The icons need to float so high above units because why?

[Erik Springelkamp]

Where can we find that mod?

Actually I play CMSF and CMA, and there they are called Billy_sp icons, but I saw recently a new mod with small icons for CMBN that will have the same favourable effect on stacking.

[ss11955]

Lots of toilet paper on top of them and they should go away mate:p

i love that ----gave me a real chuckle/smile !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[GreenAsJade]

I agree that the icons at level 1 are easy to see.

I've come to realise that the critical camera angles for icon height are 3-5, and the most critical is 4.

Ironically, for me at least, level 4 is both the most useful camera angle, where you can see lots of stuff and enough detail, and it is the level at which the icons are most problematic.

At >6, you're looking vertically, obviously the "height" of the icons is irrelevant.

At 1 and 2, you're looking horizontally. This means that icons aren't conveying much horizontal positional information no matter what their height. It's not an issue.

At level 4, the 3D models are like tiny ants, and you need to rely on the icons to see them. At this level, the position of the 3D icon appears far, _horizontally_ from the position of the unit.

I would hazard a guess that those who are expressing the most concern about icon height are those who like me use level 4 a lot.

Level 4. Where is the commander who's icon is near the word Orchard? Really, where are any of these guys?

Level 3. Where are the commanders who's icon are near the word Orchard?

Level 1. Where is the commander in the centre of the view located? His icon is up in the sky. (A an example for the sake of it, I don't find this a particular issue).

(that commander is way closer than you might guess, just behind the bush in the middle of the screen)

Hope this helps. I actually have other games, where the map is flatter, that seem

to suffer worse: I'll take some screenies of those when I have a chance.

GaJ

[stoex]

Sorry, really weird double post. See below.

[stoex]

While I am not overly critical of the stacking issue (a difficult thing) when units OR their icons are close together, I would like to make a point regarding the icon height in general:

Simply put, there is an optimal solution for this. It is just as the combined posts of the genteel members above say: if you put the icons high above the units, the icons will usually be visible, but will naturally not convey very accurate positional data about the units. If you hang 'em lower, the icons will be closer to where the units are and give a better positional representation, BUT they will vanish behind terrain, buildings, trees etc. You can't have your cake and eat it too, IN THE CURRENT CM SYSTEM OF ICON DISPLAY. This is because the icons are strictly two-dimensional objects floating in a projection of a three-dimensional space. THE ONLY SENSIBLE SOLUTION IS THE FOLLOWING: The icons need to be given a "third dimension" just like the terrain has, meaning their SIZE NEEDS TO CHANGE depending on how far away from the viewer they are. You can then merrily leave them hanging at a goodly height where they will not be blocked by terrain etc., and they will STILL convey the necessary depth perception. DUH!

This is the only way to do this (well, OK, you could "fade out" the icons depending on distance or some other weird trick, but relative size is the way we recognize distance in a 2D projection of 3D space).I mean, that is how TV and movies work, and it's also the way it's done in just about any video game you can name that depicts a three-dimensional space. I'm not going to go into the whole "BFC GUI and usability problems" thing right now, I will just say that this is simple physics, it's literally the only way of dealing with this basic problem, and the vast majority, if not all, video game designers got it a long time ago. I shall say no more.

[GreenAsJade]

An interesting "solution" that hadn't crossed my mind.

I have to say I find it hard to picture, visually ... so I can't guess whether it would really help: I find it hard to picture in a way that it would help

I also find it hard to picture the issue of "icons going behind things" being a problem. For a start, they don't go "behind" trees, see the Level1 screenshot above.

Secondly, at the critical levels of 4 and 5, there is very little for them go "behind" in a way that they could disappear. They are bigger than most obstacles.

If a prototype of "lower icons" could easily be done, my sense is that it might "just work".

Maybe even better if icon height is a function of camera angle (I can't quickly tell if it is or not),

and only levels 3-5 might be affected.

My guess is that simply having them lower might be better, though at the same time I can see that surely various heights have already been tried and the current was found optimum by someone at some point.

