Scenario Organization in CM:N

[c3k]

Gents,

I'll resurrect this idea: we NEED a way to sort the scenarios in the next game. Right now we can only look at the alphabetical listing of scenarios, with no idea of what type of battle is hinted at by the name. Nor can we tell if we've ever played that scenario, or how we did.

Here are some suggested sorting criteria (adjustable/selectable by the user):

Date

Size, map

Size, forces

Force type

Opposing Nationality

Objectives

Length

Region

Have I played it yet?

Did I win?

Did I lose?

Did I finish? (How many restarts did it take? Kind of tough with savegames.)

Best score/record?

Review score by others (is it a popular scenario or is it a dog?)

Time of Day

Environment

Weather Conditions

Terrain Types

Reinforcements

Support: Artillery, Air

Obviously a simple tabbed sorting system would be a boon. (As well as a SCROLL BAR.) Oh, a "delete" option would be nice. That way I can delete all the hundreds of savegames I accrue.

A feedback system, voluntary and opt-in, would be too cool. It would upload the player's battle results back to BF.C.

Regardless, a better system needs to be implemented.

See these threads: http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=72661

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=76751

Thanks,

Ken

Thanks,

Ken

[Nicdain]

I definitely second this!

[theFightingSeabee]

Me too. That would be a really nice improvement.

[Vergeltungswaffe]

All great ideas.

If the coding proves not to be worth their time, I'd be happy with scenarios being sorted by date and a check box or something denoting that it had been played to a conclusion at least once.

[Mikkey]

great idea c3k, sorting scenarios would by good improvement

[SlowMotion]

If the scenario list would allow browsing into subfolders, then players could make their own ways of grouping scenarios. For example you could have a Played folder to which you'd move scenarios you've already played. Or if you have downloaded scenarios that are meant for H2H games, you could put those some other subfolder and easily find them later.

I think this would be quite easy thing to do, yet wouldn't limit how people want to group their scenarios

[Canada Guy]

Vergeltungswaffe,

I agree with you if you mean by the date the scenario occurs and not the date it was created by a player. I tried to re-write all the scenario titles and description in CMBB to get an idea of the points and the date of each scenario. Turned out to be a nightmare.

I would also like to see a return of the type of units fighting. In CMBB you had symbols for SS/guards as well as reg forces. It was nice to see what type of units were playing against each other.

And use the whole screen. Do not just trap the information in a little box as long as it fits into your minimum sized screen (1024 x 768). If it is a parameter, it should be displayed as long it ius something that is needed (e.g. who is fighting whom) or both players should know (e.g. weather) . It does not have to be fancy, just informative.

[MikeyD]

Sounds like a great idea, except you could see scenario designers start to hang themselves at their workstations. Its hard enough just getting to darned scenarios pulled together, also being force to construct an Excell spreadsheet listing the parameters might push 'em over the edge! :eek:

You DO already have some parameters displayed as icons as you click on scenario titles. night/day, assault/ME, large/small, rural/urban icons in the four corners. That should be some help at least, though they often get overlooked.

[c3k]

Yeah, the icons help you get a meta-sense of the type of scenario, but they do nothing for sorting, seeing if you've played it, etc.

[Battlefront.com]

Yikes, that's a long list

I can say that we will try to improve file management for CM: Normandy. Personally, I like the idea of having a couple of different ways to sort scenarios and tracking which ones have been played before. Keeping track of results for each and every individual battle... I can say for sure that's not going to happen, though it's certainly not a bad idea.

Steve

[JonS]

If the scenario list would allow browsing into subfolders, then players could make their own ways of grouping scenarios. For example you could have a Played folder to which you'd move scenarios you've already played. Or if you have downloaded scenarios that are meant for H2H games, you could put those some other subfolder and easily find them later.

This, if possible, would be quite an elegant solution. No requirement to second-guess exactly how people want to sort their scens - just leave it up to them!

[c3k]

Yikes, that's a long list

I can say that we will try to improve file management for CM: Normandy. Personally, I like the idea of having a couple of different ways to sort scenarios and tracking which ones have been played before. Keeping track of results for each and every individual battle... I can say for sure that's not going to happen, though it's certainly not a bad idea.

Steve

Steve,

Thanks for reading and responding. If you have a need for any more ideas I'm sure I can expand on that list!

I do note your use of the term "try". That's all I could ask for.

Thanks,

Ken

[Combatintman]

Well its a nice to have - but would you prefer Charles' programming time to be taken up in this way rather than (list feature here).

[SlowMotion]

This, if possible, would be quite an elegant solution. No requirement to second-guess exactly how people want to sort their scens - just leave it up to them!

People could group things on any criteria. Like Fictional/Historical, scenario size, area where the battle happened (think of the east front later), time etc. And it would make the scenario list faster to browse. I think there's going to be quite a few scenarios for this WW2 game.

