Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #61 - Data Visualization

[PDJR_Alastorn]

Question - It pie charts are so bad, why are they used in-game instead of something like donut charts?

Because I'm told the fanbase would riot if we didn't allow them to make poor life choices.

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

Aren't red and green a bad choice for people who are color blind?

You would be correct.
Its a good thing we have a colorblind mode which takes care of that for capacities and most numbers.

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

there should be a bar showing employment, not just how full the cash reserves are. this way, the player can expand a factory in this view directly rather than click on the factory to see if employment is full. for instance, textile mills has full cash reserve, but does it also have full employment? if no, then no need to expand it yet...

View attachment 886375

While I agree, there's a limited UX space and if we put a bar for everything we end up running out of UI room. We try and do Employment issues are currently shown by the pop and arrow symbols to the right of the building. You see when there is employees flocking to a building (golden icon) and when there is issues in hiring employees (either qualifications or wages as the red icon)

You also can tell when a building is at full employment because if it has full cash reserves its hightly likely its reached that status.
A building that is not at full employment will consider increasing wages or holding wages up to keep employment and you will see such changes in its cash reserves.

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

This feels like the devs just cut through the first wave of mandatory UI mods and just went "fine, I'll do it myself" on the UI.

I love it

Spoiler: Also this meme I made a long time ago is now relevant again

View attachment 886320

We play the game too, and we like to have it be reasonable understandable

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

Are the market panel columns sortable? It is bugging me far more than it should that wood is in the sixth row instead of the third...

Yes they are sortable, we know exactly the kind of "this is bugging me" crowd our fanbase is.

Great DD, I love the changes, especially the ones in the market screen! And yeah, it's crazy how the change from green/red to golden/blue can have a huge semantic difference and influence the perception! I agree that, as a player, I would have gone for the "all green" instinctively. Well done!

Why are some good coloured in violet, green, yellow or brown?

Those colors correspond to the groupings of goods: Staple, Industrial, Luxury, Military, etc. Helps classify what the good is for and shows you what the filters remove.

I've heard so much about these legendary PDXCON slides! I hope we can have a look at them eventually.

Patience, one day. Preferably closer to when its actually useful for you all as players.

Can you explain this please? One Proud Bavarian already tempted us with you unavailable powerpoint. Can you give an example so I can understand what you mean?

Also: iirc in the game having a deficit does not mean any pops/buildings lack the good there is too little of (which of course isn't realistic but alas). So am I correct in understanding you can safely preserve a shortage of say 10% of a certain good indefinitely to merely to drive up the price of yhat good without any ill effects (besides those caused directly by the higher price) ?

See above, I will have that talk posted sometime and maybe some other things for you all about that topic

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

Looks cool One visualization to consider that could be really helpful could be to add some small sparklines where there's space for them (these are simply small line graphs showing recent changes in important values like market price or cash reserves). These could be a great way to unobtrusively let players appreciate information about recent trends without overwhelming the interface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparkline , https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR

I have spent 8 years of my professional life trying to get sparklines to work. I used to do them for regularly for doctors who had to make life decisions off of them.
I really don't want to add them to Victoria 3, I'd rather just make our tooltip in tooltip graphs better.

Hot take but sparklines are the pie charts of linear data.

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

Re: balance bars, has anyone figured out how they're drawn and what they represent exactly ?

I think negative balances bars and positive balances bars use different formulas. The negative balance bar seems to represent balance*price : the higher the result, the longer the bar.

But it doesn't work when the balance is positive. Paper and... what looks like sugar ? (eighth row) both have similarily-sized bars despite giving very different numbers when using the above formula. So idk.

I may just be wrong about the negative balance formula tho.

I'm not sure I understand what the Balance bars are supposed to represent. The number given is (Sell orders-Buy Orders), but I don't understand what the length of the bar means.

I will take a look at this in the morning. Since I am sick at home today and don't have the ability to pull up the code.
I think we are trying to do something smart with that formula and this is either proving:

There's a bug somewhere
We are trying to be so big brained smart, we've crossed the line into stupidity.
But as always, that's half the benefit of a dev diary

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

first my university was antipiecharts, now my video games when will this cease

When you give up using piecharts incorrectly, which is 99.5% of general usage.

 

[PDJR_Alastorn]

Could this tool be mad available for mod development

This tool is already possible by debug command, takes maybe an hour to throw together a script sheet to process it depending on the way you want it.