33 replies to this topic

[MoonUnitBeta]

I did a quick mock up (using old UI, sorry!) to show you what I'm talking about regarding dynamic thumbnails. I left the cicada's icon as the current icon for comparison. You'll see all the mechs have a different array of colours and patterns.

Since there's no longer a 3D preview for clicking on a mech while poking through to select one, those visual cues that are now lost with the list view, and need to come back somehow in the list view.
Currently we have tiny mech thumbnails, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish mechs at a glace, almost to the point where the current thumbnails are virtually useless. This is why I'm proposing the change to pre-rendered images, showing exactly what the mech looks like in the thumbnail.


The mechs are easier to distinguish what kind they are as well.
With mech's silouettes becoming very close to each other, the surface details do a better job at showing us what mech it is.

I know a lot of players are going to have over 200 mechs soon by the end of the year. At this point, I forget which mech is which if their icons look the same, I also forget letter designations and the build I have associated with this. Ideally, images are easier to distinguish than read text.





I also suggested this a while ago as well. The poll i created currently shows that only 4% of voters want it to remain the same.
I hope this can make it with the new UI, or shortly after.

Edited by MoonUnitBeta, 13 May 2015 - 11:03 AM.

[Tennex]

The new UI is not going to have a grid, nor a 3D rendering of the mech at all when you go through the mechlist

[MoonUnitBeta]

Tennex, on 08 May 2015 - 09:52 AM, said:

The new UI is not going to have a grid, nor a 3D rendering of the mech at all when you go through the mechlist

Exacty. That's the point. We don't have a 3D view of the mech to fall back on like we do on live server. Not having the grid view is irrelavant. (but the option to have it back would be good. And portraits like I shown would be even more useful in grid view with everthing smushed together)

But because we don't have 3D view without selecting a mech, we cannot fall back on how your mech looks as a way to idendify it (even though I think it stil should have a tiled and list view). So why not move that to the thumbnails?
Like, I have 3 jagers. One of them is painted like a cow and thats the one I like to play. If all I had to do was click on the drop down list, see the portait with cow camo, I can click on it and start playing. I forget the letter designations for which one I like to play, but I don't forget what it looks like.


In fact, custom portraits are more feasable with the new mechlab list view, because it doesn't have to load as many images all at once, and only will need to load images when you click on a mech name to see the variants.

Edited by MoonUnitBeta, 08 May 2015 - 10:45 AM.

[Troutmonkey]

MoonUnitBeta, on 08 May 2015 - 10:17 AM, said:

In fact, custom portraits are more feasable with the new mechlab list view, because it doesn't have to load as many images all at once, and only will need to load images when you click on a mech name to see the variants.

I really like your idea for custom portraits. The game could easily render and bake them off as 2D images for loading later, so there's no need to render them each time - they'll only need to be updated when the mech camo changes.

However, if the current mech selection window goes ahead as is (with dozens of collapsed menus) I will seriously stop playing MWO until it changes.

[sabujo]

That would be a great step forward into mechbay customization. I was going to suggest that feature in my mech select proposal mockup, but I though it would be too many changes for one topic. Even though there are more important issues to take care first, and this request seems rather "heavy" to be developed, I fully support your idea and I would love to see my mechs rendered properly.

[Troutmonkey]

sabujo, on 10 May 2015 - 05:31 PM, said:

That would be a great step forward into mechbay customization. I was going to suggest that feature in my mech select proposal mockup, but I though it would be too many changes for one topic. Even though there are more important issues to take care first, and this request seems rather "heavy" to be developed, I fully support your idea and I would love to see my mechs rendered properly.

A combination of this and the above would be a massive improvement on the current mech selection.

[Jack Shayu Walker]

Tennex, on 08 May 2015 - 09:52 AM, said:

The new UI is not going to have a grid, nor a 3D rendering of the mech at all when you go through the mechlist

They shouldn't be throwing out the mech grid in the first place.

[MoonUnitBeta]

Jack Shayu Walker, on 10 May 2015 - 05:39 PM, said:

They shouldn't be throwing out the mech grid in the first place.

I hope they don't...
This little icon in our current UI gives me hope that they had plans to include both, and that they might have plans to push forward to finally expanding on that.

[Alistair Winter]

+9000

Holy mother of God, I would be so grateful if they implemented this change. The problem is, it's a huge technical issue. Either the UI has to load and render a thumbnail image of all of your 0-200+ mechs based on their camo - which sounds impossible - or PGI has to generate pre-rendered thumbnail images of all possibilities and then let people download them as part of the game files.

I don't know the precise numbers, but...

Let's say there are 16 unique colours used for the preview images. You have 3 different slots. 16 * 16 * 16 = 4096 combinations.
Let's say there are 16 camo patterns. 65536 combinations.
Let's say there are 100 different variants. 6,553,600 combinations. If each image is 10 kb, then that's 65,536,000 kb. 64,000 megabyte. 62,5 gigabyte of preview images.

