Small suggestions topic

CheeseBerry

A lobby option allowing premade teams to play together in an opti lobby would be great!

Example: Two people want to play together in a custom 4v4 with opti enabled. The host enables this new "opti with premades" option, and then puts those two players on the same "opti team". The opti algorithm then takes this into account and tries to find the most balanced teams, with the condition of those two players always ending up on the same one.

UI wise you could even use the already existing "Team" selection interface, as it's literally useless in opti lobbies.

I'm not sure how small of a suggestion this actually is (I guess a similar algorithm already exists for tmm?) but if implemented it would certainly find some use.

H-master

@zokora

I don't know how to do it either, but I am pretty sure it's possible.
A button would be very intuitive IMHO. What do you think @Jip ?

Jip

@banan3 said in Small suggestions topic:

How about we turn on by default all the "proplayer features" in options?

We're working on this here and I appreciate your input

@elmi said in Small suggestions topic:

Would it be possible to prevent anyone to spamm the pause button?

There is a lobby option to limit the number of pauses a player can do. It is set to unlimited by default, but can be set to 3 for example.

@arma473 said in Small suggestions topic:

Suggestion: When you have 1 or more Gemini selected, right clicking on the stealth button turns stealth on/off for ALL Gemini you own. To avoid unstealthing all of your fighters by mistake, maybe if ANY gemini is uncloaked, right-clicking will turn cloak on for ALL of them.

I'm not confident if we can make the distinction how one of those toggles got toggled. I'll ask Balthazar.

@konjikinoyami said in Small suggestions topic:

Maybe not "small" but if there's any way to fix the colossus beam targeting while moving that would be amazing. Many times I've seen people move a colossus into the enemy base but the beam turns 90 degrees and tries to fire at something behind itself. Often times it ends up attacking nothing except the ground. Yes you can stop the colossus from walking but then it eats unholy amount of damage and dies.

I think this is a decent suggestion, even though it is related to balance. I'll work this one out. Always found that annoying myself too.

@konjikinoyami said in Small suggestions topic:

If possible make engineering stations (hives & kennel drones) not assist anti-nuke's unless manually selected/assisted. If you build lots of hives nearby a factory or quantum gate without microing, most of the time the drones eventually end up assist building the anti-nuke and it becomes a waste.

Not possible I am afraid and I am not in favor of making this change either. It is an intended feature to auto-assist things nearby. My suggestion is to not build the SMD nearby.

@konjikinoyami said in Small suggestions topic:

When going to reclaim/assist, is it possible to make it so we no longer need to put a move order at max range before reclaim order? Yes it would make the game more casual but I'm bad so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I'm not sure if this is possible without extensive tracking of orders. Sadly, we do not have direct control over the orders of units from Lua.

@konjikinoyami said in Small suggestions topic:

Is it possible to see a preview for the map generated maps? I would play more games with the map-gen if I could see what it looked like before downloading it.

This is not possible from the client perspective: the previews are retrieved from the map. If you have not generated the map then it can not show you a preview.

@konjikinoyami said in Small suggestions topic:

Also, this is almost 100% not a small change but more options for the map generator could be cool. Maybe the ability to select more than 1 "map style".

I'm quite confident there's a list of options available for this:

@spacewhales said in Small suggestions topic:

Is it also impossible to modify the queues of a factory?

Yes it is - see this game option:

@heavenly said in Small suggestions topic:

Encourage Players to host games in Opti balance games. Allow host to choose their starting position all other players are Opti balanced randomly. This will encourage more players to host games if they get to select their starting position.

I'm afraid this is quite involved. I agree this feature can receive some more attention. But that won't be this year.

@blaadjesboom said in Small suggestions topic:

a small suggestion that i would appreciate is the ability to sort maps during map selection by map size, it seems like currently you can search for a specific map size but you cant sort them based on map size

This is possible - suggestions on how to change the UI?

@blackyps said in Small suggestions topic:

People only know that higher quality should be a better balanced game., but nobody fully understands game quality is calculated. This leads to either people not wanting to play because the quality is lower than an arbitrary percentage or to the above mentioned exploits where the quality is high, but the game unbalanced.

I understand your vision, but leaving it out doesn't increase the available room. What we could do is add the team statistics to the tooltip of the game quality calculations.

@swkoll said in Small suggestions topic:

A lobby option to force Rainbow Cup player colors:

Unironically, I like this idea and so did @Strogo . See his pull request.

@scout_more_often said in Small suggestions topic:

Why not have a seperate tab for them to put some spotlight on them?

In the client or in the game lobby? The latter is not reasonable in my opinion.

@somuchcancer said in Small suggestions topic:

better cpu test, allot of people play on low end laptops by 29 minutes its pure cancer to play.

