I have had the idea of making separate upgrades like in ts1 so people have to choose the upgrades they want and what spells do the most and such. This would be simple enough to do.

Also, the probe is already in the game, he is still very incomplete and needs quite a bit of work still, but assims work.

Sorry for not replying, but I am suddenly very busy.. I'll reply tonight
Luzz, i won't be able to go on until well after dinner.
Ahli, have u emptied your inbox yet? XD

If you do give separate upgrades for spells and put them in the building, make sure the icons are the same as the spell icons so they're easy to see
Actually, with Separate upgrades, Rapid shot isn't that bad of a concept anymore. But may fit elsewhere better... /shrug

Oh, did you want a general spell effect improvement upgrade or actually upgrades per spell?
Both ways would be possible.
As a reminder, we can only upgrade stuff that can be changed in upgrades easily (except that I won't use real upgrades for those effects because upgrades are limited).

Is it possible to upgrade things like Range, cooldown, duration, etc. very easily?

I won't be able to get on later tonight. I need to sleep sorry.

We can have upgrades for multiple things, it doesn't have to be just an abilities damage.

Edit: yes it should be easy to do, actually ya, ican do that easily enough

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 16 2012, 2:12 am by luzz.

Actually I think I can go on Right now..

Here is what I was thinking for the UI of Stat points

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Okay, right now, I'm thinking that Spell upgrades should be entirely separate from Normal attack and armor.
Altho it doesn't mean we can't have spells that enhances our Normal attack.
Summons (summoner zlings and ultras, and engineer stuff) can have separate or same depending on what we want later on....

Here's something I've drafted up



So on the top would be Icons showing Weapons and Armor upgrades. Icons can be clicked to upgrade them

On the bottom left are the spells (They can be grayed if player does not have it yet. It is okay to let them read tooltip if they choose to)

What I'm proposing is that the boxes A and B represent different Upgrades for the spell.
For example, for Light Mage's L2, Box A can be Damage, while Box B can be Range or AoE or whatever.

The green bar would be a progress bar, where we'll have to decide a max upgrade for each of them. A simple representation of them leveling up is better than telling them the numbers behind it IMO.

Obviously, some spells will only have 1 thing to upgrade, like Assassin's Shadow Step's Only possible upgradable thing would be Range.

Remember that everything here is bought with Minerals, Making resource management important.

Also, this is just something I've thought about. Could be cool to try but probably hard to balance.
It's entirely possible that having 2 upgrades for 1 spell is too much.
This is just something that I want to get out there for you guys to ponder about.

The only thing that I'm worried about for this system is that Stat points become useless. Altho if we are able to polish Spawn Count and Spawn level well enough, it can become a late game thing.
BTW, how are we to increase Spawn Count and Spawn level (or are we gonna drop it?)

Also, we dont need to have upgrades for every ability if we don't want to, however I think this system is a bit too complex, and might confuse beginners and maybe even experts. This would also remove the upgrade structure entirely, which I think we shouldn't do, we want the UI to be uncluttered and easy to use and understand.

Also, Upgrading range and other things for abilities may not be possible through triggers, I ran into this drawback earlier with the attack an weapon upgrades and I had to come up with a workaround. I do know however that it is quite easy to upgrade and modify any part of an ability using the common upgrade ability on the upgrade structure I have created.

UU, is that on a separate panel? It doesn't look very minimal and sleek.

I would be assuming that the upgrades panel is separate so people can distinguish between the stat points and the upgrades one.

The UI I had planned had everything integrated onto the main screen. I highly dislike having to open up a big screen while in the middle of a game to upgrade my guy, especially as I'd do it several times a game. Much better to have a single button to press to upgrade stuff.

Hmmm, if we changed it, where would we put the button. In ts1 you had to go to the top of the map and move your guy into the thin wou wanted to upgrade, this can't be much different or worse than that.

Unholy - about the spells, do you think it would be ok to have the original spawn and kill units for their visual death effects? This system is ancient I know, but it works, and you can make some very cool patterns of color, shapes ad things like that. Also, we can probably know for certain that nearly nobody would be using this system, and it would give the spells weight as you say they need.

We don't have to do this for all the spells, but I think it would be cool to have it on some of them. Especially the ones lacking an animation.

I had it that small plus signs appeared next to your stats so you could click to upgrade. Pretty ezy to do and to use.

A plus sign appeared next to say your weapon with a tooltip that said "Upgrade attack and spell damage"? Is this right?

Also how would this work for getting minerals from stat points? Or if we keep it, upgrading the spawn and spawn level? No I don't think this system would work because we have some many things that you can spend stat points on, and we want everything you can spend them on to be condensed, not spread all around the screen. I think this might make a but confusing if when you level up like 5 plus icons appear around the screen near everything that can be increases. I don't know, these are just my thoughts, feel free to disagree.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 16 2012, 1:19 pm by luzz.