Let me know if my calculations are faulty, but I think that even a very modest estimate shows that it would simply be too much data.

Frankly though, I'd be happy if I could just choose between 10 different thumbnail images for each mech. Red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple, cyan, white and black paint. For everyone with the Pokemon collector gene, the impact of being able to gawk at your full collection of mechs is huge. And it really pains me to see them all with stock green camo in the thumbnails.

[Troutmonkey]

Alistair Winter, on 10 May 2015 - 11:07 PM, said:

+9000

Holy mother of God, I would be so grateful if they implemented this change. The problem is, it's a huge technical issue. Either the UI has to load and render a thumbnail image of all of your 0-200+ mechs based on their camo - which sounds impossible - or PGI has to generate pre-rendered thumbnail images of all possibilities and then let people download them as part of the game files.

You're thinking about this too hard Alistair.

When you save your mech's loadout after changing the camo the camera takes a render of your mech, and then saves it to a disk. It is then reused each time the thumbnail is required.

At worst this will cause a slight increase in HDD usage, and a slight GPU usage spike as a second camera renders the mech as it's being saved. At the very worst I could see a slight delay on first use of the game client as they game tries to render each mech for the first time, but after that it would simply keep reusing them until they're updated. At that point it'd be no more a drain on resources than the current method of showing a generic thumnail

Edited by Troutmonkey, 10 May 2015 - 11:23 PM.

[Alistair Winter]

Troutmonkey, on 10 May 2015 - 11:13 PM, said:

You're thinking about this too hard Allistair.
When you save your mech's loadout after changing the camo the camera takes a render of your mech, and then saves it to a disk. It is then reused each time the thumbnail is required.
At worst this will cause a slight increase in HDD usage, and a slight GPU usage spike as a second camera renders the mech as it's being saved. At the very worst I could see a slight delay on first use of the game client as they game tries to render each mech for the first time, but after that it would simply keep reusing them until they're updated.

Make it happen! Nao!

[XphR]

It could easily be made an automated part of the process of saving a mech after creating a loadout/camo scheme.

[Troutmonkey]

I made this as a combination of your idea and Sabujo's.
The coloured ingots show installed modules.

[Lily from animove]

The issue with your list Op is the network traffic.

if you have around 100 mechs, the initial mechlab laoding is already painful long. if you now also want for every mech to show thw weapons and colors correctly in this minipictures, the laodingtime form starting mwo to mechlab readiness will be a pain.

This already sucks, when you have a CTD at matchstart and want to hurry back to the match.

When you save it on a disk, the entire feature will then be prolematic if you use differently PC's or make a new install, since then all the mechs suddenly gets weird messy.
Maybe the game could update this file on a seperate update button, and everytime someone leaves the game as part of the game closing process. because then while being online the game only needs to work on the deltas.

@Alistar, you only need to save he pattenr info like:
Pattern 001, color 1 FFFFFF color 2 120503 color 3 A3F2E1

or basically like: 001FFFFFF120503A3F2E1 And then this entire set of mech information could even be compressed.

thats rather simple to do without much diskspace..

Edited by Lily from animove, 11 May 2015 - 05:53 AM.

[pyrocomp]

I think as a process done on save mech and on the first run of the game with new user or during patch process this won't generate traffic. But the update button or external mechanics to update corrupted portraits should exist.

[sabujo]

I don't think this would carry any network traffic load in it's default state. It would be a local thing that just required a bit of CPU/GPU effort each time the mech is saved. It could even have a button to update thumbnail manually.

Now, this also would open the possibility for a feature share/export/import mech specs with custom picture online. But that seems even farther away.

[pyrocomp]

sabujo, on 11 May 2015 - 06:03 AM, said:

Now, this also would open the possibility for a feature share/export/import mech specs with custom picture online. But that seems even farther away.

Do you mean just share code or seeing not the list but grid with these icons on preparing match screen as a team drop deck?

[Troutmonkey]

Lily from animove, on 11 May 2015 - 05:47 AM, said:

The issue with your list Op is the network traffic.

There's no need to save these online. They would be stored locally and updated as required.

After syncing on login if the mech loadout hasn't been modified elsewhere, there's no need to regenerate the picture and it can continue to use the cached copy. It's really a simple thing

[sabujo]

pyrocomp, on 11 May 2015 - 06:11 AM, said:

Do you mean just share code or seeing not the list but grid with these icons on preparing match screen as a team drop deck?

My thought was like if you could share a web URL of your mech, including custom picture, like you do with Smurfy's. The mech would have a code and that code could be used to build the same mech in-game by anyone.

[pyrocomp]

sabujo, on 11 May 2015 - 06:17 AM, said:

My thought was like if you could share a web URL of your mech, including custom picture, like you do with Smurfy's. The mech would have a code and that code could be used to build the same mech in-game by anyone.

To send mech loadout in URL there are ways, but picture should be available online (and it is not in current idea of implementation) or the service that provides those pictures and loadouts (smurfy's or anything else) should have ability to render models, camps etc.... Not going to happen, I'm afraid.