We're working on a benchmark map, but there is no ETA on it at this point.

@khaldounn said in Small suggestions topic:

Make FAF chat include history of chat

This is client related!

@willowsduality said in Small suggestions topic:

1 - Change the sound of the SCU exploding to anything other than the sound an ACU explosion makes... this feels minor to me. This has been a thing causing both casters and player heart attacks for years. SCUs exploding and tricking us into thinking a com just died or a nuke landed is kinda annoying imo.

With thanks to @Deribus we're looking into adjusting the explosions of the SACAs, that should help solve the problem for some commanders. We'd need new sound effects - or maybe re-use some of other explosions (like that of the mavor). I'd need to investigate .

@willowsduality said in Small suggestions topic:

2- Adding a UI element to replays that shows more player stats (APM, Resources lost, idle engies.) would help casters a ton. I'm actually unsure how minor to major this is but gonna propose the idea.

This has been discussed previously and it is a tricky one. Sending more information to the UI allows others to interpret it using their own UI mods. I'm not sure how to approach this yet, but I am thinking about it.

@giebmasse said in Small suggestions topic:

Yes pretty much as two last messages thought about it
Border acts as an invisible shield with the bounce function, if abused can do something like each bounce results in 20% dmg of unit max health.

I'm not sure what this feature is trying to solve - does off mapping happen that often?

@elmi said in Small suggestions topic:

Imho it would be cool to be able to name the templates we create, as sometimes they get the same icon for different builds...

@arma473 said in Small suggestions topic:

Would it be possible to allow users to put custom image files into some folder, and then let the users choose from those custom images for their templates?

Possible, but quite involved in practice. I'd need to look into it and see how involved it would be.

@h-master said in Small suggestions topic:

I don't know how to do it either, but I am pretty sure it's possible.
A button would be very intuitive IMHO. What do you think @Jip ?

I can't see what you are referring to here - please use the quote functionality

Status quo

Things I'll be taken into account, including my previous summary:

Replace radar sound
The repeat build hotkey being off
Being able to see the team scores.
This one is a bit tricky as the lobby UI is out of space .
A sound for novice players when you're expected to run out of storage.
A sound for novice players when you're spilling.
Ability to ping people, would only be useable by the host and only every 10 seconds. use is registered in the log, abuse can be moderated with that
A notification when you receive units through the full share mechanic.
A modal that allows you to accept or decline is too much and undesired - if you choose to decline you can shift + drag to select all the units and gift them when it suits you. This can be potentially extended with a sound, that can be turned off in the settings .

And of course all the things that are already implemented.

H-master

@Jip

@h-master said in Small suggestions topic:

Suggestion: infinite build button for movable experimentals.

Result: the builder will Keep trying to build a new experimental on the same spot.

There is a key combination for it I believe, but a button is probably easier to find.

I meant this post.

PostHumousDire

It used to be possible to select a group of engineers, que up a series of reclaim orders, and then Shift + G these orders to split out the reclaim orders over all the selected engineers - it used to work a while ago but has been broken in recent builds.

Another thing that I think still doesn't work - is to be able to take a UEF SACU Engineering drone, and have kennel drones assisted to the SACU drone - I don't think that works.

Thanks for all the awesome work and continually improving the game. it's hugely appreciated!

Jip

@posthumousdire said in Small suggestions topic:

It used to be possible to select a group of engineers, que up a series of reclaim orders, and then Shift + G these orders to split out the reclaim orders over all the selected engineers - it used to work a while ago but has been broken in recent builds.

It is not broken - I think it was removed intentionally because it was too good.

@posthumousdire said in Small suggestions topic:

Another thing that I think still doesn't work - is to be able to take a UEF SACU Engineering drone, and have kennel drones assisted to the SACU drone - I don't think that works.

I'd need to check but if I am not mistaken the engineering drone of a commander is not a typical unit. Not sure if you can assist it. But I'd need to confirm .

Kampfkartoffel

Hello fellow Commanders!

There is this pretty much underrated mod known by the name "Wyvern Unit Battle Pack" in the mod vault.
It is similar to Total Mayhem with interesting new units and experientals.

Unfortunately when players who dont have the mod yet try to join the game with the Wyvern mod get rejected from the lobby because it doesnt download the Mod by itself.
Players then have to switch to the mod vault and manually download the Wyvern mod. And of course many players are not aware of that..

Furthermore the lobby views the Wyvern mod as "unknown sim mod"

There has to be a way to make Wyvern download automatically on lobby join

WYVERN DESERVES MORE POPULARITY

Sprouto

Unfortunately, much of the work in Wyvern was lifted from other authors. There are very few original works in the mod.

freemp

Would it be possible to add a special bar for nuke load in battleship and submarines? There is the yellow recharging bar but it displays "at the same time" the nuke loading AND the main cannons.

