Planetside 2 iPhone App

[Goku]

Originally Posted by Malorn

I'm working on a windows phone 7 app and a Windows 8 app.

I like that. I don't have a Win 7 phone, but its good to see someone paying attention.

I don't want to see apps just staying on one specific OS either, like PS2 apps being exclusive to android and nothing else.

[Malorn]

My base Idea for the WP7 & W8 apps is like Capsuleer for EVE.

• Soldier
  List of soldiers you wish to track. For each soldier
  - Cert-training timers (like capsuleer, tells you when your certs are done, browse your cert list)
  - Resources
  - Stats
  - Outfit (links to outfit search page for the outfit)
  
  
• War
  Your view of the state of the war.
  - Continent list showing brief stats (population, territory ownership split)
  - Drill-down into each continent showing map, and more detailed information
  - Historical data (shows trends, time-lapse of past day/week)
  
  
• Search
  - Outfit / Soldier / Continent/ Cert / Leaderboard lookup
  - Search history
  - Favorites / Bookmarks that can be pinned to main page or to start page

My design concept revolves around letting you pin/favorite any of the pages, so if you want to pin a leaderboard or outfit, you search for it and favorite it/pin it. Same if you have a favorite continent or soldier.

Because Windows 8 and Phone 7 have live tiles there are numerous Live tile options, including:
- Soldier cert status
- Soldier stats
- Soldier's outfit stats
- Continent status

I plan on making this a user-editable list so you for example want it to cycle between your soldier cert status, your outfit stats, and your favorite continent, you can do that. Or if you just want it to show your cert status, or just cycle between continents you can do that too.

All features above are assuming that information is available to us.

Advanced features I'd like to add in if they permit them. All require secure login service provided by SOE which could be risky so I doubt we'll see them at first.
* cert switching
* mission creation
* outfit management
* station store shopping

[Snipefrag]

Originally Posted by Malorn

My base Idea for the WP7 & W8 apps is like Capsuleer for EVE.

• Soldier
  List of soldiers you wish to track. For each soldier
  - Cert-training timers (like capsuleer, tells you when your certs are done, browse your cert list)
  - Resources
  - Stats
  - Outfit (links to outfit search page for the outfit)
  
  
• War
  Your view of the state of the war.
  - Continent list showing brief stats (population, territory ownership split)
  - Drill-down into each continent showing map, and more detailed information
  - Historical data (shows trends, time-lapse of past day/week)
  
  
• Search
  - Outfit / Soldier / Continent/ Cert / Leaderboard lookup
  - Search history
  - Favorites / Bookmarks that can be pinned to main page or to start page

My design concept revolves around letting you pin/favorite any of the pages, so if you want to pin a leaderboard or outfit, you search for it and favorite it/pin it. Same if you have a favorite continent or soldier.

Because Windows 8 and Phone 7 have live tiles there are numerous Live tile options, including:
- Soldier cert status
- Soldier stats
- Soldier's outfit stats
- Continent status

I plan on making this a user-editable list so you for example want it to cycle between your soldier cert status, your outfit stats, and your favorite continent, you can do that. Or if you just want it to show your cert status, or just cycle between continents you can do that too.

All features above are assuming that information is available to us.

Advanced features I'd like to add in if they permit them. All require secure login service provided by SOE which could be risky so I doubt we'll see them at first.
* cert switching
* mission creation
* outfit management
* station store shopping

Sounds similar to my layout, although I might have to borrow the favourites concept . As for cert timing info, I hope they offer it up, will be very nice to be able to check that on the go. haven't heard anything about that so far. I like the idea of historical data and maybe being able to review the battle over a week or so in a timelapse, we might have to cache this info ourselves somehow (planetsidestats.com ?!) if they only offer up current live stats. Hopefully the devs are listening and grant us all these cool things .

The secure login stuff would be great, but I agree.. Seems a bit of a long shot, I guess they would have to provide some sort of tunnelled login that bypasses the app and then returns some sort of session confirmation code, there's no way they would trust outside sources to handle their login details. I don't have much experience with doing this, I guess it will be a case of wait and see what comes down the pipeline.

iPhone doesn't have anything like live tiles as it stands, would be nice to be able to push some of that data out to a screen saver or something.

[Shake]

Don't make it over complicated in my opinion.

I think you should focus on:

1. Live world map, as an iphone user I think one of the most impactful uses I can see for this for planetside players would be being able to see what empires control what hexes and where the battles are. When I'm coming back from class or work I could check my phone and see where the battle is so when I boot up the game I already know where to go and don't have to check the map. It would also be fun to just track your empires progress while you're busy throughout the day.

2. Outfit stats. People love their outfits. You should have an outfit page that shows who is online, what continents people are on, their stats for the day + outfit wide stats.

3. Leaderboards... self explanatory

4. Search function. You should be able to search players names and see their profile with stats, their cert specs, etc.

5. Cert builder. Have a page where people can mess around with cert trees, item/vehicle customizations, etc.

Just have a main page when you open the app, nice and sleek but simple looking with links to those 5 functions and I think it would be a really solid app.

