Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #74 - UX Improvements

[hagerhink]

Great to see some needed quality of life improvements! Are the visual map upgrades from DD70 scheduled for a different patch?

Thank you! Most, if not all, visual map upgrades mentioned in DD#70 will not make it in for 1.2, no.

 

[hagerhink]

I have been losing my god-damn mind trying to understand what the hell "toast" is supposed to mean in the context of message settings. Why is NOBODY talking about this anywhere? Does this terminology actually make sense to someone? The only toast I recognize is the kind I EAT.

Haha, sorry about that! Tooltips with explanations are coming for this!

 

[hagerhink]

I am curious how the Price Reports in the Market Tab will work, but maybe that is adjustable in Message Settings if I prefer the current approach.

Yes! You can turn these back on in the Message Settings!

 

[hagerhink]

What do the checkboxes in the message settings do?

If checked the game Auto-Pauses when that thing happens. Labels for the columns are also added on our internal builds.

 

[hagerhink]

Can we pin other markets? If so, how; if not, is there a need for the "British Market" level?

The plan was definitely a "Yes, you should be able to pin Goods in other Markets", but recently we discovered a bug, or rather a limitation of how the data for the Outliner is structured, so for 1.2, it is very much a Maybe.

 

[hagerhink]

I know it is not mentioned here but group by country is currently implemented as group by originating country. Is there a reason for this? Would it not make more sense if it was all trade including said country? If I am checking my trade with Peru I would not want to have to check both the USA section and the Peru section.

Oh, that very much sounds like a bug! Thanks for pointing it out!

 

[Wizzington]

Please make the infamy states cost to conquer scale with gdp and not population, since that would make more sence and incentivize countries to develop their economy. in 1836 people would be more upset if you invaded beugium than if you grabbed a piece of india from britain(also make the raj and EIC be transferable in a cheaper way please)

It used to be like this, the problem is the way GDP grows exponentially over the course of the game. I've been eyeing a solution where I compare against the average state GDP in the world, but it's a little trickier to explain to the player.

 

[hagerhink]

Can we please get a literacy over time graph in the tooltip like we have with GDP and Radicals/Loyalists? I like to see how much progress I’ve made.

This one is on my wishlist for sure, but for 1.2 we decided to prioritize performance and memory usage, and since graphs can have an impact on both we decided to push this for a later release.

 

[hagerhink]

Personally I hope the "fade in/out" could be faster. I've to wait about 0.5s to keep on. It indeed looks much better but interrupt my thinking.

We are going to do a pass and look over the current default settings for this, and regardless of what we end up with you can also tweak those values to your own liking in the Settings panel!

 

[hagerhink]

Are there any plans to allow us to see tax capacity per state when building Government Administrations so that we know which states have deficits that need to be resolved? Don’t like having to look at situations or clicking on each state to know where I need to build them.

Plans: Yes! Unsure if it will make it into 1.2 though.

 

[hagerhink]

Nice Work!
BTW, will this new UI be able to show script value or variables? This is very helpful for us modders.

There has been some work on this, as we will be using this system to generate the tooltips for the Initial Number of Troops in a Battle, but I am unsure about how generalized it is. It will for sure be more useful than what we had before, but each tooltip might need some extra love to be presentable. Regardless of it's state at the release of 1.2, we will continue to improve it, as it is a very powerful tool for our designers (and for modders).

 

[hagerhink]

Hey amazing job at this rework! I have 2 questions on the trade panel:
1) What is the "revenue" column? If it is the revenue I get as tariffs, then wonderful because that info is much needed; if it is something else, then I don't know.
2) How can I quickly now set the export/import tariff for that good up/down? The buttons are still available?

1) That is correct! This is the tooltip for it:

2) You can either use the "Group by Goods" view (the same as what is currently in 1.1), right-click the Goods or go to the details panel for that Goods.

 

[hagerhink]

On pop info, I wish it was possible to easily do pivot tables.

Me too Cagallo, me too.

 

[hagerhink]

Those are some useful changes. Have you ever considered adding charts for Sell/Buy orders (when you hover over them on the goods panel) for each individual good? Just like the ones you have for the price itself. I think that could quickly give some important information about what's going on in my economy. I would bet this wasn't added for perfomance issues. Could you talk about that?

Yes, we have definitely consider those, but for 1.2 those we're deemed risky as we wanted to prioritize better performance and less memory usage over adding more graphs.

 

[hagerhink]

Can we please also, perhaps in 1.3, have a "queue Railway" button on that same interface?

I definitely see the need for something like this, and I'll see what I can do there. It probably won't be for 1.2 though, but rest assured that we understand where this is coming from!

 

[hagerhink]

Will the new messages/diplomacy allow for something like setting a country of interest like EU4? It would be nice to see it display when a nation becomes open to diplomatic agreements, like taking on their debt. I always see the omniscient AI swooping in to take on debt, but as a human I have never done it, because of a lack of information. The country interest could also convey when they change politics or other info.

No, sorry, not for 1.2. We have a design for it, but we were not able to fit it into the production schedule for this update.

 

[hagerhink]

Great work team!

Sadly, no credit to my Visible Pop Needs mod (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2898482972)

Oh, I am so sorry, accidental omission from my end! Will update the post!

 

[hagerhink]

What is the fascination with buttons that appear to be not needed.

The main reason is "Players more often than you think miss that some buttons are buttons". We saw this time and time again when doing user research, both from new players and experienced PDS veterans. The arrow navigation buttons solved most of those problems.

In addition to this, for the Construction Map Interaction the reason was two-fold:
1) We wanted to be able to both queue a construction and navigate to the details panel for that Building, not just queue
2) We wanted to make sure that it was easy to move your mouse cursor into the tooltip if you wanted to dig deeper into it, which a button for the entire list item made much harder to get right

For the Construction Widget in the Outliner, it was also two-fold
1) We wanted to be able to Pause/Unpause the queue from the Outliner, and to be able to navigate to the Construction panel
2) We wanted it to align neatly with the rest of the Outliner
However, after looking at the result of this, and listening to the feedback we got from internal testing and the Open Beta, this will be changed in the upcoming release.