allows for quickly tabbing, you can easily see friends to the right(steam friends) Each tab will quickly bring you to the features. Top live matches, more then often from pros can be accessed easily in the system of most popular matches, you can then watch them play. its overlay is clear Too much clutter. An option to hide some of the panels would be nice. 80-20 rule. Most of the time I'll just be chatting or looking for a quick game, those features works well enough in battle.net. | ||
|
Candadar
2049 Posts
On February 07 2012 07:32 coldasice wrote: Too much clutter. An option to hide some of the panels would be nice. 80-20 rule. Most of the time I'll just be chatting or looking for a quick game, those features works well enough in battle.net. If you think that's clutter, I'd love for you to see an interface that's actually cluttered. Having a lot of options on one screen isn't inherently cluttered. Does the SC2 UI do what it needs to do? Yeah, you can ladder and talk to friends and setup custom games. However, that's about when the functionality disappears, unfortunately. | ||
|
gh0un
601 Posts
On February 05 2012 08:24 Ooshmagoosh wrote: In dota, you right click and press 3 or 4 hotkeys while occasionally waiting for HP / MP to regen. Your teammates yell at you if you do something wrong. In Starcraft 2, I don't have time to pay attention to my chatboxes or adjust settings after 2 minutes into the game. There is much more to the game than controlling one unit. This is comparing almonds and oranges While it might be comparing almonds to oranges, its not true that peeling oranges is easier than peeling almonds when it comes to a competitive level, or just higher level of play. Dota is much more about knowing what you are allowed to do, how you need to position yourself, when you need to retreat, what you have to watch out for, when you need to pressure and such. You need to know all these factors, for all the different hero and item combinations, and since there are over 100 heroes and over 100 items, the amount of information you need to gather before you can safely lane against all kinds of scenarios is just immense. Being afk a minute or two during that in a pub game is not as big of a deal, since you can position your hero at a safe location and be fine. Go afk for a minute or two against a good enemy team, and you probably already lost lane dominance and thus the game. I have been playing Dota for almost 8 years now and i never had a match that equalled any previous match, even though i had plenty of games where the exact same 5 heroes played against the exact same enemy 5 heroes (and my wc3banlist tells me that i have over 6k games accumulated). In sc2 you have scenarios that reoccur pretty frequently, like the 11/11 rax against zerg, and they even have the same outcome frequently aswell, in Dota you dont. The more scenarios you encounter, the more knowledeable you become, and the better you are at laning, ganking, pushing etc. Dota has probably one of the steepest learning curves, even today, i still learn new stuff almost every day. Just to give an example of what i learned (just yesterday): In dota there is a day night cycle, during daytime, heroes have a sight range of 1800, while during nighttime, the vision is reduced to 800. There is a hero in Dota, called pudge, that can throw a hook in any direction, and if he manages to latch the hook on someone, he pulls that particular entity to himself. Now, if you lane against Pudge in the midlane (its basically 2 ramps facing each other with a river inbetween), you always try to stay behind some kind of blockade in order to NOT be hooked by pudge, since his hook latches onto the first target it encounters. Therefore you always try to position your hero behind creeps, if Pudge tries to move around in one way, you move around it the other way, its a constant repositional game to not get hooked by Pudge. Usually when you lane against pudge, and it becomes nighttime, its very dangeroes to farm inbetween the two ramps (down at the river part), since you cant see whats going on above the enemy ramp (pudge could be anywhere and just be waiting to hook you). Why is this not an issue during daytime? Because during daytime, you can look across the river from your ramp and perfectly see whats going on on the other side, since you have 1800 sight range, and usually you will have a ranged creep above your own ramp spotting across the river for you, thus making it safe to farm down in the river. That obviously goes the other way aswell, pudge cant look up your ramp during nighttime and you can safely farm from above your ramp with a ranged hero (as long as you constantly reposition yourself, since you briefly show up to enemies you attack). This is already information im pretty sure 50% of dota players dont know about, and 90% of the ones that know dont utilize