Best Management/Sim Game Interface

[Joe Stallings]

Trying to get a few ideas here. Please take a moment and list what you think are the best (and worst, if you want) management sim game interfaces.

Management sims would be things like "text-based" sports sims, games like Superpower, Civilization, Master of Orion, war games, etc., i.e. any game where the focus is really on information management and data displays.

Joe

[Ben E Lou]

Baseball Mogul is my favorite. It is SO easy to get around. If all the text within the interface could be copied, it would be just about perfect.

I think the perfect interface would combine the Windows-type dropdowns in Mogul with the HTML-like hyperlinks in Puresim Baseball.

[Vince]

I'm a pretty big fan of TCY myself...but that's probably moreso because I'm more familiar with it than any other text-sim.

Man, filters or a search function for recruits would make that game so much better...

[John Galt]

I agree with Skydog on this one - Baseball Mogul had the best interface. If only the rest of the game had kept pace with it.

[Radii]

The CM method of making *EVERYTHING* clickable is something I've always thoroughly enjoyed. I actually love the CM interface itself, simply because EVERYTHING is clickable, it's usually easy to bounce from one set of menus to another just by clicking on different things on the screen once you have learned where each click takes you.

Whenever I switch to any other game, I get frustrated when I find there's only a few things I can click on for more information on a screen

[Joe Stallings]

So just a straight Windows interface? Like pop-up windows and menu bars?

[3ric]

The best interfaces all allow both navigating by means of the mouse and by the keyboard. TCY and CM4 has keyboard shortcuts which makes it possible for me to do most common tasks with arrow keys, the space bar and specific combinations such as Ctrl+G. FOF4 don't have this and it's very annoying.

[Vince]

3ric nailed it...keyboard shortcuts are key.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally posted by 3ric
The best interfaces all allow both navigating by means of the mouse and by the keyboard. TCY and CM4 has keyboard shortcuts which makes it possible for me to do most common tasks with arrow keys, the space bar and specific combinations such as Ctrl+G. FOF4 don't have this and it's very annoying.

Yes. Hotkeys are very nice. I love having that F12 hotkey on Baseball Mogul. No matter where I am in the game, I can "sim today's games".

[John Galt]

I think the key to good interface is cutting down on layers and having information available in a few places. One of the big drawbacks with the CM interface is that the ratings have to be viewed over multiple screens. This makes it hard to assess players comparitively. On the other hand, CM is great because everything is click-through. BM was better than most because you could get most all of the information you needed easily and allowed access from multiple points. OOTP5 seems to struggle because of its excessive layers (ie playing one-player always requires you to go to your team in the menu). I hope that helps.

[sianews]

Originally posted by Joe Stallings
So just a straight Windows interface? Like pop-up windows and menu bars?

Doesn't sound pretty, but that's all we want.

[JPhillips]

John: I agree that ratings on one page is very important. I hate having to surf through pages to find ratings.

[Easy Mac]

I want an interface that shows me the stats I need. I don't care about pictures, scrolling text, fancy menus or skinning. Just give me windows menu boxes, some drop down menu's and a discount on the game and I'm happy.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally posted by Easy Mac I want an interface that shows me the stats I need. I don't care about pictures, scrolling text, fancy menus or skinning. Just give me windows menu boxes, some drop down menu's and a discount on the game and I'm happy.

That's a pretty good answer you've got there, I think I'll just borrow nearly all of it for my own

I'll add in my strong, very strong, preference for the ability to click in logical places (like a player or team name) to access information; a desire to have sort functions (that stick at least while you're within the same area of info) ala Excel; and repeat the prevoius requests for both keyboard & mouse access as much as possible.

Give me those plus what you mentioned, get rid of the absolutely annoying crap you cited and I'll happily do without the discount.

[Easy Mac]

Originally posted by JonInMiddleGA
That's a pretty good answer you've got there, I think I'll just borrow nearly all of it for my own

I'll add in my strong, very strong, preference for the ability to click in logical places (like a player or team name) to access information; a desire to have sort functions (that stick at least while you're within the same area of info) ala Excel; and repeat the prevoius requests for both keyboard & mouse access as much as possible.

Give me those plus what you mentioned, get rid of the absolutely annoying crap you cited and I'll happily do without the discount.