[Battlefront.com]

The problem with relying upon manual folder organization is that you have to pigeonhole each scenario to a specific concept. For example, if I want to play a medium sized battle and I have 5 folders:

Historical

Fun Stuff

Head2Head

MikeyD's Sadomasochistic Nutbusters

Blue Optimized

How am I going to easily do that? I'd have to go through each directory looking for Medium sized battles. Honestly, I think that has the potential to be more frustrating than the way it is now

Personally, some ability to sort the list, a larger list, and a few other things are the things I'm hoping for. Sub directories would also be great to have, though I wouldn't use them quite like the suggestions above. I'd simply have them divided up into broad categories like:

H2H Optimized

Blue Optimized

Red Optimized

Just the way my brain works

Steve

[JonS]

I'd simply have them ... [snips] ... Just the way my brain works

Yep. And I'd simply have them all in the same folder, because that's the way *my* brain works (heh, you should see my desk ...). Which is, of course the (only?) advantage of having subs - no need to guess how other folk want to organise their lives.

But yes, being able to sort and sift on the fly would undoubtedly be *better*

[Field Marshal Blücher]

Please implement a "Delete" functionality though. Please. I hate having to go into the file directory and delete all of the scenarios that I make once just to test something out.

[c3k]

Hmmm, the subdirectory idea seems counter to a useful sort function. If I want a list of ALL scenarios with night action, I'd have to search each subdirectory.

Perhaps I'm missing the utility of saving scenario files into different directories?

A sortable tab called, say, "Best Played As" with values of "H2H", "Blue vs. AI", "Red vs. AI", would do that, wouldn't it?

Then, I could search for "Night" and find all the night scenarios. If I then want to play Blue vs. AI, I could do a sub-search under "Night" to get all the Blue vs. AI at night scenarios.

The idea of creating a separate directory for each permutation of scenario differentiation seems balky, at best.

Would I need a separate directory for battles which contain tanks? Or, only infantry? Or the ones I've already played? Etc.

To reiterate a point I made about this issue in a previous thread: when I start a Combat Mission game on my computer, I am giving myself, my time, my attention, my imagination to this experience. The experience does NOT start with the beginning of the battle. It starts when the CM program opens up on my computer screen. Delving into which battle I will engage in is PART of the experience. The scenario menu deserves the same level of polish as the actual battle. Sorting is a sorely lacking area of functionality. Heck, even SCROLLING would be a huge improvement. (Yes, a "delete" function within the scenario menu would be a boon, as well.)

I, personally, would not mind waiting a bit extra for this to be accomplished. (Notice, though, that I do not put a value on how long "a bit extra" means? YMMV.)

Thanks,

Ken

[Other Means]

Just use the filesystem handler. Why there's specialist code for this I don't know.

[SlowMotion]

The problem with relying upon manual folder organization is that you have to pigeonhole each scenario to a specific concept. For example, if I want to play a medium sized battle and I have 5 folders:

Historical

Fun Stuff

Head2Head

MikeyD's Sadomasochistic Nutbusters

Blue Optimized

How am I going to easily do that? I'd have to go through each directory looking for Medium sized battles. Honestly, I think that has the potential to be more frustrating than the way it is now

Well, the ultimate solution here (IMO) would be use of tagging. A bit like what latest Firefox allows to bookmarks. Users can have any number of keywords/tags that they can attach to objects and later filter those object lists using selected tags. So a scenario could have any number of tags that can be later used to find that kind of scenarios.

To take that example above you could have tags like Large,Medium,Small. And H2H, Historical, BlueOptimizedl etc.

Then later you could select some items from the tag list

Large

Medium X

Small

H2H X

and it would give you medium H2H battles.

Remove check from Medium tag and it would show H2H battles.

Someone might make just one tag: favorite and add that to those really good scenarios.

Maybe overkill right now, but the idea of having 500 scenarios in one list doesn't sound good either. Note: organising stuff whether this way, using folders or what ever way would be *voluntary*. People who like those huge lists could use them the way they've always have.

[Redwolf]

The problem with relying upon manual folder organization is that you have to pigeonhole each scenario to a specific concept. For example, if I want to play a medium sized battle and I have 5 folders:

Historical

Fun Stuff

Head2Head

MikeyD's Sadomasochistic Nutbusters

Blue Optimized

How am I going to easily do that?

I think these are not exclusive.

You let the user sort them into subdirectories.

But the game offers the user to either use a plain file selection dialog (which only gives the filename), or when the user switches to the view that has scenario information scanned from the scenario files, the game scans all subdirectories of the scenarios/ folder.

Note that this doesn't take any longer than scanning the same number of scenarios from a flat folder.

As noted, that scenario view should allow you to use everything that has been scanned from the files as a sort criteria.

There should also be the capability to only scan a sub-tree of scenarios/

Reminder: savegames go here, too, and then things get really messy if this doesn't get solved.

[c3k]

I thought it would be nice if "someone" would give this thread a bit of a BUMP...

Thanks,

Ken

(Looking forward to sorting my scenarios at Christmas.)

[Rocky Balboa]

Personally, some ability to sort the list, a larger list, and a few other things are the things I'm hoping for. Sub directories would also be great to have, though I wouldn't use them quite like the suggestions above. I'd simply have them divided up into broad categories like:

H2H Optimized

Blue Optimized

Red Optimized

Just the way my brain works

Steve

But that's the main reason to have the ability to create/view subfolders. We each have the ability to organize things based on how our brains work. I'm 99.9% sure mine works differently than yours ...