Mine selection and destruction

Started by Shaft, October 29, 2013, 10:21:41 AM

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Shaft

More than once I have accidentally set off every mine on the map.
When raiders start attacking, I usually double click the mines to see where they all are(hard to see).
Next thing I know, they are all ticking, with no way to cancel.

Suggestion would be to either prevent mass triggering of mines or possibly cancel the countdown.
If I am the only one who does this, I'll shut up.

British

Maybe you can try *not* to double-click on the blasting charges ? :P

To simplify your search, you can also click-drag an area around where you think a charge is (don't make that zone too wide or you'll pick up other elements instead).

Semmy

Quote from: Shaft on October 29, 2013, 10:21:41 AM
More than once I have accidentally set off every mine on the map.
When raiders start attacking, I usually double click the mines to see where they all are(hard to see).
Next thing I know, they are all ticking, with no way to cancel.

Suggestion would be to either prevent mass triggering of mines or possibly cancel the countdown.
If I am the only one who does this, I'll shut up.

In all honousty.
This adds a game element in wich you the player makes mistakes. It happens to all of us.
Wrong positioning. Moving your goons te wrong way. Triggering mines with friends on them etc etc etc
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke

Milo

I strongly disagree. The player should never be struggling against the user interface. I noticed in Ty's patch notes he mentioned that some electrical devices short circuit if exposed to the rain. If this caused the mines to explode randomly it would be a different issue, but user error caused by the interface is not fun game design. It's just frustrating.

Additionally, avoiding parts of what the interfaces allows you to do, i.e. avoid double clicking the mines, is also telling of poor interface design.

Maybe there could be two types of mines.

1. Motion Mine
Colonists lay it on the ground. It explodes when raiders get too close.
Blast size: smallish

2. TNT with plunger
Lay the mine, then lay the plunger within a confined radius of the mine itself (say, 40 tiles). The colonists build the two, then run wire from the plunger to the TNT. When the player wants to detonate the TNT, command a colonist to activate the plunger, then watch the fuse burn along the ground to the TNT, followed by a big BOOM!
Blast size: huge

With motion mines having a smaller blast radius their effectiveness would shine in choke points and hallways, but not so much in more open areas. The TNT could be used for mining, but also as defense against a raid. Building a plunger would give players a physical object to see and detonate (probably red and near your sandbags), and the burden of building the two objects connected with wire would increase cost and reduce mine deployment speed, and the spammy way it's being used now
 

Ford_Prefect

Hmmm.  The problem here is twofold.
Problem 1.  The player has a hard time seeing his/her mines.
Problem 2.  If you select all your mines and forget to deselect them, they will all blow up.  This is complicated by the fact that sometimes you do want to make them all blow up.

The first problem is easy to fix.  :D  Make the mines more visible to the player.  Make their sprite bigger and/or use more vibrant colors to make them stand out against the ground.

The second problem is more complicated and has several possible solutions that have tradeoffs.
Idea 1:  Display prominently in large text the number of mines selected.  Pro.  quick to implement. Still lets the player detonate all her/his mines easily.
Idea 2:  Instead of a delay after telling them to detonate, instead have the player hold down the detonate button for 3 seconds.  Make the mines blink while the user is holding down the detonate key.  Negatives:  Would take time to implement.  Clunky interface.  Player can't split her attention for 3 seconds.
Idea 3:  Disable being able to detonate all mines when the player double clicks.  Neg.  Player wouldn't be able to detonate all mines by double clicking.

I honestly feel that idea 1 would be the only one worth pursuing, as anything else that I can think of would remove control from the player.


British

The way *I* see it, blasting charges are visible enough (pun intended).
If I really have a hard remembering where I put my charges (when there's a lot), I just zoom in, and they're pretty easy to spot (the red color helps).

Now maybe the OP has sight issues, but that wasn't mentionned...

Voltronguy

no argument, people shuldnt be frustrated by simple controls, this is seperate than gameplay. a player wants to be able to select all of their mines on screen, double clicking shouldnt be detonate, detonate shud haz its own function (g key, etc) so stating things like "its easy enough already" is poor excuse. the game has 200k funding from 20k goal.. sheesh

Tynan

Double-clicking doesn't detonate anything. It just selects. To detonate all, you'd have to double-click to select them all, then either click the detonate button or hit the T key. It's the same sequence that would let you detonate all your banelings in StarCraft II.

Anyway, mines are getting rethought a little bit so this will hopefully be less of an issue in the future.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog