You can only work in a vacuum for so long, before hands-on feedback is necessary. And this is that time. Now’s your chance to take some miniatures out for a spin and let me know what’s working an what isn’t.
Miniature controls
Left-click on mini - selects mini
Left-click and hold/move left or right - rotates mini
Left-click and hold/move up - lifts mini
Camera controls
Right-mouse button or Left ALT key - orbits camera
Middle-mouse button - moves camera
Scroll-wheel - zoom camera
Dice
Left click on any die to roll two of that die. (Note: the d4s do not return the correct result.)
Map
The visible portion of the map is determined by the line-of-sight and by distance. The mini can “see” up to 120′.
Any part of the map that has been “seen” will be shown as a 2D map when no longer visible.
I’m looking forward to any and all comments. [Edit: A quick note based on some feedback that I've had so far: 1) the final product will be a standalone program, it's running in the web player so I can get comments; 2) the ALT orbit is a workaround for the Unity player pop-up that appears when clicking the right-mouse button. If you right-click and choose full-screen, if pop-up goes away.]
I commend you for the great effort here!
My feedback:
1 - rotation of the piece seems to have a very prominent place on the hierarchy of the control scheme. I found myself wanting to move my piece more often than rotate, but got caught rotating instead. Perhaps a contextual menu to start rotation?
2 - camera panning was a bit fast, and requireing a center button click is bad design. Perhaps pan when the user clicks the ground?
3 - orbiting was good, and I think using it with the right button would be better (as you’ve indicated it should work outside Unity web plugin)
4 - “Fog of war” effect you are using is jarring and appears to be a glitch. It took a minute for me to realize the white “2d map” style tiles where intended. Perhaps just hiding what is there with a darkness and giving a quick “overview” style map view would not feel so strange.
All good points on the control scheme. The camera controls will definitely be user-configurable. Agreed on the rotation. It does feel to prominent and easy to accidentally rotate. I want to avoid too many contextual menus, as it breaks the verisimilitude of the miniatures.
I think I’m following you on the FOW effect. Would it be less jarring is there was a battlemat always visible, but was only filled in after that area was explored?
Hey Carl. Looks pretty neat so far. I don’t know exactly what I’m doing when I’m testing the game just yet. But for the most part, according to your instructions, it works fine. Two things I couldn’t do were a middle mouse click and a mouse scroll. I’m on a Mac and my Apple mouse doesn’t have a middle button. However it should scroll, but I wasn’t able to. Everything else appears to function as advertised.
No support for unity on linux
There is support for Unity on Linux. http://unity3d.com/unity/multiplatform/ Is the webplayer not supported on Linux?
Nice to see this operational!
A couple comments:
Zoom feels slow compared to my typical gaming. I’d guess zoom speed would be user-configurable of course.
Please include some sort of command-line style dice roller that produces text results. I may just be a grumpy old guy, but I really don’t care to have virtual dice flying around the virtual tabletop.
Probably known, but rolling multiple sets of dice causes the popup text to vanish / not be displayed.
Not a fan of middle click to move map, but don’t have a suggestion as to a better way.
Still, great progress here, looking forward to seeing more.
The middle mouse button is not popular. I think I’ve been using commercial 3D apps for too long. Noted on the zoom. Configurable, yes, but I’d like defaults to be reasonable. What if there was command-line style rolling, but you also had the visualization? Would that still get under your grumpy old guy skin?
Well, my ideal solution would be user configurable, so if I have things set to command-line mode, and another player is using visual-mode, he can roll the dice and I see something like: Joe rolls 2d6: 3, 5 = 8
My main problem with visualization is that I usually GM, meaning I often end up rolling, say, 10d20 to resolve a bunch of attacks at once. I want to be able to do that with /roll 10d20 and see a nice neat row of numbers instead of clicking 10 times on the d20 and then having to find the 10 results scattered over the board.
Looks great, and just piling on with middle click issues really. Is there a way to clear the dice from the table after they’ve rolled? Might have just missed it, but if not, I could do with a quick way to sweep away all the results at once and have a fresh table.
So much hatred for the middle-mouse button. These are the types of things that I can only learn from other people.
The dice implementation is very early. The dice will clear after rolling. (You’ll be able to specific the number and type to roll as well.)
Thanks for the feedback.