[interface?] Better Campaign Competion Symbol

[novotny]

Its not really a problem, but I think it could be done better for those who are not so great and are trying to get better in campaigns.

When you complete a campaign on beginner, it gives the same banner upon completion as does completing one on challenging, etc. So when I play one on normal, and stop for a while, and I come back to play it again, I am not sure what difficulty I completed it before.

What I suggest is somehow making it noticeable what difficulty (the highest) you beat a campaign on. Probably the easiest way for this, since not all difficulties are labeled the same, is a subtext next to the 'green leaf banner thing'. Or another suggestion would be, when you choose to start a campaign if it has been completed before, on the "select difficulty screen", a little leaf symbol (or something) could be next to the difficulty you completed.

Thanks for your ideas on this.

[ancestral]

Perhaps the banner should be gold-silver-bronze to simulate the difficulties.

[Iris]

Perhaps the banner should be gold-silver-bronze to simulate the difficulties.

Sounds good to me, although handling non-default difficulty sets (i.e. where the number of difficulties does not equal three) would require some additional thought.

... I’m too lazy to come up with a formula at the moment. I’ll look into implementing this later, or at least the completion difficulty level tracking part.

[novotny]

Yeah, i was thinking something like bronze, silver, gold to begin with, but then i thought about various names for difficulties, and different number of difficulties.

That's why i suggested a subtext thing, or add a symbol next to the previously completed difficulties, on the "difficulty select screen"

Also, thanks for looking at this.

[Reepurr]

I'd say bronze-silver-gold would be very hard to throw in with two-(AToTB) or four-(lots) difficulty campaigns, so as a possible workaround, perhaps something like this?

There is both a wreath and a shield (a small shield near the bottom of the image, not anything major). The shield may have either I, II or * on it, for levels, and the wreath goes bronze-silver-gold within those levels. So you have:

BEGINNER - bronze, level I
EASY - silver, level I
NORMAL - gold, level I

CHALLENGING - bronze, level II
HARD - silver, level II
DIFFICULT - gold, level II

NIGHTMARE - gold, level *

[JaMiT]

I'd say bronze-silver-gold would be very hard to throw in with two-(AToTB) or four-(lots) difficulty campaigns, so as a possible workaround, perhaps something like this?

To me, that seems a bit complex, specifying seven results when no individual mainline campaign has more than four difficulties. Plus, that would require the game to know more than the current four standard difficulties (EASY, NORMAL, HARD, and NIGHTMARE, regardless of what the displayed name is -- for example, AToTB uses EASY and HARD, displayed to the player as "Beginner" and "Challenging"). To keep things simple, it should be enough to specify defaults for four difficulties and provide a way for campaigns to specify the laurels for other difficulties. That still leaves the question of what to display for NIGHTMARE (platinum? diamond? flaming horse? leave it to the art folks?) Eh, in one respect, the exact image is not an immediate concern, as the support for multiple laurels can be independent of which images are used.

Not to tread on shadowmaster's toes, but here's my thinking on this. First, each difficulty would need a numeric rating so the game can compare them to tell which is harder. (To give UMC flexibility, the four defaults should probably leave gaps, such as EASY=100, NORMAL=200, HARD=300, and NIGHTMARE=400.) This ranking would be saved as part of the record of the campaign being beaten, so completing the campaign with a higher difficulty ranking would update the image. Second, each difficulty would need an overlay image to use as its laurels. Or subtext, but I think this could be done well enough with imagery.
Ignore the stricken parts please. I was not thinking clearly.

Once that kind of support is in place, four images could be picked for the default difficulties, and a macro written that could be included in a campaign to define the default ranking and laurel overlay scheme. (It is in this respect that a scheme for the displayed overlay image is not important for the implementation. In fact, I suspect a switch to/from images/subtext would be relatively simple compared to providing the base support for tracking completed difficulties.)

