Originally Posted by Fishy
My comments:
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Well let's compare it to what PS1 did.
(Dundunduuuuuun!)
1. Terminals wern't on it, instead it only pointed out rooms (if you were indoors).
2. Arrows of allies and enemies were plain dots and much smaller.
3. Platoonmembers were just coloured numbers, not dots overlapping other map information.
4. The map showed the level of the building you were in and automatically resized when you were inside or outside a building.
5. In some backgrounds the contrast was pretty poor between the brown terrain and red dots.
World of Tanks does some more things. Targeting someone as a unit (in this case, the artillery in the lower left hand corner targets someone in the north east) draws the attention of everyone on the same team to the mini map. In WoT, the units are listed on the minimap by type, not in detail. It provides a bit more guesswork, although you can often link the information quickly to the information known on the composition of your enemy team (depends on composition and units known to be left). It also shows the direction your tank hull and turret are facing indepently.
Then there's the little tank hull/turret angle indicator itself. Very handy. It shows which of your systems and crew have been damaged, if it's on fire and that sort of thing. But not only that, it shows the widest angle your gun can fire at before the turret or the hull has to rotate and basically how much health you have left. PS and PS2 have something similar to this, but the angles are a bit less noticable, while the health is more obvious.
Which lessons can we learn from these minimaps?
1. Auto-resizing can be a very handy thing. Outdoor fights need the highest zoom level as default due to facing more long range and vehicle threats (especially aircraft). Outdoor base fights require medium detail by default due to the rooms and terminals in the area, mixed with longer range engagements. Indoor base fights even more default detail.
2. Obscuring vision is not handy, so ensure symbols are as tiny as possible without losing the most relevant information.
3. Many symbols frequently cause information overload, toggles would be nice.
4. Plain dots did not provide vector information, PS2 arrows do, but also tend to take more relative space.
5. Contrast is very much needed (previous map update did wonders there already)
6. Shape icons provide clear information on what unit is facing in what direction (both games, PS2 more so)
7. If we'd have spotting info and who is doing the spotting, then we'd get spammed to oblivion with information overkill in PS2, this only works for low numbers.
8. If we have icons for allied players, we need to be able to relate to who it is (ie. a full list of names of platoonmembers).
I think they need should create toggles you can set as defaults for each situation (zoom level, amount of detail listed, perhaps some options for the icons).
But of course, most the time, the minimap shows this (in any ES colour):
Luckily this forum has taught me there's no such thing as tank spam and this sort of one hit kill unit composition can easily be ignored to reach any control point.
2013-03-11, 12:10 PM
Linear Mode
