Hello friends. In today's diary, we will tell you a little about the section of user interface that helps you to control your units: hotbar and quick access bar. But remember, my friend, that everything shown on the screenshots is a working concept. To bring the interface to it’s fullest potential, we need all features to be implemented and this is possible only closer to the release. So, looking at the screenshots, remember what Confucius said at this point "If you hate an alpha-build, then you’re defeated by alpha-build”.

Why change? The old one was native and cozy!

Indeed so! But the industry does not stand still, standards change, and, most importantly, in Soldiers: Arena, the pace of the game is a little faster. These means making the interface responsive and intuitive is the priority task. The old interface was occupying a good quarter of the entire screen and was doing this without days off and holidays. Most of the important buttons were in the lower left part of the command panel, which made you constantly distracted from the fight. And you had little possibilities to configure this panel. In addition, it even displayed impossible-to-use commands, which misled the newcomer and was simply inconvenient. In Soldiers: Arena the number of possible commands has become even bigger, as many new features have been added to the old functionality: entrenching, strengthening buildings, sending medics, suppressing fire, and active perks are on their way. With so many commands, it was impossible to make it work properly without the reworking the interface. We realized that the interface should be informative, intuitive and flexible. To ensure that a beginner won’t lose his mind with a staggering amount of information, and in addition we’re looking forward to enable the seasoned players to customize the interface for themselves so as to use all twenty fingers on their four hands. We have already achieved some successes in this field, but there is still a lot of work to be made.

Easy to learn, comfy to dominate.

Hotbar in Soldiers: Arena looks like this.
As you can see, only the available commands are highlighted. Unavailable at the moment are darkened. If we select another unit - hotbar will change and display other commands.
Now the hotbars are configured by types: infantry, tank, artillery. In the future, we plan to deepen this system so that each unit has its own hotbar and the player will only see the commands of the selected unit. So darkening is a temporary half-measure, but even with it you are not distracted by buttons that are inaccessible to use. While it is not entirely clear whether we will be able to do this until the start of the beta, but we are trying to do so. The possibilities for customizing the hotbar have also expanded significantly. Now you can add the commands you need from the extensive list shown below.
To call the quick access bar you need to press F button. This bar is divided into four groups. In the screenshot below, we see that a group with common commands is selected, which includes the commands of movement, shooting, inspection and so on.
A group with specific commands for vehicles / artillery, where you can choose the type of projectile, change the position from combat to marching, strengthen, etc.
Here is the group of system commands, where you can customize the displaying of other interface details: maps, battle statistics, highlighting units and so on.
As you can see some commands even have the “working” names :) And here is the group of commands for the infantry.
Hot keys are binded now, not on the functional F1-12, but the numbers 1-0. We try to make the interface intuitively understandable, and most of us still used to see hot keys binded to numbers. And F-keys are now occupied by commands for allies. Clicking them you can put a marker on the map and send a message to the chat with a call to action. So it became even easier to ask something. "Attack", "Intelligence is needed", "Urgent need of whining about health bars" - the choice of commands will satisfy up to the most refined tastes.
This does not cover all the interface, because there is also a start menu, a context menu, a development tree and the associated tool for creating an army and much more. And we will tell you about everything, but not this time. Bye!

[ 2017-04-06 18:00:01 CET ] [ Original post ]