Author Topic: Make crew loadouts visible without having to go to another screen  (Read 5360 times)

Offline Unarmed Civilian

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Currently, the pilot of a ship can use the recommended loadout system to quickly check each crew member on their own ship to see a quick outline of their crew's kit. However, they can't do this for crew on other ships, and crew can't do it for eachother. Instead, everyone else must click on their player icon, view it there, then leave that screen to go back to the lobby screen, which feels ridiculous when there is a more streamlined method available.

So why not just have a similar feature for everyone else? Most of the UI already exists, you just have to remove the recommended loadout part.

This change would be a quality of life improvement, as it's less clicks and screen transitions for the same information, and may reduce lobby waiting time, as people will be able to process important information faster if it's more accessible and thus make their decisions quicker.

Offline Arturo Sanchez

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Re: Make crew loadouts visible without having to go to another screen
« Reply #1 on: October 26, 2016, 09:59:35 pm »
Currently, the pilot of a ship can use the recommended loadout system to quickly check each crew member on their own ship to see a quick outline of their crew's kit. However, they can't do this for crew on other ships, and crew can't do it for eachother. Instead, everyone else must click on their player icon, view it there, then leave that screen to go back to the lobby screen, which feels ridiculous when there is a more streamlined method available.

So why not just have a similar feature for everyone else? Most of the UI already exists, you just have to remove the recommended loadout part.

This change would be a quality of life improvement, as it's less clicks and screen transitions for the same information, and may reduce lobby waiting time, as people will be able to process important information faster if it's more accessible and thus make their decisions quicker.

Your main issue here is the needed refresh rates to do so will destroy the server for the most wasteful of reason.

The screen is there because it has to load the info. If the game must refresh constantly just to keep track. A lobby may as well be a running game as far as the server is concerned.


essentially impractical wishful thinking. Almost as bad as boarding.

Offline Daft Loon

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Re: Make crew loadouts visible without having to go to another screen
« Reply #2 on: October 27, 2016, 04:24:36 am »
More likely that not having to load people's outfits along with their loadout would save on server time rather than waste it, the amount of data needed from the server to convey a 5 item loadout is miniscule.

Offline Huskarr

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Re: Make crew loadouts visible without having to go to another screen
« Reply #3 on: October 27, 2016, 06:03:55 am »
or the server loads it when you click on the thingy.
That way you won't load stuff until you need it.

Offline Guagadu

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Re: Make crew loadouts visible without having to go to another screen
« Reply #4 on: October 27, 2016, 09:05:44 am »
The screen is there because it has to load the info. If the game must refresh constantly just to keep track. A lobby may as well be a running game as far as the server is concerned.

My understanding is that it shows up as though you are captain of the ship, loadout would only show up if you click on the class icon next to the name. This would not have it refresh more often than the way it is now, because it would load just as often as if the player icon were clicked. The only difference between this and the method used now is that there is no need to press the back button to get back to the lobby.

Offline Unarmed Civilian

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Re: Make crew loadouts visible without having to go to another screen
« Reply #5 on: October 27, 2016, 04:52:33 pm »
Your main issue here is the needed refresh rates to do so will destroy the server for the most wasteful of reason.

The screen is there because it has to load the info. If the game must refresh constantly just to keep track. A lobby may as well be a running game as far as the server is concerned.


essentially impractical wishful thinking. Almost as bad as boarding.

I honestly don't believe any of that. It only needs to pull new data when you click on the class icon for the first time, and if they changed their loadout before you click it again. If the data isn't updated (I would guess sending timestamp to server and checking against last updated timestamp there, probably a 64 bit number at most), it sends back nothing.

The data itself is 5 ids for whatever items they're using, so let's assume they use a 32 bit integer (complete overkill currently) for each, plus another for some identification tag or checksum for the packet. That would be about 24 bytes at a time.

If sending about 24 bytes of data about every quarter of a second to a bunch of people is enough to kill the servers, then Muse has much more serious problems. I'm no network expert, but I suspect that a lot more information than that is going back and forth at a much higher rate for normal gameplay.


I appreciate the implied insult at the end though.