Dear God, I've completely agreed with all of my political opposites in the span of 2 weeks... gone to commit suicide... i mean do homework.

[JonInMiddleGA]

It's okay Easy M, it happens to all of us on occasion. Just do what I do and take comfort in the fact that it's so rare that I can still look at myself in the mirror every morning.

[Easy Mac]

Originally posted by JonInMiddleGA
It's okay Easy M, it happens to all of us on occasion. Just do what I do and take comfort in the fact that it's so rare that I can still look at myself in the mirror every morning.

but what if I can't I'm hideous

[oykib]

I think that the game should run in a window easily. I like that because then you can easily do something else when the game is simming.

For example, with the aforementioned Baseball Mogul you can easily write dynasty reports while simming. It's also easy to play it on your work computer.

[SFL Cat]

Out of curiosity, which verison of BM are we talking about here?

[tucker342]

baseball mogul has a great interface. It's just to bad that the rest of the game sucks...

[oykib]

Originally posted by tucker342
baseball mogul has a great interface. It's just to bad that the rest of the game sucks...

Mogul doesn't suck. You just have to accept the fact that it's not a deep game. Personally, I think that Clay Dreslough needs to accept this too. You can't really build depth into that system.

You've basically got to blow it up to bring it up to the level of an OOTP or a CM.

[bbor]

Nekkid chicks are always a bonus

[oykib]

Originally posted by bbor
Nekkid chicks are always a bonus

Well...yeah. But... huh???

[Maple Leafs]

At the risk of sounding like I'm 100 years old, I still think Earl Weaver ws among the best. Drag and drop, double click to open and edit, everything on one nice simple screen. And in-game, plenty of shortcut keys.

Hockey League Simulator was also good, although it had a few little annoyances here and there.

[nilodor]

I think some of the worst interfaces are when they try to make it look pretty, ie FOF 2001/02. You should not have to go anything more than 4 clicks to get to what you want. My vote for best interface would have to be Baseball Mogul, simple, clean and very easy to use. I would say FOF 4 would be right there if it had the hotkeys and if it had the ability to multitask between windows. ie when you have your roster screen open and you have the free agent window open you cannot scroll down in your roster screen.

[bbor]

Originally posted by Maple Leafs
At the risk of sounding like I'm 100 years old, I still think Earl Weaver ws among the best. Drag and drop, double click to open and edit, everything on one nice simple screen. And in-game, plenty of shortcut keys.

Hockey League Simulator was also good, although it had a few little annoyances here and there.

damn.....you old as dust

and you're a rookie too

[Karim]

Originally posted by Vince
Man, filters or a search function for recruits would make that game so much better...

Isn't that the truth! TCY would be perfect IMO if it had a search function similar to CM and if I could recruit in the offseason (even if that isn't realistic).

[Karim]

Dola...

One screen that NO sports sim has and I inevitably end up writing by hand is a "Projected Squad Salary" screen. In one glance I can see who is committed to the team 1,3,5,7 years from now, and how much salary room is available in every year. This is vital information when renegotiating contracts or thinking about adding salary during a transaction.

[astralhaze]

Huh. I'm certainly no fanboy, as Joe can likely attest to (holyroller Joe ), but I love the ootp5 interface. I shake my head at people who don't like the browser windows. They make it so easy to alt-tab through different information quickly and easily. I have nitpicks with it, of course, such as the search functions being buried and the inability to imediately add a player to a trade offer after searching for him, but all in all me likes.

As far as non-text sims go, I loved the interface for Call To Power. Apparently, so did Infogrames because they basically jacked it for Civ3.

As you can likely tell, I like my information organized in categories yet easy to access. I think ootp5 does this pretty well and ctp did it even better. Markus is on the right track, just fine tune it a bit and it will be top notch.

[Joe Stallings]

Yeah, I can attest that you sir are no fanboy.

[astralhaze]

Thank you very much
Thank you very much
Thank you very much
That's the nicest thing that anyone's ever done for me.

[cthomer5000]

Is everyone going to attack me if I admit that I have always really liked the FOF2001 interface?

[Kevin]

A quick comment about the OOTP5 interface. It looks good, but would be greatly improved for stats viewing if it started with just the batting1 or pitching1 stats but one of the drop down items was a full screen view of all the stats rather than just the 2nd or 3rd screen.
The same would apply to put general info, ratings and salary on another full screen option.

