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Look & Feel and UI
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Topic starter
Have you created a wireframe for the UI yet? Just curious what information we'll have available via the UI. We were discussing add-ons in the unofficial Discord (Stelaphina's). Any thoughts on whether Add-ons will be allowed. Many games have been data mined and so the information will likely be out there. What information would you like to see us have?
------DISCLAIMER------
Let me be clear: anything I share on this topic is totally tentative. I like to share openly, but it is very early stage for UI discussions. UI design is a science and we don't have a UI specialist on the team yet. Once we have a real UI design expert on board our plans and understanding might change. What we have now are general design principles.
So take everything I say on this with a big grain of salt. No guarantee we don't alter things.
SO what are these design principles:
The UI is going to be minimal HUD, so it's quite easy to imagine what the general appearance will be. Sparse. No hovering menus in your screen, no life and health bars, no chat channels at the side. We'll go pretty hard core.
So when you walk around in the streets, you are pretty much going to have to find your way using signs and observation. We are considering that we might need a location finder anyway, as an toggle option, if it gets too hard for certain gamers. But we certainly do not like how they break historical immersion, so we will try to make it as minimal as feasible. The idea is that you get familiar with maps, and we will also design the maps with a certain location logic and optimal travel layout, so that you intuitively will know in which corner of a port you would, for instance, find a ship builder or a bank, once you get familiar with the game.
Once you are close to a interactive character, such as a merchant or agent, then an option for interaction will appear. The same applies for interactions regarding running your business, doing your (administrative) job, reading your mail, changing your outfit or character, voting in the House of Lords, joining the Navy, taking out a bank loan, this is all done at interaction points, such as desks, beds, dressers, in specific locations, such as your home, your office, a public building, the cabin of your ship, a tavern, etc.
In most cases where you then do workflow or database related (simulation, management or trade) related actions, you will go to a first person perspective, and look at a desk top with a ledger, a form, a list, something that blends with the game world.
(concept)
You can then interact, leaf through folders and papers, select, fill in forms, etc. Like in this concept, look through a list in a ledger to find suitable crew members, then read some more information about them. (Disclaimer: This is just a design concept, not a practical design. So don't go and discuss details of it).
(concept)
As for management and data mining:
We will offer minimal data. In the 1750 there were no spreadsheets, ships did not have gauges, guns no velocity measurement, certain things could be expressed in numbers, such as a speed measurement (when you log it). But most things are expressed in words, such as fair, good, excellent, etc. You will never know what the underlying values are we calculate with. This approximates a much more 18th century mechanic, where you have to act on intuition and discover what works and what not. It might not always be obvious what works best, so gamers might develop their own convictions on what works for them.
So let's take as an example a crew member. A crew member is a collection of personality and skill statistics that you influence with your management style and talents, how you deal with things as they occur, how you train and develop, etc.. You can only see this crew member is 'fair' at gunnery rate of fire, 'good' at gunnery accuracy, 'excellent' morale, etc., in his Officer's evaluation, which is made periodically.
(concept)
Those statistics are calculated towards accumulated statistics of the entice crew, gunnery accuracy and rate of fire, morale, etc. And different crew members are weighed differently, the Gunner has a bigger impact than the Quarter Gunner, the Boatswain more than the Sailor, etc.
The crew of a ship contributes to its quality of handing, but so do do the properties of the ship itself, how it is designed, and what the state of maintenance is. And all these things are not expressed in numbers. What you can measure, are the results of all this, they are even recorded in the log. How fast does your ship sail, what is the rate of fire of your gunners, how far upwind can you sail, what is the rate of turn? And of course you know dimensions of your ship, weight of cargo and provisions, etc. So it's not that you have nothing to work with, and you will see an improvement when you do things well, but it will be very difficult to exactly know what it is that you did that has the most influence. But obviously, a happy and well trained crew will do better. An a well maintained and outfitted ship also.
So there is not much gamers can calculate. But there is plenty they can speculate about. They can experiment and try to determine the effects. And I'm sure there are going to be some in-game books written by gamers with instructions for Captains, Business Managers, Government officials, etc.
With this design we try to create a system where experience really matters. If gamers specialise they can gain in-depth knowledge, both logically and intuitively, that will not be that easy to duplicate by less experienced gamers. Real skill and knowledge, not skill points. Talent, in this sense, will also be rewarded.
If you hadn't guessed yet, I'm the game designer. Ask me anything, that's what I'm here for!
Posted : April 21, 2020 2:55 pm
I just realized something that should have occurred to me earlier, but only “clicked” when I looked at the images. There are a lot of young people (and yes I know it’s a bit rich for me to say that, but I mean here the 18 and under crowd) who I know who cannot for the life of them read cursive script. It just is not something they were taught in school or by their parents. Could this present an issue?
“I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth -- that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? ” - Ben Franklin
Really? I am unaware of that. I have an under 18 at home, and he was still taught to write with pen at school. So he can read it fine. Is this in the USA? Or the UK?
If you hadn't guessed yet, I'm the game designer. Ask me anything, that's what I'm here for!
Posted : April 21, 2020 5:02 pm
Topic starter
Script was the writing of the period. It's fairly legible in a game unless it's intended to be obscure. I can't imagine it'll be unreadable even if you don't know cursive.
Posted : April 21, 2020 5:07 pm
They have stopped teaching it in the US, not sure of other parts of the world.
Posted : April 21, 2020 5:47 pm
@kaeolin
I understood from our community managers that there was the suggestion on Discord that we don't know how data mining works.
Don't be afraid to ask or suggest those things here, we're fully transparent and we don't want to be the kind of project with a lot of mixed communication on different channels. That will sour the community. Any beef with us? Share it. We'll be nice. And if we have something to learn from you, great! It's a community project.
