AHD DD5 – Message system

[podcat]

Hi and welcome to another development diary. Today’s topic is messages and how to manage the flood of information given to the player.

In Victoria II you can set different levels on messages: pop-ups, notification icons or only shown in the log. Most of your messages will be shown as notification icons. This works ok to keep down the information level, but you still need to manually filter through a lot of messages you aren’t really that interested in to be able to read the ones you are. This is even more of an issue when playing multiplayer and not being able to pause the game, and missing important happenings can be devastating.

I believe we have found a really neat solution to this problem. Countries can now be flagged as "interesting" to you by right clicking any flag and setting a toggle while playing. There is also a window where you can easily select and manage these. Each message type now has separate settings for when it concerns a country of interest or not, so for things like gaining a casus belli you can have it show as a notifier when it involves countries you are interested in and only in the message log otherwise. You can also have them both as notification icons if you so want as the important ones have a golden frame.



Next week we will be talking a bit about splitting up china so tune in then. Same bat-time, same bat-channel!

 

[Kalelovil]

What does the "best guess" filter do?

Can you give particularly important events the ability to pause the game?

 

[Creideki]

I think this is a great idea!

 

[Romtos]

Small, but nice improvement.
Would work well in other games as well.

 

[Dewirix]

That's brilliant. I was just thinking about this the other day and wishing for a feature of this type.

 

[unmerged(262687)]

We are interested in [Ghanzou Clique]

Very cool

 

[Thracian]

i dont want to be rude but my excitement for the "patch" is fading away

 

[AlknicTeos]

hm, another :ninja: left to "go to diplomacy" in the left bottom corner. However, somehow I don't understand the benefit of this new system, maybe because I don't play MP and pause each event . But gives the check to set country as interesting a cb boost ?

edit : oh and will evil :ninja::ninja::ninja: (ninjas-plural) split china next week ? ninja:-report) :unsure:

 

[safferli]

i dont want to be rude but my excitement for the "patch" is fading away

How come? (If by "patch" you mean AHD, which clearly isn't a patch)

 

[Kaoschan]

Would it be possible to have a "Continent" Selection .. so for example i can mark all countries in Europe as interesting at once?

 

[HappyBanker]

Great. Very usefull. That is definitly a huge improvement.

 

[s1234567890m]

out of curiosity have you given an toggable option to turn of sprites?

 

[Kalelovil]

i dont want to be rude but my excitement for the "patch" is fading away

This is only Developer Diary 5. The release date is planned for January 24, that leaves potentially another 12 developer diaries.

 

[podcat]

What does the "best guess" filter do?

Can you give particularly important events the ability to pause the game?

yes you can set them to pause. Best Guess is sort of like a good start point and is what will be set if you dont have any other settings. it includes things like neighbors/great powers/alliance members etc.

i dont want to be rude but my excitement for the "patch" is fading away

well, despite your best efforts that was a bit rude. There are at least 10 more diaries planned.

out of curiosity have you given an toggable option to turn of sprites?

no but you can set at what zoom level they switch on

Would it be possible to have a "Continent" Selection .. so for example i can mark all countries in Europe as interesting at once?

it is something the betas have suggested as well, so we will likely add it in.

 

[siis]

love this, as soons as I saw it in Sengoku I hoped you include this feature of marking important countries/persons in all your future games! Please consider eu3 expansion just to include this message system! It is a big step forward in handling all the information.

 

[delra]

Nice. I hope this is added to other games too.

 

[RedRalphWiggum]

In the past I have turned off useful messagetypes not because I don't want to see them about some countries, just because I really don't need to know if Johore has improved its relations with Korea when I'm Peru. Not any more

 

[Weijun]

hm, another :ninja: left to "go to diplomacy" in the left bottom corner. However, somehow I don't understand the benefit of this new system, maybe because I don't play MP and pause each event . But gives the check to set country as interesting a cb boost ?

edit : oh and will evil :ninja::ninja::ninja: (ninjas-plural) split china next week ? ninja:-report) :unsure:

I do not play MP either, but I think this will be incredibly useful. There are many messages that one would like to receive from some countries, but not others. Watching other countries' historical events can be interesting, but it really turns into a flood of spam. Watching a handful of countries can add flavor without overwhelming the log.

Notifications for countries forming and breaking alliances can be overwhelming. Now one can get a notification that your enemy is friendless without having to wade through hundreds of irrelevant notifications.

The problem with too much information is that one stops paying attention. This new scheme is quite clever. It will allow comprehensive messages for the few countries of interest, and you can turn off unwanted notifications for all other countries.

 

[Darkrenown]

i dont want to be rude but my excitement for the "patch" is fading away

So don't post in the DD threads then.

 

[Forodwaith]

This is really a nice and practical addition. You should also consider adding a filtering option by continents and a similar "not interested in" flag.

And of course, this should be implemented in other games too