Graphics / Visuals
  1. Camera
    1. Increase the maximum zoom-out distance. It’s currently so close that it almost feels claustrophobic. I always feel like I can’t see. I’m constantly scrolling the mouse wheel without even thinking about it, trying to make it zoom out just a little bit more even though I’m already as zoomed out as I can be. I am also frequently rotating the camera so that my characters aren’t walking toward the bottom of the screen which is where there is almost no visibility, even though that kinda screws up my sense of direction. I can’t tell where I am in the world, or even which way is North, from the main game screen.
      • If you only make one change from this list, please make it this one. Nothing else here is as important as this. It’s probably the most-requested change for DOS1 and DOS2. I have friends who didn’t play DOS1 because of the camera zoom level (they complained that they couldn’t see what was going on during combat, and that they couldn’t really tell where they were going out-of-combat).
    2. In combat, when using an ability, the camera (in Dynamic mode) should focus on the target of the ability, not the character using it. Nothing’s happening to the character using it unless they are also the target. With the max camera zoom as close as it is, I often can’t see what’s happening at the target because the camera’s focused on the user, so I don’t know exactly what’s happened.
    3. Add a compass on the main game screen that appears while I’m rotating the camera, and disappears when I’m done. I really only have to know which way is North, so it could be just an arrow pointing north. Currently I have to scroll the camera up and watch the minimap to see if it’s scrolling North or not, then adjust as needed.
    4. Don’t recenter the camera (nor drop it out of Tactical Mode) after performing a quicksave. I quicksave a lot, and it’s really annoying having the camera pan and spin around each time. I will never quicksave to fix the camera position.
  2. Transparency Area
    1. Currently, when walking under things, you have a tiny hole through which you can see your character. It’s enough to see your character, but not enough to see what’s around them. This hole needs to be greatly expanded. Truly, anything between the camera and my character should be mostly translucent if not completely transparent, but I’m guessing you’d have to rewrite the code entirely for that, so I doubt you would do that. Making the hole bigger may be easy to implement, though.
    2. Tall trees and other things that you’ll only see when they’re blocking your view should just be always translucent. It’s fine that they’re there, but it’s not fine that I can’t see anything else when they’re on-screen.
  3. Highlights
    1. Add highlights to containers, corpses (which are containers), and dig spots. At least add mouse-over highlights to corpses. It’s sometimes hard to find them when combat’s over.
  4. Combat
    1. While in combat, there should be indicators at the edge of the screen pointing to characters that are off-screen. The indicators can be as simple as colored triangles. The color of the arrows would match the colors of the highlights for those characters (so enemies would get red arrows, allies would get green). Only characters in combat would get arrows, of course. Indicators for active off-screen characters should pulse.
    2. When mousing-over potential targets for an ability that bounces to multiple targets (like Ricochet), it should show you what other enemies it would hit. Sometimes you can’t tell the distance between targets, but even when the enemies are very close together, you can’t tell if it’ll actually bounce to any of them. It would also be good in case there are more targets available than it could bounce to, so you’d know which ones would get hit.
    3. If an enemy can move a good distance each turn, they shouldn’t be moving so slow. I get that zombies are supposed to be slow, but unless their movement rate actually reflects this (as it doesn’t), they shouldn’t actually walk so slow. It’s boring waiting for them to cross half the map as they can apparently do in one turn (that’s an exaggeration).


Last edited by Darxim; 14/11/16 02:39 PM.
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