this information fully to their advantage. Now comes the part i didnt know about till yesterday. The only way a Pudge down the river could be of any danger to you on your side of the ramp (during nighttime), is if he had placed wards in order to spot across the river for him, but since i was in the lane the whole game, i was quite confident that there werent any wards. Now i was just standing there above my ramp, constantly repositioning myself after each attack, completely abusing the lack of vision pudge had, and he was standing down in the river unable to hook me. Suddenly pudge places a perfect hook into my face and kills me, and i immediately asked how he could have seen me and he just answered that he suddenly had vision. I was about to accuse him of maphack, but was skeptical, since he played pretty poorly. Later on, i watched the replay like 5 times in order to figure out how he could have seen me, and like i had assumed, there werent any wards. I was about to dismiss it as a lucky hook up the ramp, when i noticed that he actually really had vision up my ramp even though he was standing down in the river. There was another enemy hero above his own ramp (just crossing by, he didnt stay there) but usually during nighttime, no creep or hero can spot across the river, since they only have 800 sight range (instead of 1800), but somehow he gave vision up the ramp. I did know that some heroes had a little more sight range during nighttime, but it never occured to me that some hero other than pudge might come and spot up the ramp for him (since not many heroes have more sight range during nighttime, and the ones that do, only have slightly higher sight range during night, not enough to spot across the river anyways). I went on and looked up the passing heroes stats and as a matter of fact: http://www.playdota.com/heroes/geomancer Frigging meepo really has 1800 sight range during nighttime. It came to me as a complete shock that meepo out of all heroes, has 1800 sight range during night, like how random is that? There are heroes that are associated with night, and they have more vision during night, but why meepo? But fact of the matter is, he has 1800 sight range, and because of that i got hooked into oblivion by pudge standing down the river. Its pretty obvious that pudge himself (or meepo for that matter) didnt know why they had vision on me, judging from the chat that occured afterwards, but now i know one more scenario to watch out for when laning against pudge, suffice to say i looked up all the sight ranges of all the heroes in order to never get caught in the same scenario again. I can now tell you that there are a dozen heroes in Dota that have above 800 sight range during nighttime, but only 6 of them have enough extra sight range in order to look across the river (out of over a hundred heroes). If it ever happens again that one of these heroes is in the same team as pudge and i am at midlane during nighttime, i now know what to watch out for. It might never happen again the same way, but there is advantage in knowing about it. | ||
|
gh0un
601 Posts
On February 07 2012 07:32 coldasice wrote: Too much clutter. An option to hide some of the panels would be nice. 80-20 rule. Most of the time I'll just be chatting or looking for a quick game, those features works well enough in battle.net. Your post makes no sense, since all of the extended features are hidden behind tabs, which is exactly what you want (hiding stuff). If you dont click on any of them, you wont see any of it. If it is chatting and playing a quick game for you, then all you need is the play button at the top of the screen and everything else is hidden except for exactly the two features you want. Look at the play tab, its almost completely empty except for the big "find match" button, some self explanatory buttons above that to configure stuff and thats it. At all times you can see the chatchannels you are in, the party you are in (at the bottom left) and online friends (bottom right). Everything is kept very simple. Now ill ask you something, when was the last time you actually pressed on the home tab in sc2 and read any of the news that were displayed there? For me it is never, because the news tab is kept extremely small in sc2, as if blizzard doesnt want you to know about what is going on in the sc2 community. Press on the home tab in dota 2, and you immediately see a huge picture of the newest stuff in the dota world (like clinkz introduction to the game in that particular screenshot). Im pretty sure that tournaments and stuff will be announced ahead of time in the home tab, perfectly visible to everyone that logs into dota (this is something many refer to as the reason why LoL has so many viewers, because they advertise their tournaments on their client). How has blizzard advertised their tournaments? In a small 4x4 square no one can read since its so small. | ||