Ditto on sticky sorts, keyboard shortcuts and the salary projections. The nekkid women thing could then be left to the Mod creators.

[condors]

you usually can get used to most interfaces

the only thing i feel most games lack is the compare feature, if i am looking at picking up a new starting 2b i want to see him and mine side by side otherwise i am forced to write down my currents guys stats, ratings and compare

[Maple Leafs]

Originally posted by astralhaze
Huh. I'm certainly no fanboy, as Joe can likely attest to (holyroller Joe ), but I love the ootp5 interface. I shake my head at people who don't like the browser windows.

They did a pretty good job with OOTP5. I had to fire up v4 last night to export for an online league, and it really felt clunky compared to the new version.

That said, the OOTP interface will never really be a good one until they fix the sticky sorting issues. Having to continually go back and reselect the same categories over and over gets so frustrating that I find myself not bothering to really go deep inside the game's numbers.

There are a few other problems (having to click on all the position to deslect them on the trade screen, for example, or the lack of a "back" button without right-clicking in the in-game browser), but the sort problem is the killer right now.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally posted by Maple Leafs
That said, the OOTP interface will never really be a good one until they fix the sticky sorting issues. Having to continually go back and reselect the same categories over and over gets so frustrating that I find myself not bothering to really go deep inside the game's numbers.

Joe, I don't know if I explained what I was talking about right in the other thread when I tallked about the sticky sort and "double-sort". A MUCH better example would have been during the amateur draft. You should be able to first sort on the "power" category, THEN sort on the "contact" category, and everyone with "average" contact will ALSO have power as their secondary sort category. TCY does this, and of course Excel does. Does that make better sense?

[Maple Leafs]

Another example: I'm looking at a team's catchers and choose "General Ratings", then sort by star rating. If I click on another position, I have to back and reselect both options again. This makes it a royal pain in the tuckus to check each position on a team, not to mention multiple teams.

(Yes, I know you can view all the positions, but that's not always something you'd want to do.)

[Marc Vaughan]

I've always thought that a good interface is one that you simply use without really noticing after a while.

I try to ensure that the CM interface is as open as possible and allows people to access data in any manner they want, eg. see a club and think it sounds interesting then you can always simply click upon it regardless of the screen you're on and get to the clubs main team screen.

As has been mentioned the main weakness in this approach is that newcomers to the game sometimes feel a little drowned in information and the scope of things, this is something we're working on rectifying.

CM4 has hint tips to help people find their way around and future versions of the game will go further with hopefully a 'walkthrough' tutorial taking users through their early days (if they require it) and also having help available for every screen.

We have also added proper short-cut keys for the first time in CM4, this has proved to be popular and is something we will improve upon in the future (allowing users to map keys themselves to particular items - potentially even setting them to particular favourite clubs and players?).

Finally as most people have guessed I'm a huge fan of people being able to customise games via. editors or simply using notepad. For this reason we made the entire CM4 totally skinnable and have had a great amount of interest in this side of the game (checkout the unofficial cmskins.com website for some of the stuff that has been done already).

Skin-makers have only touched the surface of what is possible using this system so far, but have already customised much of the interface and even added in extra sorting options to some screens using the information provided to them.

I await with great interest their future evolutions of the game .... I'm sure they'll manage to surprise me with their talent and ingenuity (they usually do ).

Making things 'skinnable' is an odd option, its one that is only utilised by a few people - however their work is then used by a much larger community of people. This is the reason that we opted to make the game skinnable.

I believe the fact that the most popular of the 'skins' sites for CM4 has over 15,000 users currently shows the popularity that this side of hte game has garnered in the short time it has been available.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally posted by SkyDog You should be able to first sort on the "power" category, THEN sort on the "contact" category, and everyone with "average" contact will ALSO have power as their secondary sort category. TCY does this, and of course Excel does. Does that make better sense?

FTR, this is the sort of thing I was referring to when I mentioned Excel earlier in the thread. Y'think "Double-sort" might also be described as "multi-sort" ( as in "sorting on more than one value") ?

[Ben E Lou]

Originally posted by JonInMiddleGA
FTR, this is the sort of thing I was referring to when I mentioned Excel earlier in the thread. Y'think "Double-sort" might also be described as "multi-sort" ( as in "sorting on more than one value") ?

Sounds good.