Yeah I disagree on how confusing it would be I'd say it'd be pretty clean and simple to do.

It's simple to do, I don't deny that, but

1. Getting the button in the correct place would be a nightmare for people with different screen and resolution sizes
2. There would buttons that would pop up around the screen, and I'd you wanted to wait until you can 3 points so you could get your next spell, they would be there that whole time...
3. All the different buttons might confuse some people as to what each button does. We can add the tooltips, but I still think that having 5 buttons just pop up after leveling would annoy some people.

The buttons should be self explanatory, an not require the player to figure out what they mean.

Dug this up from Google Wave luls



This is the UI that Jack planned out before.
I brought it up just so we'd be clear

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The UI that I've put up is a draft. It serves more as something to think about Spell Upgrades rather than what it actually should be.

I think it is Important to talk about what we want to Achieve in the system rather than what we want the system to be first. It'd be a lot easier to see other people's POV this way

Basically, here is what I want to achieve

1. Spells/Abilities need to Upgradable
2. (Some) Spells/Abilities need to have a Separate Upgrade from Normal Attacks
3. Spells/Abilities are upgraded using Minerals. This gives advantage to the Assiming and Map dominating team.

So far, we've established these things that we do NOT want
1. No Tech Trees
2. Things clogging up the Main Screen
3. Tiresome tooltips
4. Spells/Abilities where everything is just about Numbers and Percentages

And finally, here're the things that I'm personally not sure where everyone stands at
1. Spells/Abilities should be upgradable using Only Minerals (No Stat Points)
2. All Spells/Abilities should have some kind of upgrade (i.e. Shadow Step)
3. A UI Should be created that Integrates everything together into one Window OR 2 UI's should be created, 1 for stat pts, 1 for spell upgrades, OR leave spell upgrades to Upgrade buildings, and have Stat points as the only in-game UI.

The UI I've drafted is able to cover all the points i wanted to achieve, but is definitely not good enough (Even I felt it was too much. Probably one upgrade per spell is good enough)

I want to make a point that Minimalistic is a good approach, but sometimes it won't do. It is better to have Consistency.

@buttons in UI
Creating Buttons in the right place on the UI is no problem as the bar has the same offset. We only need to change the offsets according to the amount of weapons and the existence of shields, etc, to place them correctly.
The only condition is that it has to work on a 4x3 screen resolution like 1024x768.

BUT there will be lags for these when they change because displaying the stats of the selected unit is local data and not an effect of the server telling the client to do so.
The added buttons will lag because they are created with triggers and should lag behind for small amount of time.

I could add a test version for that, when I get the map. Then we can see how it works out.
Also, we have 5 command card buttons we could move around to other places on the screen (I guess). We need 5 for the basic commands (stop, move, patrol, attack, hold position), 4 for abilities, 1 for special stuff like stimpack or a passive button telling what the hero's special thing is instead of the ability. So there are 5 unassigned.

Keep in mind that the builder would use that command card layout somehow, too.

Example what Dogmai did to show you guys what's possible (note that that is offline, so every triggered UI element which changes because of direct player input [mouse pointer/buttons] is inevitably delayed):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTr08YOae2g

There's also Smashcraft which is very impressive
Obviously the spells can't be as crazy due to the difference in the game set up

It's not a problem to make attack and defence upgraded by minerals, and is definitely something we should have rather than using levels to upgrade them. Spells and hitpoints and mana, on the other hand, are upgraded via levels.

The purpose of our user interface should be to enable the players to control their hero with the most efficiency possible while not restricting his ability to see the map as much as possible. Separate windows restrict his ability to see the map, so that makes it a no-no in my eyes. Having small plus icons on parts of the UI that already cover the map doesn't change what he can see, so it isn't a negative point. It doesn't really clutter the UI as there will be a grand total of 8 plus buttons to click, which are small and will have a place designated for them.

Ahli, if the buttons are always there but sometimes greyed out does that cause lag? In addition, can we use dialog buttons for some of them or a second command card, or even increase the size of the command card? It's been a while since I've done any layout editing.

I'm against having all the upgrades in separate places, but if guys decide it would work better through dialog ahli and I can create this.

I would however like to keep the upgrade structure and not have any upgrades on the hero. To have upgrades on them would require submenus which I hate, and can be annoying when that is the only unit you are using, because f you get attacked while you in a submenu, then you can't cast abilities, you can't move, the regular annoying stuff. It is also easier to just show and hide abilities on the upgrade structure than it is to put the upgrades on the hero (I think, ahli may find it easier to put the upgrades on the hero).