I suspect that more experience might just be telling is that this old judgement needs to be revised. Its very likely that early tests were done more with low camera angles, where the glorious graphics are most attractive, and focusssed less on the more useful play-angles of 3-5.

GaJ

[Lt Bull]

It's not arbitrary. It's about usability. Something that BFC needs to take lessons in.

Exactly what womble said. Arbitrary? How can the distance between a unit and it's floating icon be considered arbitrary? The higher it goes the more it loses it's ability to be a functional marker for the player to readily determine exactly where on the battlefield (and in what terrain) the unit is in at a glance.

If I try to have another go at trying to answer the question I originally posted (no one has offered ANY type of reasoning yet), it's probably best to refer how other games with 3D battlefields have (much better) treated the same issue of proving "abstract" ID visual clues to the player that assist in keeping track of what units are where on the battlefield.

Lets look at the Total War series apprach and comapre it to CMBN. They use a similar idea in principle, "float" a marker over the unit, but with some major key points of difference which makes their approach much more straightforward, sensible, logical and much betetr for the player to interpret seamlessly.

1. The marker is actually fashioned to represent an "oversized" unit flag or banner. As such it does not freely "float" unattached/disconnected to the unit (like in CMBN) at some height above the unit, but has a "flag pole" that physically (visually) connects the flag to the unit base. It is easy to physically see what flag belongs to what unit just just by seeing the flag linked to the unit by the flag pole.

NOTE: I do understand that in these games the marker/banner is actually meant to be part of the unit being represented (ie. the battleflags of that era) so i makes sense just to see them represented, unlike in CMBN where the icons are just there purely as abstract markers for teh players sake. However it iteresting to ask, how would BFC have treated the icons IF CM actually was representing feudal era combat with TW style units etc.!!!! Would they have STILL adopted the bizazre approach to icons used in CMBN??

2. The height at which a marker appears over a unit is fixed relative to the scale of the battlefield. In other words, the "flag pole" doesn't magically shrink or extend (in battlefield scale) as a result of the player moving/changing the camera perspective, unlike CMBN. It consequentially naturally scales on the screen (with the unit) depending on how far away it is from the camera. Actually if you actually observe what happens to the height of the marker above a unit when you zoom in and out from a unit in CMBN, it is most puzzling (a probably contributes to you subconsciously picking up that something just isn't quite right). You will find that if you zoom right up to a unit, the marker floats some height (x pixels) above the unit. If you now zoom out, this height (in pixels) decreases at a rate disproportionate to the distance zoomed out, resulting in a perceptional confusion as your brain tries to reconcile the visual arbitrary disconenct between the scale of the units/zoom setting and the visual height of the marker above the unit.

3. The size of the marker/flag relative to the screen naturally changes according to the standard natural rules of depth of field, unlike CMBN. So even if you saw a group of markers, you would be able to at least tell which markers belong to units closest to you (the larger ones) and which are further away (the smaller ones). CMBN instead just uses just 3 discrete sizes of icons (the medium and larger one being approximately 33% and 66% bigger than the size of the smallest icon respectively) based on some arbitrary scale of how far the camera is from the unit to give some visual cue as to the distance it is from camera. This visual cue it gives is so innefective in practice, you probably wouldn't notice it if the icons remained just the one size regardles of distance from the camera.

Here is a compilation of screenshots taken when you progressively zoom out from a unit.

Note that I have aligend each screenshot with the next so that the bases of all the tank tracks line up horizontally. Only the third screenshot from the left has the medium sized icon.

4. The TW banners allow for overlap with other banners (and, just as importantly, terrain), as you would naturally expect. The CMBN icons however by defalt do not. They exhibit an strange "auto anti-overlap" behaviour that ultimately makes the markers literally suddenly jump around and rearange themselves (in both the horizontal and vertivcal directions) in space if the camera is posiioned so that it would cause icons to overlap. It further adds to the confusion!. Best understood if you watch this sample video of it occuring in action.