[Bags]

Kind of sad that apps are only for stupid smart phones...

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Bags

Kind of sad that apps are only for stupid smart phones...

Windows 8 has apps too, and that's my primary focus. Tablets, work PCs, even your gaming machine can have the app.

[Snipefrag]

Originally Posted by Shake

Don't make it over complicated in my opinion.

I think you should focus on:

1. Live world map, as an iphone user I think one of the most impactful uses I can see for this for planetside players would be being able to see what empires control what hexes and where the battles are. When I'm coming back from class or work I could check my phone and see where the battle is so when I boot up the game I already know where to go and don't have to check the map. It would also be fun to just track your empires progress while you're busy throughout the day.

2. Outfit stats. People love their outfits. You should have an outfit page that shows who is online, what continents people are on, their stats for the day + outfit wide stats.

3. Leaderboards... self explanatory

4. Search function. You should be able to search players names and see their profile with stats, their cert specs, etc.

5. Cert builder. Have a page where people can mess around with cert trees, item/vehicle customizations, etc.

Just have a main page when you open the app, nice and sleek but simple looking with links to those 5 functions and I think it would be a really solid app.

Thanks for the input, I'm planning on all those things. As for Sleek.. I'll post up some Screenshots when i have a bit more to show.. I'm planning on skinning the UI so it shows red/blue/purple/default styles and controls depending on what character you have selected as your main in the app, right now Its hardcoded to TR . I'll have a settings option so you can lock it to a specific skin.

[Snipefrag]

I was going to just take some screenshots but it doesnt really show you guys that much so i made a quick video demoing what i've done with regards to the my stats section, obviously all this could change completely but i thought it would be a good idea to rebound the current state off the community to gather opinions:

watch in 720p !

Most the effort at the moment has been finding the right layout and style but i'm reasonably happy with how its coming along, the side bar minimizes the real estate needed to navigate between sections. Clicking on each kills section will push across to a new window which will contain raw stats and graphs.

a few things to note that are ascetically unfinished:

1) The implants will have pictures of each implant instead of text, I haven't found anything suitable just yet for this but i haven't particularly looked
2) The right side Terran Republic emblem will be replaced by your rank medal shown in the GDC video on the website stats page.
3) Resources will also go on this section under the implants unless it has many attributes to display, if so i will either have multiple sections in the table view in the bottom half of the screen, one for kills and another for general stuff such as resources, maybe a cert view can go in there as well as the activity tab as the 'kills' section is probably too specific for it.
4) I will probably have a initial spash screen that comes up before entering this section of the app. I know for certain i will have a window that appears the first time you load the app up asking you to enter your characters (which you can skip if you want).
5) I'll have more details on the character select table view, such as an icon for the faction, rank etc.

As i said above the color scheme will depend on the faction of the currently selected character with an option to lock it to the default or a particular faction. I obviously started with the best faction first, TR. Will get around to doing the VS/NC when bored .

Comments and suggestions welcome !

-SF

[Kurtz]

yea, don't make it in HTML5 with JQuery. Native Objective-C or don't bother

I would make the android version, but I'm too busy. I'll be lucky if I even get to play this game let alone making apps for it.

[SGTalon]

It would be really cool to have a character build tool.

Meaning a way to look through all the unlocks/certs and make a plan for your future.

EVE has one that works great for ships and characters. I know it made a world of difference for me when it came to figuring out what i wanted to do when i am NOT sitting at my computer. I always hated the time away from gaming trying to work all that stuff out.

It would also be cool to have a friends leaderboard. Similar to the outfit thing but you pick who you want to compare to.

[Malorn]

I'm holding off on being too specific because we don't know what stats and such will be available. The planetside website might also have a mobile version so some of that stuff might be as simple as loading the corresponding page.

Only so much we can do without the feeds. I'm focusing on UX structure and flow.

[Snipefrag]

Originally Posted by Kurtz

yea, don't make it in HTML5 with JQuery. Native Objective-C or don't bother

I would make the android version, but I'm too busy. I'll be lucky if I even get to play this game let alone making apps for it.

All you see so far is objective-C coacoa touch for the UI elements.

[Snipefrag]

Originally Posted by SGTalon

It would be really cool to have a character build tool.

Meaning a way to look through all the unlocks/certs and make a plan for your future.

Yeah, this would be great assuming that this data is available to us.

[Snipefrag]

Originally Posted by Malorn

I'm holding off on being too specific because we don't know what stats and such will be available. The planetside website might also have a mobile version so some of that stuff might be as simple as loading the corresponding page.

Yeah,ditto. only for me no flash.. Hopefuly its HTML5 over flash.

[Snipefrag]

Here's the second iteration, added support for different skins based on currently selected faction. The layout has changed slightly, using some nicer looking controls for the add character dialog.. LMK what you think about the color scheme, nothing is fixed at the moment im mostly just playing around to see what looks best.

watch in 720p !

Next up i will be working on the favorites system and the basic layout for the leaderboards. fun fun fun !