That being said, at some point the images would be needed. As an alternative to bronze, silver, gold, and "something", maybe there could just be a row of stars placed somewhere on the laruel overlay? Something like one star for EASY, two for NORMAL, three for HARD, and four for NIGHTMARE? (I would still implement this as four independent images for flexibility, though, not a single image repeated X times.) That could make it easier for UMC to insert custom difficulties into the order (with things like different star colors or "half-star" images).

[Reepurr]

I admit that my suggestion was a bit...odd..., and agree for the most part with JaMiT.

Whether there is a need to support UMC 'custom difficulties', however, is debatable. For the first part, I didn't realise that the game could support anything other than the four difficulties EASY, MEDIUM, HARD and NIGHTMARE, and for the second, are there any campaigns currently existent that require or would use five difficulties?

[ancestral]

If there's more than three difficulties, then just make all the middle difficulties silver.

[Iris]

Not to tread on shadowmaster's toes, but here's my thinking on this. First, each difficulty would need a numeric rating so the game can compare them to tell which is harder. (To give UMC flexibility, the four defaults should probably leave gaps, such as EASY=100, NORMAL=200, HARD=300, and NIGHTMARE=400.)

No, they wouldn’t. Difficulty levels are currently enumerated in campaign.difficulties in the same order they appear in the difficulty selection dialog, from easiest to hardest. It’s absurdly trivial to assign an automatic number to a difficulty level in code starting from that basis — in fact, that’s already done in the code that invokes the selection dialog.

If there's more than three difficulties, then just make all the middle difficulties silver.

I was originally thinking about a more complicated solution separating the difficulties into three tiers, each one with the same amount of levels whenever possible (e.g. when the number of difficulty levels is a multiply of three), but I suppose more simplifications would work too, and make the implementation far easier.

In that case, it might be more intuitive for the user to make all difficulties but the last two use bronze laurels, and assign silver and gold to the second-to-last and last levels, respectively. There might be additionally a label in the right side displaying a more detailed completion status (perhaps in the future even with statistics!).

I’m still waiting on other developers in regards to this dialog since they said they discussed UI stuff in FOSDEM. Hopefully there’ll be a mailing list post soon.

[novotny]

If there's more than three difficulties, then just make all the middle difficulties silver.

this loops back to the, not being able to tell the difference again.

I still think my original idea is the easiest. In the "campaign selection" screen, leave the leaf wreath banner the same. However, after you choose a campaign you have beaten, a symbol will be next to the difficulty previously completed. or, do a diagonal banner with the words "completed" or something. Like this:



I know there are little pictures of characters in the other blue space, but just work around them i guess.

[JaMiT]

[...] and for the second, are there any campaigns currently existent that require or would use five difficulties?

Not sure, but I recall seeing a campaign that used the difficulty selection to choose a hero as well as the difficulty. (Or was it just the hero and the difficulty was fixed?) In that sort of setting, three choices for the hero unit and two difficulties gives six options in the difficulty selection dialog.

On the other hand, that use of the difficulty selection does not really fit with this idea of showing the "hardest beaten", since it would have multiple selections with nominally equivalent difficulty. This would be rare, though, so probably not worth making significant allowances for.

First, each difficulty would need a numeric rating so the game can compare them to tell which is harder. (To give UMC flexibility, the four defaults should probably leave gaps, such as EASY=100, NORMAL=200, HARD=300, and NIGHTMARE=400.)

No, they wouldn’t. Difficulty levels are currently enumerated in campaign.difficulties in the same order they appear in the difficulty selection dialog, from easiest to hardest.

Oh right. Sorry, I think I got caught up in the idea of comparing campaigns, even as I was stating that such comparisons were not useful. Bad thinking on my part.


Hmm... for this idea of repeating laurels: Could it be implemented along the lines of having a (comma-separated) list of laurel images to apply in order? If there are more difficulties than images, have the first image in the list (the one for the easiest difficulties) be repeated as needed. If there are fewer difficulties than images, ignore the first image(s). The end result would be that for something with four difficulties, the list would effectively be "bronze,bronze,silver,gold", while for only two difficulties, the list would effectively be "silver,gold".