Also (as I think it hasn't been seen): could it be possible to make a button in the lobby, close to each player that would ping it. In case of afk players when game has to be launched it would be usefull.

Strogo

Speaking about spread-build/reclaim/tml/whatever orders, they all were in a game a while ago, but we had to remove them as they create a hole for UI mods which automate basically everything as we pass orders and their coordinates from UI to sim, and on UI side you can do whatever you want: make a bot that executes perfect BO for you, auto dodging for engies (still there as spread-move/attack wasn't removed), auto-hovering for bombers etc etc.

Note for lua coders: to make it works without adding loopholes for abusers, sim function unit:GetCommandQueue() should be modified in engine, so it actually returns a command type, its position an so on, instead of useless pointer to C-object. Mb I will look at it st some point but can't promise anything.

Sinidas

@jip
Can you fix the sound so you don't have to go into Windows to put the game in CD stereo mode to hear sound as intended?

I believe this is a turn off for new players.

Option #1
When you launch the game, automatically put windows in stereo mode whilst playing game
Option #2
Fix it so DVD Surround Sound quality works properly and isn't so overwhelming

Deribus

No, that isn't really possible. There might be some way to detect if surround sound is on and have a warning but even if implemented that'd be better to do in the client, not in the game

Sinidas

@deribus
Even a warning would be good for new players. I know it took me a long time to understand what the problem was and how to fix it.

Jotaro

Would really love it if you made an AI mode that behaved as intelligently as the AIX but without the cheating. It would seem that every time you remove the AIX's cheating capabilities, it loses its ability to perform as well, so a mode to surpass that would be awesome.

A Former User

@maelstrom said in Small suggestions topic:

Would really love it if you made an AI mode that behaved as intelligently as the AIX but without the cheating. It would seem that every time you remove the AIX's cheating capabilities, it loses its ability to perform as well, so a mode to surpass that would be awesome.

Do you realize how hard and unimportant it is?

Jip

It is not unimportant - but it is quite difficult. Luckily there are several people with their own AI mods. I can recommend you those. An example is RNGAi.

Deribus

Trying to make a more convenient list of suggestions, as this thread has grown enormous:

Being worked on/looked into:

Easy to interpret lag information (Coming soon)
Change radar selection sound (Being worked on)
Give friendly/enemy nuke launches different sounds (Being worked on)
Display total score of each team in lobby (Being worked on)
Repeat hotkey improvements (Being worked on)
See friendly radar bubbles (May not be possible, being investigated)
Full share unit gift prompt/notification (Being worked on)
Button to notify players to ready up (Being worked on)
Enable many "proplayer features" by default (Being looked into)
Global unit toggle (May not be possible, being investigated)
Force rainbow cup colors (Not possible in custom games, but being worked on for matchmaking)
Better CPU test (Being worked on)
Audible low power warning (Being worked on)
Display whether maps are rated (Being investigated)
Matchmaking menu improvements (Being worked on)

Probably not possible

Add unit to beginning of build queue (May not be possible)
Fix stereo sound issues (May not be possible)

Feature already exists or was purposefully removed

Ship FAF with PD + Walls template by default (Rejected/similar feature already exists)
Prevent pause button spam (Feature already exists)
Target prioritization improvements (Rejected/old feature that was reworked)
Allow reduced disconnection timer (Feature already exists)
View share condition in-game (Feature already exists)
Ability to name templates (Feature already exists)
Shift-g reclaim orders (Rejected, purposefully removed)

Suggestion outside the scope of the thread

Clear client search field (Client issue)
A variety of UI improvements (Client issue)
Toggle option for UI mods when watching a replay (Client issue)
Highlight alternative game modes (Client issue)
Merge all ladder queue chats (Client issue)
Option to hide games by specific mod (Client issue)
Portal/teleportation building (Rejected, better as a mod)
Chat history (Client issue)
Wyvern mod fix (Rejected, mod issue)
Encourage optimal balance games; discourage leaving the game early (First is a large feature but may be looked into later; second rejected)
AI improvements (Rejected, large issue)

Rejected for other reasons

Lobby voting system (Rejected)
Gain rating for each player kill (Rejected)
GC claw inconsistency (Rejected/no issue)

Miscellaneous

chunky

I would really like to be able to chose semi random facs in custom games.

Like ladder you can go for 2 of 4 facs or 3 of 4 randomly. Thqat in custom Please.

Deribus

Took me a minute to realize fac = faction and not factory

Aulex

I think is a much needed feature
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/869/need-ui-mod-let-me-know/73?_=1642968871273