Small suggestions topic

Sometimes a small change can make a difference. And sometimes that change doesn't take too long to implement. I hope to use this topic to provide the community a channel to make suggestions to change the game at some places, but only a tiny bit. Three examples:

  • This topic about changing the functionality of the button that enlarges the map
  • This topic about changing the ringing feature
  • This discussion about adding a drag-move feature

Note that the latter two are considered big small changes, they're quite involved. But I think they were and will be worth it. And they originate from community interaction.

There are some guidelines:

  • No bugs, you can report this on Github or on the FAF Discord and in particular in the #game-bug-reporting channel.
  • No balance changes, there is a separate forum section for that.
  • If a feature suggestion is considered to be too involved then there is no point in arguing unless you can show me that this is not the case. Showing here means that you make an implementation. An example is how the drag feature will be part of the game: I thought it would be tricky to do right but someone shown me with an implementation that it is possible in a reasonable fashion.

Note that there is a difference between the client and the game. The client is what you download from our website. The game is what you download from Steam (and then patch through the client). This topic is primarily about the game. Suggestions on the client are welcome too - but I do not work on that myself and I can't guarantee you a proper response.

I hope to see some of your small suggestions as part of the next release, set for February.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

Matchmaking 4v4 and 2v2 setting auto-match menu is lackluster cant we have something nice like league of legends loading menu? where you can see % and status of the people loading?

Is there a way to mute the in game voice clips people spam they’re annoying. Can an option be added to disable them if that doesn’t yet exist? I haven’t seen anything related to muting them in any options menu.

put the xbox units in the game pls u_u

Everyone encounters lag in multiplayer games at some point.
Remove the guesswork and witch-hunting of "who is lagging" by storing more persistent connection quality data of the players per game session. Currently we mainly have ping that is easy to look at but often isn't very informative. The connection stat screen has packet loss and shows who is behind in the sim, which people who know how to interpret can much faster and reliably identify the source of the lag. Two usable metrics from this could be aggregated and shown in a more user friendly way (perhaps there is more or even better data available?):

  • Who drops most packets during the game session/per X amount of time
  • Who is "behind" the longest time

Additionally if those metrics would become more reliable, perhaps users could start to distinguish network lag from sim lag more too, as currently those are easily mixed up with each other in the user base too.

I'm assuming this could be fairly easy if we can access the data, do simple math and pipe it into some added UI element, e.g. in the same view where you have the ping currently per client?

@Zeldafanboy d489709d-c941-4fb2-92cd-f355f47efec4-image.png

you can turn them off under Multiplayer Taunts

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" - Spock

@giebmasse

I'm not entirely certain that information is available in Lua. The information printed by the console command ren_ShowNetworkStats is not available, for example. That is directly printed on screen by the engine.

If I can access the data it shouldn't be that difficult. If not, maybe the ICE adapter is capable of at least generating the information. Showing it in the client is another story 🙂 .

@kdrafa91

BlackYps made a similar suggestion - it is coming!

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

@zeldafanboy said in Small suggestions topic:

Is there a way to mute the in game voice clips people spam they’re annoying. Can an option be added to disable them if that doesn’t yet exist? I haven’t seen anything related to muting them in any options menu.

It is an option, don’t remember if it’s in game settings or the chat box itself.

Nvm already beat to the post

Hotkey of build closest mex for engies

When the multiplayer game hangs due to packet loss or some data transmission issue, could the game automatically say in the all-chat that player X and playerY have lost connection to each other? Or if anyones ping goes over say 600(?) the all-chat box will say so. Limit how often the message would appear eg once every 60 seconds. People may be inclined to sort out their issues if it is made very clear who is having the issue? Just a thought.

Would it be possible to put voting in the game? I cannot remember specifically, but there were a few games with problems after the ranking cutoff where I had wished some way to have the players present agree to unrank the game.

You must deceive the enemy, sometimes your allies, but you must always deceive yourself!

@kalethequick said in Small suggestions topic:

Would it be possible to put voting in the game? I cannot remember specifically, but there were a few games with problems after the ranking cutoff where I had wished some way to have the players present agree to unrank the game.

It surely is possible but I'm not sure if it is desirable.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

Add x button in players search field in client to clear it 🙂

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
— Steve Jobs.
My UI Mods

16

Make radar selection not make the exact same sound as a ping

Make friendly nuke launches sound different from enemy nuke launches. Or just make friendly nuke launches without sound.

@wikingest said in Small suggestions topic:

Make friendly nuke launches sound different from enemy nuke launches. Or just make friendly nuke launches without sound.

Sound is important even for friendly nukes, but I like the idea of having a different sound/voice for friendly nukes vs. all other nukes.

Friendly nukes do already get a special map ping but maybe it would be good to have a little bit more than just a ping.

@deribus said in Small suggestions topic:

Make radar selection not make the exact same sound as a ping

If you can bring me an alternative then I can set it up 🙂 .

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

Same for the suggestion of @wikingest / @arma473 . Please keep a tab on the license of the sound.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

@Jip Which license(s) would you accept for sounds?

If someone creates a new sound and donates it to FAF, that would work, and anything that is 100% in the public domain should work.

Are there any kind of open source licenses that you would accept, e.g. which of the creative commons licenses is acceptable? Is the FAF project willing to include a sound if it means you have to give "attribution" to the author? That seems like a relatively easy thing to do, just distribute a file with the FAF files that lists all of the "attributions." I don't know if FAF already has something like that.

Just an idea, could we just cut the existing sound? "Nuke launch detected" for enemy, and "Nuke launch" for allie?

Going further on this. If multiple nuke launches follow in very short time, will every new notification stop earlier one? I mean for 3 nukes: "Nuke nuke nuke launch detected"? In this case both notifications should start differently. So it would be possible to differencie in spite of overlapping notifications. "Nuke launch detected" for enemies, and "launch detected" or "n-launch" for allies. So in overlapping case it would be: "n-lau n-lau nuke launch detected". So it would be possible to understand only from hearing, that there was two friendly and one enemy nuke launched.

Suggestion: SACU explosion should be different from the ACU. I think even Gyle mentions it several times that it is really distracting.