5. The TW banners always face the player, essentially just like the icons do in CMBN.

When you consider all the odd/unnatural things listed above that are going on with the CMBN icons as the camera zooms in out/rotates/pans etc, thier potential to give the player any high quality information on the units POSITION on the battlefield is totally wasted.

It's not like the TW apprach to battlefield icons/banners is anything borne of rocket science or amazing innovation. It's just simple common sense. I mean you just need to look at this video of even the first game of the Total War series (Shogun Total War) that came out in 1999 to see just how effective their banners/icons are at identifying units and where they are relative to others on the 3D battlefield. Worth noting that this first TW game did not even feature 3D units, they are just 2D sprites, same as the banners/icons.

I do agree that the CMx1 style bases are much more effective at giving a player SA of where units are on the battlefield. Making the unit bases the main way of identifying where units are is most effective.

FWIW, my ideas for a better solution revolve around making the icons behave more like TW icons/banners.

eg.

- having virtual "flagpoles" of some kind to link the unit on the ground to the icon in the air might help.

- reduce the height at which they float

- make them scale naturally (though I understand there are issues here)

[JonS]

If I try to have another go at trying to answer the question I originally posted (no one has offered ANY type of reasoning yet)

My guess is it has something to do with not 'losing' the icons when your troops are in terrain. The icons can already be hard to find when your guys are against a hedgerow, and bringing them down lower will probably cause problems in trees and especially in buildings.

[Lt Bull]

My guess is it has something to do with not 'losing' the icons when your troops are in terrain. The icons can already be hard to find when your guys are against a hedgerow, and bringing them down lower will probably cause problems in trees and especially in buildings.

So this really is a problem is it? Hmm...CMBN certainly isn't the only game that features units on a 3D battlefield with terrain on it and a free camera. Have I experienced this problem of "losing" the icons in other games that DON'T treat icons the way like CMBN does? (actually I think CMBN is the ONLY game that treats unit markers like it does). No.

Have you? If so please tell the name of the game so we can have a look ourselves (screenshots/videos).

Maybe this is the case of BFC just thinking they need to deal with a problem that really isn't and in the process of trying to address it actually created a problem much more annoying than the one they thought they were addressing.

[Chek]

I thought they were kinda cool actually.

I'll use a random icon to get me quickly across to the other side of the map then fine tune to the particular unit once there.

I am using Bill Lockton's Lo vis Icons.They are less intrusive and I find the symbols more familiar.

[stoex]

An interesting "solution" that hadn't crossed my mind.

I have to say I find it hard to picture, visually ... so I can't guess whether it would really help: I find it hard to picture in a way that it would help

You might find it hard to picture, but believe me, it is so natural that if you had it, you wouldn't want it any other way, even though you might not notice it consciously. The main reason why the icons seem disjointed from the units is because the icons don't properly scale with distance like everything else, believe me. See Lt Bull's excellent post.

I also find it hard to picture the issue of "icons going behind things" being a problem. For a start, they don't go "behind" trees, see the Level1 screenshot above.

They rarely go behind trees, tending to be high enough to avoid them, but they do. Also buildings and particularly hedgerows. As well they should, in fact, since this indicates to the player that the actual unit is behind something. They just need to remain partly visible, probably dynamically adjusting their height when behind an obstacle.

Secondly, at the critical levels of 4 and 5, there is very little for them go "behind" in a way that they could disappear. They are bigger than most obstacles.

Um, sorry. They are not bigger than most obstacles (depending on your camera angle).

My guess is that simply having them lower might be better, though at the same time I can see that surely various heights have already been tried and the current was found optimum by someone at some point.

I wish you luck with that request, but seriously I don't think it will change the basic problem. Just imagine a slightly rolling map. If you look at it from a low camera angle, there may actually be several places on the map which line up due to the undulations. Meaning they will appear at the same height but be at different distances from your point of view. Now if you have units in these places, and their icons are all the same size and the same height above the units, the icons will not let you know which unit is closest and which one furthest away from you. Your screenshot is actually a good example of this the height of the icon above the unit cannot possibly give accurate positional information without adding some kind of depth of view effect to them.

[c3k]

I agree that scaling the size of the icon based on distance could help, but let's look at it for a moment.

The purpose of icon is to allow the player an easy way of finding (and selecting) a unit. Scaling the icon is fine if we're just talking about a few hundred meters.

How small would an icon be which is 4km away?

How would that help me find/select that unit? Should it? Or, should the dot at 4km force me to pan over that way to see what it resolves into as it expands?

Lt. Bull's series of pictures is great for showing how the icon's relative size changes. It goes from being about the size of the TC's head, to something like 20 times larger than the entire tank. Heck, it could be Jupiter in that last shot. As well as relative size changing, the relative height changes.

I'm not saying that icon size changing with distance is NOT a solution. I am saying that you need to incorporate the CM environment into the solution. How many games allow you to go from a single face filling the screen to being 4km away? (Actually further: set up a 4km x 4km map and go to one corner and look diagonally at the opposite corner, 5.65km away.)

If icons are at fixed heights, how will an icon hiding behind a cathedral tower help? If icons can float over obstacles, how will you juxtapose an icon for a closer unit in a field with that for farther unit behind a 4 story building? Vice versa?

Remember, I agree with you that the icons seem "funky" sometimes. I cannot, as yet, exactly define when and why they seem "funky" or "off". Unless I can define exactly what is wrong with them, the solution will be elusive.

Ken

[c3k]

Examing it a bit, the game DOES change the size of icons based on distance. Closer ones are bigger than ones further away.

One issue I noted was that close units can have their icons float off the top of the screen and disappear. I would prefer the screen top to act as a glass ceiling for them.

[GreenAsJade]

Remember, I agree with you that the icons seem "funky" sometimes. I cannot, as yet, exactly define when and why they seem "funky" or "off". Unless I can define exactly what is wrong with them, the solution will be elusive.

I agree with you. In fact, I noticed another thing, which is that if you stay at a certain camera level, and "calibrate", then the funkiness goes away, similarly if you "concentrate" on thinking about "what height are the icons". Once I've deliberately made myself aware of this, I can use them. While the feeling lasts.

I want to add that the purpose of the icons is (IMHO) secondarily about being able to select the units. It's primarily about being able to see "what is where" _because there is no other solution for this_.

So the "where" is very important.

In another thread somewhere, Steve said "users should not focus on proposing solutions, they should just say what they want from the game, and let BFC figure out the solution".

This is fair.

What I want is to be able to reliably tell where all the units are that I see (or hear).

The problem that I experience with the current implementation is that this is not the case: I find it difficult to reliably tell where units are based on the cues I am given (which is almost solely the icon). One solution would be to leave the icons where they are and provide visible bases Ooops, there I go again, proposing solutions!

GaJ

[stoex]

I see two things happening in Lt Bull's series of screenies:

1. The icons do scale with distance, but they actually scale through their three available sizes pretty quickly (within the first 4 screenies), while the tank is still close enough to see relatively easily with the naked eye. They cease scaling at greater distances where I cannot discern by looking at the map whether my tank is 1 mile or 3 miles away. Maybe this should be changed so that the icons start scaling later and thus give more information at greater viewing distances.

2. The relative floating height of the icons obviously increases in the first few shots, but it is difficult to tell what the relative height does in the later shots where the tank is so small. However, the absolute floating height of the icons (which is a more visible clue at greater distances anyway) first goes up, then goes back down again, which to me is also somewhat confusing. It is clear that the icons can't scale exactly the same way with distance as the units - or else they would become practically invisible just like the units themselves, no point in that - but the scaling of the icons is rather inconsistent, disjointed and unintuitive overall, and Lt Bull's screenies demonstrate that well, I think.

In general, it only bothers me sometimes because I try to know where my units are anyway, but it can be a hassle when there are a lot of units on the field in particular.