|
NeWnAr
Singapore231 Posts
| ||
|
gh0un
601 Posts
On February 07 2012 07:25 willoc wrote: Valve = fast? I don't think you've done your research: Valve Time. They've been working on DOTA 2 (a simple game compared to SC) for quite a long time too... Both companies take their sweet time and cancel projects as they see fit. Remember how long and how many iterations it took to get to Team Fortress 2? Where is Half-Life Episode 3? Half-Life 3? Please don't take this as a bash against Valve as they are my favorite game company along with Blizzard. Quality Assurance is probably the biggest similarity between Valve and Blizzard. Can you explain how exactly it is a simple game (programming wise) compared to sc2? They have been working on Dota2 for 2 years now, and their client has by far more useful features than sc2 could ever dream of right now. Shared watching of ONGOING games (blizzard doesnt even manage to implement shared watching of replays), it even has a built in delay in order to make cheating impossible (something sc2 struggles with). A way to reconnect to an ongoing game in case you have a disconnect (how many regames did we have due to someone dropping out in sc2? plenty). An automatic observer that automatically catches everything of importance during a game, since it can basically look into the future. (how many times did an observer in sc2 completely miss a game deciding drop? almost every game) A feature that displays popular games that are being watched right now, making it easier for people to get together for the same thing. Valve already confirmed lan support, something sc2 will never have (because apparently they would have to rebuilt their whole interface from scratch and that would take way too long -Dustin Browder) A feature where you can apply as a coach/apprentice and immediately get put together with someone. (sc2 relies on third party websites in order to accomplish this). A feature where you can shoutcast a match from within the game interface, people can look up how many shoutcasters there are for a particular game and choose the one that suits them best (sc2 relies on third party websites to accomplish this) Im quite sure there is stuff i forgot about and stuff that will be continuously added, while sc2 didnt even have customkeys at release and blizzard needed several month to introduce customkeys lateron (this is a friggin joke). The game itself also is most probably harder to program than sc2, since in sc2 you dont have as many spells that interact in a unique way with units. For the most part, you have units that can damage other units in a generic way, by taking away a fixed amount of health. Thats something you program once, and can reuse for every unit that behaves in such a way, except changing the variables (damage value, armor value, range of attack, etc). Add an animation to them and you are basically done with some of the most basic stuff in sc2. The only stuff that is working uniquely in sc2 and needs to be programmed individually, is concussive shells, fungal growth, psistorm etc, all spells basically. Flying units need to be programmed individually once aswell (their behavior in air compared to ground) but you only need to change variables for different air units once you have it programmed generally. In dota you have over a 100 heroes with 4 spells each (some have more than 4 spells), thats basically individual programming for each and every one of them, and you even have to consider how the spells interact with each other (not only how they behave towards heroes). Since you have so many spells, there are like a huge amount of permutations you have to program individually until everything works bugfree. As an example, how does a spell that slows an hero interact if put on a hero that has a speedbuff? How do these two particular spells stack with each other? Some stacking stuff you can program once (kinda like a template), most stuff you will have to look at individually. On top of that, every hero in dota has a much larger soundset than units in sc2. They will talk in unique ways depending on what hero they are talking to (facing off against basically). They even talk uniquely towards items. An ursa that buys a vladmirs, says "roshan i come to reclaim what is rightfully mine", just how awesome is that? Considering how there are over 100 heroes and over 100 items one can only imagine how big some of these soundsets are going to become. | ||
|
cnas
Sweden640 Posts