My reason for phrasing it this way is that it would lend itself to being a key-value pair in a [campaign] tag, so that a campaign could potentially specify its own laurels (and if a campaign does not specify them, there would be a default bronze-silver-gold list -- or maybe green-bronze-silver-gold for DW?). That would push the task of coming up with a five-difficulty solution onto whoever comes up with a five-difficulty campaign. The downside would be a potential lack of visual consistency in the campaign list.

I still think my original idea is the easiest. In the "campaign selection" screen, leave the leaf wreath banner the same. However, after you choose a campaign you have beaten, a symbol will be next to the difficulty previously completed. or, do a diagonal banner with the words "completed" or something.

Maybe both this and some visual indicator on the campaign list? In the end, it comes down to what someone wants to code, but I think in principle having both might be nice.

[novotny]

Bump (allowed?)

anyway, I recently got a new computer, new internet, new house, etc etc. So i came back and re-downloaded the battle for wesnoth.

then i remembered I had suggested this and it was... *stared*, before. I know nothing has been done with it as of yet, but maybe if this idea is still strong, someone could come up with some code? I've only started to learn programming so i wouldn't be able to do it. But I still believe this holds relevant and should be added.

I'm sorry if bumping isn't preferred here, but since this is almost 1 year old, I figured it would be best.

[UnwiseOwl]

Every time I look at those wreaths, I wonder if they'd go different colours if I did the campaigns on different difficulty levels, so I think the different colours of bronze, silver and gold would be excellent for this and look very natural and attractive, and I imagine it'd be an easy thing to program and for an arty type to produce. Shadowmaster's idea of silver and gold for the two hardest difficulties and bronze for everything else is simple, intuitive and effective, we could go for a programmable/customisable option if campaign creators wanted to play around, but the campaign list is so attractive with its simple look, so I wouldn't want to change that much without overwhelming support for such an option.

Personally, only the difficulty of the campaign relative to itself is relevant, there's no need to distinguish a beginning campaign from an easy one in this way, it's just for letting a player know to what level they've completed at and give those that desire 1000% completion a marker to aim at.

I don't pretend to understand how the background coding for campaigns works in the slightest, but I imagine that there is a 'victory' identifier that would need to change from a false/true switch to a no/difficulty-level switch which would then need to be referenced in the file that creates the campaign dialogue to select the correct re-colour of the laurel wreath image file.

[Lord-Knightmare]

Here is my thought on this:

Easy - Bronze
Normal - Silver
Hard - Gold
Nightmare - Platinum

Why platinum? Cause it's simply more rare than gold.

[Dugi]

@Knightmare
Explain how would the platinum colour differ from silver. All metals except copper (and therefore also bronze) look almost the same (and gold usually contains yellow impurities). I also don't know why should there be platinum above gold, when there are dozens of metals more rare than gold, with cooler names, like iridium, einsteinium or niobium.
If there was something for completing a 4th difficulty, it should be something that is not a rare metal, rather some diamonds, shining stars, flames, skulls or something.

Not sure, but I recall seeing a campaign that used the difficulty selection to choose a hero as well as the difficulty. (Or was it just the hero and the difficulty was fixed?) In that sort of setting, three choices for the hero unit and two difficulties gives six options in the difficulty selection dialog.

As far as I know, it was in Five Fates, but you had a different hero on each difficulty, making the difficulty depend on the sort of hero. I am not sure if it already existed in February 2012.
It also used to be in my campaign Legend of the Invincibles, but only in one part and I removed it about February 2012, for certain reasons. There were three difficulties, and you could choose between two main characters in the difficulty menu (I later made it through variables and ifs). So this is irrelevant now.

But there is still a problem with difficulties, EASY, NORMAL, HARD(, NIGHTMARE) are not always the names of difficulties. Somebody might name them NOTHING, CHALLENGELESS, CHALLENGING, BRUTAL, MASOCHIST-ONLY, or like in Skyrim, Novice, Apprentice, Adept, Expert, Master (I started on Master right when I installed it...), and this system will not work at all. Maybe there should be way to assign some background highlight for the campaign name on the list, that would be coded similarly as difficulty_descriptions.