Let me clarify about data mining.
Rulers of the Sea will be fully server-authoritative, like any good MMO should be, and we will only send data to game-clients that a player needs (and is allowed) to see/use at that moment.
The reason why you can mine data from MMO's is because the developer doesn't prevent you from getting to it. With a game like EVE Online (for instance) it doesn't matter, that's why it is possible. You can already figure out how the game calculates from just observing it. It's not secret in the first place. They built it this way, you're not outsmarting them.
With us under-water data is an actual game feature. So we calculate what we want to keep obscured on the server, what you get on the client is the resulting data from those calculations.
So if the resulting status of calculations is 'average', we will send you that value, state=average, you won't see 10,6=average. So you have nothing to mine there.
Nevertheless, maybe you can model all the events and create a simulation that might give you a good prediction of what values might result. But the amount of data points in our calculations are by no means small, and the variables are great, and much data missing, so I would admire it greatly if someone succeeds.
So why can we run so many calculations on the server? Because Rulers of the Sea is a slow mover. We can even run your sea-battle entirely on the server, and just send you the resulting values. We're not running and jumping around with guns like Fortnite, risking a lot of lag. Ships move slow, cannons fire slow, your orders delay action, the resolutions of those battles can be entirely server-side. It's mostly the graphics that we will need simulate on the client.
Many of our calculations are not necessarily updated directly. We will likely have an amount of periodic runs. Let's say the combined status of your crew, your ship and your ship condition determines your sailing qualities, a substantial amount of those factors change over time. The degrading of your ship occurs per sea mile, per part. The degradation of training quality of a particular skill of your soldiers or crew degrades with time. So if you run a periodic run you update those factors. That will be all kept the server, and only a status will be sent if it changes a factor you need to see on the client. And that is not per definition directly.
We build in a delay when you see all these states. The condition of your crew, soldiers, ship, etc, are displayed in reports from your officers. They make those reports once a day, and on your request (which then takes some time in execution). So when you request, the server will update the reports. Or when you get into battle, storm, calamity, the conditions will be updated. Or when conditions are such that they have a physical appearance, they will be updated. If these things do not apply, you will not be updated. If your officers are poor quality, the status in their reports you see is less accurate. The truth is on the server, in the hands of God.
Doesn't mean there are not challenges, and also not that this is not complex. But we're not a game with gauges you can follow, the aim is really to approximate what you would really see in the 18th century.
If you hadn't guessed yet, I'm the game designer. Ask me anything, that's what I'm here for!
Posted : April 21, 2020 6:55 pm
Calysta reacted
Topic starter
I'm sorry if my tone indicated anything negative. It was a simple discussion. I didn't mean to imply you were hiding anything and I even suggested that perhaps it's all being handled server side so data mining isn't possible as you said. I tend to toss ideas about and just see how they stick. 🙂
Thank you for explaining it in more detailed way. Makes complete sense what you are saying. I am a computer guy and wasn't thinking that the slower timeline would lessen the server load.
I loved reading the above concept of the game and think it is great that it will be so immersive.
I'm not too concerned about writing being in script. In my opinion, it is more important to be immersive. Learning script should be easy since it is so neat and orderly in the pictures provided.
As for the US, script was taken out of the curriculum with common core. However, a lot of parents complained. Now that common core is done away with, many schools have put script back into the curriculum. As a result, there may be a gap in which a band of students missed learning script. With everyone else knowing how to read script, they just need to learn it. It is very important to know anyway. In this way, the game would be educational for them.
Posted : April 21, 2020 7:26 pm
PeterSJ reacted
How interesting. I didn't know it was dropped from the curriculum in places! What is the world coming to? Now I am even more passionate about creating a historical simulation game! We need to preserve script!
If you hadn't guessed yet, I'm the game designer. Ask me anything, that's what I'm here for!
Posted : April 21, 2020 10:35 pm
Calysta and Grand Duke John Winthrop IV reacted
Yes, it was/is considered old fashioned and redundant in the computer age and not taught regularly anymore in large parts of the country. To give my example in New Jersey, about 10 or so years before me, cursive was shifted from 1st Grade (6/7 years old) to 3rd Grade (8/9 years old) in order to make more room for the teachers to teach printing, on the grounds that it’s easier for young people to learn to write that way, and getting them writing as early as possible takes precedence over anything else (and in fairness, there is a good deal of scientific evidence to back up that latter claim). I thus learned cursive in about 2003-2004, and the next year, my district did away with it altogether, such that my younger sister never learned it. I know that they have since resumed teaching it in these last few years after growing parental complaints, but I think there was a good 5-10 year gap.
“I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth -- that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? ” - Ben Franklin
But then again, there is also research (from Finland, as always with progressive education) that learning skills to children later rather then sooner, and letting them play longer, has a long term beneficial effect. We're in such a hurry to push these poor kids through school, load pressure on them to perform, without checking whether they are happier, more balanced and motivated adults later. Writing nice longhand is an art, it should be both fun and give you time to look at the art of writing in a different way. Take time to consider words and personalise them. I love seeing letters from the 18th century. Such a profound and thoughtful thing, where every word matters.
If you hadn't guessed yet, I'm the game designer. Ask me anything, that's what I'm here for!
Posted : April 22, 2020 12:03 am
Rudolf reacted
We're in such a hurry to push these poor kids through school, load pressure on them to perform, without checking whether they are happier, more balanced and motivated adults later.
Bah. Pressure makes diamonds! And if they’re overwhelmed and exhausted later on, they’ll be more susceptible to the allures of a simpler, more laid back world, the ones best represented in a historical MMO...
“I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth -- that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? ” - Ben Franklin