And at the same time, in Wc3, blizzard had made the most awesome battle.net possible. It's clearly a product made by gamers, for gamers. It's something that they would like to use themselves. So, now it's 2012 and I wouldn't in a million years believe back then that we would be sitting here praising VALVe and laughing at Blizzard. But Bnet2 really is that bad and it's flaws deserves to be mentioned as much as possible. I wouldn't blame the developers, I believe that they were misguided. Every part of bnet2 is designed to work perfectly with ONLY the mouse, like it was a stupid console. This design choice was really terrible and it broke many of the things that made us spend years just being online on the Wc3 battle.net. And don't think for a second that Bliz learnt from our criticism here. Look at diablo3. It's the same fucking deal. Being online, and not in a game, is a terrible, isolated experience. And diablo3 doesn't have chat rooms. Don't believe for a second that major changes will happen in HOTS to bnet2. | ||
|
gh0un
601 Posts
On February 08 2012 01:34 cnas wrote: I used to play alot of CS1.6 and Wc3 back in the day. VALVe never game a SHIT about the CS-community. They never patched their game, and they left bugs unfixed to this day. And at the same time, in Wc3, blizzard had made the most awesome battle.net possible. It's clearly a product made by gamers, for gamers. It's something that they would like to use themselves. So, now it's 2012 and I wouldn't in a million years believe back then that we would be sitting here praising VALVe and laughing at Blizzard. But Bnet2 really is that bad and it's flaws deserves to be mentioned as much as possible. I wouldn't blame the developers, I believe that they were misguided. Every part of bnet2 is designed to work perfectly with ONLY the mouse, like it was a stupid console. This design choice was really terrible and it broke many of the things that made us spend years just being online on the Wc3 battle.net. And don't think for a second that Bliz learnt from our criticism here. Look at diablo3. It's the same fucking deal. Being online, and not in a game, is a terrible, isolated experience. And diablo3 doesn't have chat rooms. Don't believe for a second that major changes will happen in HOTS to bnet2. I agree with you except for the bolded part, thats stretching it alot. Wc3 bnet is missing alot of features any game should have, and if it was made by gamers for gamers, these features would have been included. There are plenty of examples i could give you (since im still in wc3 bnet the majority of my time due to dota 1) but i will only give you two of the most important ones: 1. If you want to access the main options, you have to leave battlenet and relogin afterwards to check if the changes made are alright. If they arent alright, you have to log off again. Self explanatory issue. 2. You cant customize any hotkeys at all. If you want to use items with proper hotkeys, you have to rely on third party programs. There is plenty of other stuff (like the 250 ms built in delay in wc3, or the bad customgamelist without any proper filter options which was still alright until bots conquered it) but i dont want to go too indepth now (since sc2 managed to botch the custom game list even harder), point is it has a lot of flaws, but back then it was state of the art. | ||
|
Disconnect
United States84 Posts
On February 05 2012 07:46 DCRed wrote: Dota(1&2) mini-map, staying the same since '03. No but really, Valve hasn't touched the gameplay itself that much, which is more than sad really. Here is Valve's response Q: Don’t you think you should make a lot of changes to the gameplay? (by Robert) A: Significant changes would not necessarily make it a better game. There are countless features we are building around the game that will make the experience a much better one. The gameplay itself, though, has always evolved step by step, and it will continue with that methodology. We consider this a long term project, in the same way DotA has always been. We want to provide a quality experience and not just change for the sake of change. You’ll naturally see additions and improvements to the game as time passes, but it would be a natural progression aimed at improving the game for the players and not for other arbitrary reasons. Valve and I strongly believe that the player focused development process the game has gone through is what will allow us to continue making the best decisions with regards to where we spend our development time. Unlike Blizzard, Valve isn't going to change up the game just because they feel like it. I'm willing to bet that a lot of people would have preferred that Blizzard take this approach with SC2. | ||
|
jinorazi
Korea (South)4948 Posts
On February 09 2012 04:24 Disconnect wrote: Here is Valve's response Unlike Blizzard, Valve isn't going to change up the game just because they feel like it. I'm willing to bet that a lot of people would have preferred that Blizzard take this approach with SC2. "We want to provide a quality experience and not just change for the sake of change why couldn't browder think this way?  some are good change but stuff like mothership is exactly this. | ||
|
osten
Sweden316 Posts
| ||
| ||