The icons in general are one of the things I hope receive some attention in the GUI overhaul slated for the next major release, as they are one of the concepts in the current GUI that most fail to live up to their potential in quickly and clearly conveying relevant information to the player. They are much more prominent than the GUI at the bottom of the screen, much easier to see and follow without taking your eyes off the action, and there is so much that they could do to convey information (e.g. change their size, their shape, their color, blinking or other visual effects). Yet they do nearly nothing except float unchanging above the battlefield. Things have gotten a bit better with the blinking when a unit takes casualties, and the greying out when the unit cannot accept orders, but so much more would be possible with them.

[GreenAsJade]

In general, it only bothers me sometimes because I try to know where my units are anyway, but it can be a hassle when there are a lot of units on the field in particular.

Actually, I never really need this for my own units: it's always spotting/following/planning about enemy units that this trips me up...

GaJ

[wolf66]

I would prefer having a bar at some edge of the screen with little symbols for all my available units and if I move the mouse pointer on a symbol the unit itself gets highlighted / blinking / translucent etc on the battlefield ......

[ClarkWGriswold]

There are small arrows at the top of the screen that show the location (compass direction only) of each friendly and enemy unit. I think it might be helpful if those arrows were replaced with the unit icons, then had a "flagpole" running down to the actual location of the unit. That way if a unit was behind a hill, tree, house, etc. you could at least see that the flagpole disappears behind that object, and icons would never float above the view of the camera, since they're pinned to the top of the screen.

[GreenAsJade]

There's probably not enough room, horizontally, for icons all at the top? That's why there are those little arrows

Does anyone use them? I can't recall ever looking at them... maybe they help RT play?

GaJ

[Michael Emrys]

That's why there are those little arrows

Most of the time I am not even conscious that those are there. Sometimes I use them to speed up locating enemy units, but that's about all.

Michael

[JonS]

There are small arrows at the top of the screen that show the location (compass direction only) of each friendly and enemy unit. I think it might be helpful if those arrows were replaced with the unit icons, then had a "flagpole" running down to the actual location of the unit.

The way you've written that, it sounds as if it'd be be like playing from inside a prison cell, with loads of flagpoles/bars running from the top of the screen down to the various units. Visually that'd be utterly horrible.

[McLargehuge]

It's been a while since I played CMx1, but am I remembering correctly or not when I think the units had generic bases with no unit info and that was it? You had to click a unit to see what it was. If so, I don't get the CMx1 had the perfect solution and was so much better line of thinking. I understand the bases were more visible, but you can use a mod to change that. The flags are a new addition to CMx2 aren't they? So they are above and beyond what was available in CMx1. To me, they serve their purpose well and work as what I think is intended. As stated above, a quick way to find your commander, machine gunner, etc. Click the flag then find the highlighted base. I'm not sure they were meant to be tactical representation for the unit to be selected and controlled by and trying to use them that way is probably your source of frustration. If it is the case, that they just be used for quick unit selection at a glance, then what you are asking for is a fix for something that is not broken. Or at best, a way to improve on a feature. Would throwing grenades at people you only intend to wound be a terrible implementation and functionality of grenades or a misuse and incorrect expectation of them?

[GreenAsJade]

CMx1 was infinitely better in this respect because even when you clicked on the unit you did _not_ find out what it is.

CMx1 had fog of war for unit identification, with units having variable appearance on the 3D landscape depending on how they were identified, and it had visible unit bases. CMx1 also had scalable 3D models, so you could see what every unit is by looking at its 3D model even at high camera angles. Icons and any other accesories were not necessary. CMBN unfortunately has none of these, which is a large part of the reason we end up focussing on icons.

GaJ

[HintJ]

I know this is thread about the functionality of the icons, and not to change the subject, but is anyone as intellectually shallow as myself to prefer *pretty* icons?

I only have the demo, but I'm having a blast (quite literally) sucking up nitrous oxide and watching Gimp and Paint.net tutorials on Youtube.

[HintJ]

And I think the icons are too high (perhaps to be tree-top?) at certain levels. But overall, there has been MASSIVE improvements over the CMSF Icons, both in scaling sizes by distance and resolution processing.