Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #74 - UX Improvements

[Cagallo]

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?

That would be amazing, because sometimes (especially in markets with multiple members) I don't know if the price hike/drop is because there is less production of a good (sell orders) or a large increase in demand (buy orders). It takes me 5 minutes of scrolling through multiple windows and trying to remember numbers until I figure out it's because a market member changed production method from clippers to steamers.

 

[FleetingRain]

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.

Can't you just do a tooltip like:

"This wargoal will give us +9001 Infamy, due to:

+20 from base value
-10 from having a claim
x1.5 from attacking a fellow Great Power
x1.9 from 90% of the local population being of a culture discriminated by us
x1.6 from 60% of the local population not following our state religion
x7.8 from state GDP being that many times the average state GDP"

This looks simple enough to me. The average state GDP could be easily accessible in the GDP tooltip in the state view window.

 

[Jef Wauters]

Woah! These are all great changes! My compliments to the UI team, this is a leaps and bounds upgrade.

 

[DeepDolphin]

First, I appreciate the two of you for informing about this.

Secondly, I'm GONNA start ranting: There is NO SHOT that this is a common term. I have never ever heard of this even ONCE in my 30+ years of living with this cursed English language. There has GOT to be a better term for this that actually adequately describes the meaning of this word. You wanna talk UX improvements, "toast" is NOT it. That is not an intuitive term at all.

While it may not be very common amongst end users of an application, it is very common amongst UX/UI developers. And as evidenced by this post: https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/12000, it's been around for quite a while now.

A better name for end users would probably be pop-up, but that term is already being used for another type of notification in the menu. And simply using "notification" isn't adequate because they're trying to disambiguate amongst different kinds of notifications.

Also, the reason toast notifications are called a "toast" is because it usually pops out from the side of a window, much like how toast pops out from a toaster.

 

[ItThatAltersSanity]

Trade Routes​

you can now get a sortable list of all Trade Routes in the Market, or get a view where they are grouped by Country.

​

Economy​

we have added Infrastructure, Available Labor, and Qualifications to the Map List that is shown when expanding Buildings.

​

Map Modes​

We have added three new Map Modes (Literacy, Population and Infamy)

​

Outliner​

The Outliner has gotten some polish, with pinnable Goods

These were the changes I immediately noticed with 1 hour of Open Beta gameplay and had really been wanting. There are a couple more UX changes I'd like to see though I don't think they're at enough priority that it should make it into 1.2 - namely showing Pop career journeys.

I like looking at pops get promoted (or demoted). Sometimes I do nothing but stare at tooltips just after a building finishes construction to see how the job market changed. Given finite computational resources, the scope would have to be carefully limited, but I'd like to see more information on the career history of certain people, i.e. how they hopped between pops:
- When did they get promoted to a more demanding job? What salary did they take to make that move?
- Where did the unemployed come from? The building workforce tooltip can say "X labourer were recruited from the unemployed" in a state with 0 unemployment, which states did they migrate from?
- Did someone make a huge strata-jump in their career move? Occasionally I see peasants directly becoming capitalists. I'd really like the game to highlight when an aristocrat becomes a lowly labourer.

That last one could even form generated events. "NAME is the first aristocrat (in the last 10 years) to have swallowed their pride and became a labourer to feed their family".


On the note of pop information, there's one thing I still couldn't find easily in the open beta: which pops will be discriminated if the laws change. When I get a political movement petitioning to go from National Supremacy to Racial Discrimination, I'd like to know which pops will flip from discrimnated to accepted.

 

[Voigt]

I thought those smaller notification windows are called pop ins, instead of pop ups.
Never heard the woard toast for that.

 

[FleetingRain]

I mean, considering where they appear in Vic3, they could be called Banner Notifications too.

 

[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.

 

[Fusilliban]

First: Thank you so, so much. These changes are all extremely promising, and even more than the mechanics changes, they help shift my feelings from "I knew buying this so soon after launch was a gamble, but damn" to "even if it's not perfect now folks are actively working on it and it's gonna be great." I was optimistic - Paradox have earned a lot of goodwill from me with EU4 - but it's nice to have that optimism confirmed.

For example, we have added Infrastructure, Available Labor, and Qualifications to the Map List

Yeeeeessssss. Best part of the 1.2 announced yet. Can we please also, perhaps in 1.3, have a "queue Railway" button on that same interface? I want to be able to go "add two buildings here [click, click]" and then move my mouse 20 pixels to the left and go "and also build a Railway, because that's going to max out my infrastructure there." Leaving that screen, going to Railway construction, and then having to remember which provinces are about to have negative infra is way more annoying than "20 pixels, [click]". Maybe also a button for ports if you think the interface has room for it, but ports aren't possible everywhere and I'd be happy for just Railway.

Or if you'd rather, a tickybox somewhere for "always queue a railway when the building queue for a province is > available infrastructure". Either would be amazing.

Thanks for all these updates, and all of everyone's hard work, this is gonna be awesome.

 

[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!

 

[marxwasright]

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.

 

[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.

 

[monksimus]

Overall the UI for v1.2 is so much better, and gives me a lot of confidence that things will get to where they need to be. I like that you have incorporated elements of popular mods in rather than trying to reinvent the wheel too. Could you add some of the elements of the expanded toolbar mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2888391145 ? In particular infamy and innovation generation are something I am constantly monitoring, but are multiple menus deep. Also can you add more columns to the outliner? Having everything vertically wastes a ton of space, particularly on ultrawides. Especially if we could choose which elements go where.

 

[xbrunerohd]

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.

Thanks for addressing this. I would love to see those in the game. It is good to know it might be added in the future!