It is always frustrating when you get a notification about an alliance request/renewal, and even after clicking to “Focus” you still cannot see who it is.
To help this, I think the Focus button should give some extra visual indicator of the player/nation you are focusing on.
A basic solution would be to make the player's territory flash a little bit, like a more extreme version of the hover effect already present in the game. I imagine this as the territory pulsing with a yellow glow once or twice (I'm leaning towards once, but we can test both) when you click to Focus the player. I'd guess that each pulse would ease in and out over maybe ~100ms each way and stay visible in the middle for ~100ms with a gap of ~300ms between pulses (if there were more than one), but again, I'd want to test. I think this is a good idea with minimal drawback, and should almost certainly be implemented.
However, this would not be super helpful for small players, which are really the ones that need the most help to be identified. Something else is needed to direct your attention from anywhere on the whole screen down into the focused player. For this I am less certain on what to do. One idea I had would be to draw a duplicate outline of the focused player a few times the size of their actual territory that then shrinks down over ~300ms to the size of the small player. This would direct your eyes toward that player as it shrunk. Here is my mockup of that:
I think it looks quite good with the discrete-time trail like Splatoon's map cursor (I added that effect to the mockup):
but that might be too much visual flair. Openfront's minimal UI design serves it well in presenting information with the clarity needed to support real-time decision making, and the trail might not fit in well with that.
Another method (I believe this is mutually exclusive with the shrinking outline) would be something inspired by what Marathon does for player pings, with a horizontal and vertical line going from screen edge to screen edge, intersecting on the player. Here is my mockup of that with the lines going over the top of all UI:
We could have it go under UI elements, but doing so making them much less eye-catching, so I think it should probably go over the top. Here is my mockup of it going underneath:
(I mixed the line colour with the leaderboard colour manually, so it is not very accurate)
I find the lines method less visually appealing in Openfront than Marathon, since Openfront's territories are quite large, so the lines zeroing in on a single point feel a bit off. However, if this was just used for highlighting the small players, it would be super well-suited and very helpful.
If you have any other ideas, please mention them, and I'd like to hear people's thoughts on these.
I am not a web developer, and I am not sure how well my limited coding skills will transfer over to web dev, so I'm hesitant to ask to be assigned this issue. I want to create the issue now so that people can give thoughts on the designs, but I'll also try to prototype them a little bit. If I think I have what it takes to actually finish the feature after that attempt, I'll say, but feel free to assign this issue to someone else or yourself if you'd like to before then.
It is always frustrating when you get a notification about an alliance request/renewal, and even after clicking to “Focus” you still cannot see who it is.
To help this, I think the Focus button should give some extra visual indicator of the player/nation you are focusing on.
A basic solution would be to make the player's territory flash a little bit, like a more extreme version of the hover effect already present in the game. I imagine this as the territory pulsing with a yellow glow once or twice (I'm leaning towards once, but we can test both) when you click to Focus the player. I'd guess that each pulse would ease in and out over maybe ~100ms each way and stay visible in the middle for ~100ms with a gap of ~300ms between pulses (if there were more than one), but again, I'd want to test. I think this is a good idea with minimal drawback, and should almost certainly be implemented.
However, this would not be super helpful for small players, which are really the ones that need the most help to be identified. Something else is needed to direct your attention from anywhere on the whole screen down into the focused player. For this I am less certain on what to do. One idea I had would be to draw a duplicate outline of the focused player a few times the size of their actual territory that then shrinks down over ~300ms to the size of the small player. This would direct your eyes toward that player as it shrunk. Here is my mockup of that:
I think it looks quite good with the discrete-time trail like Splatoon's map cursor (I added that effect to the mockup):
but that might be too much visual flair. Openfront's minimal UI design serves it well in presenting information with the clarity needed to support real-time decision making, and the trail might not fit in well with that.
Another method (I believe this is mutually exclusive with the shrinking outline) would be something inspired by what Marathon does for player pings, with a horizontal and vertical line going from screen edge to screen edge, intersecting on the player. Here is my mockup of that with the lines going over the top of all UI:
We could have it go under UI elements, but doing so making them much less eye-catching, so I think it should probably go over the top. Here is my mockup of it going underneath:
(I mixed the line colour with the leaderboard colour manually, so it is not very accurate)
I find the lines method less visually appealing in Openfront than Marathon, since Openfront's territories are quite large, so the lines zeroing in on a single point feel a bit off. However, if this was just used for highlighting the small players, it would be super well-suited and very helpful.
If you have any other ideas, please mention them, and I'd like to hear people's thoughts on these.
I am not a web developer, and I am not sure how well my limited coding skills will transfer over to web dev, so I'm hesitant to ask to be assigned this issue. I want to create the issue now so that people can give thoughts on the designs, but I'll also try to prototype them a little bit. If I think I have what it takes to actually finish the feature after that attempt, I'll say, but feel free to assign this issue to someone else or yourself if you'd like to before then.