Overall Aims
- Familiarity: MSTS users should feel reasonably at home.
- Ease of use: Less experienced users should be able to get and keep moving easily.
- Challenging: More experienced users should be able to make it sufficiently hard to get and keep moving.
What Is Not Covered
- Variable physics, such as simplistic acceleration modeling; these ideas are pretty orthogonal to the driver aids themselves and can be discussed separately.
- Non-visual aids, such as sounds and tutorial audio/text. Realistic sounds, e.g. for wheel slip, should always be added and should not need to be part of this discussion; other things outside scope for complexity/time reasons and should be considered later.
General Ideas for Aids
- Appropriate aids to get started should appear by default.
- Aids will have different "levels" to show more or less detailed or complex information based on user skill.
- The visual display should be unobtrusive and aids should get out of your way when possible.
- Not all aids will be appropriate for all users or all activities.
- Every aid and aid state will be changeable in-game.
- Position, visibility and state for each aid will be saved and restored.
The Driver Aids
- Help (F1)
- HUD (F5)
- Locomotive Aid (F8)
- Route Aid (F9)
- Activity Aid (F10)
- Operations Aid (F11)
Help
The help window will pause the game when opened; the user is able to unpause the game without closing the window. The purpose of the window is to cover all the (static) information the user may want to know about the game, route, locomotive and activity while playing. This includes controls, settings, descriptions and any help text provided by the content (e.g. activity briefing). It will be in a visible window box and split in to tabs with vertical scrolling panels.
HUD
The HUD (head-up display) is, in effect, the aid for the game itself. It will provide only very basic information about the route, locomotive and activity. It is not intended to be sufficient to drive a train. It will continue to have extensive debugging data on separate "pages", but these should be focused on just debugging.
Locomotive Aid
The locomotive aid is intended to provide information about the locomotive to the player, in a clear manner consistent with their level of knowledge of the locomotive. There will be the following different levels of this aid:
- Beginner - only basic information necessary to drive the locomotive without much fuss.
- Intermediate - all the gory details of the locomotive's operation.
- Advanced - only information not conveyed by the simulation's graphics and sounds, e.g. acceleration.
Route Aid
The route aid is intended to provide information about the route to the player, in a clear manner consistent with their level of knowledge of the route. There will be the following different levels of this aid:
- Beginner - stylized graphical view of upcoming track indicating speed limits, signals and points-of-interest (stations, sidings, reversing point, etc.). The view will support both horizontal and vertical orientations, moving up (vertical) and right (horizontal), using symbols for all the key upcoming items and text labels for key distances, speed limits and station/siding names. It will also be resizable in the direction of the graphical view, up to the length of that display dimension. The display will be adjusted for the train's speed, showing at least 5 minutes down the line.
- Intermediate - text showing current speed limit, next speed limit with distance, next signal with distance, next point-of-interest with distance, current gradient and next gradient with distance.
- Advanced - text showing next point-of-interest and current gradient.
Activity Aid
The activity aid is intended to provide information about the activity to the player - I think you're getting the idea here. There will be the following different levels of this aid:
- Beginner - graphical indicator for location of and distance to next operation plus text showing the next operation with location name, target time, expected time.
- Intermediate - text showing the next operation with location name, target time, expected time.
- Advanced - text showing the next operation with location name and target time.
Operations Aid
The operations aid is intended to provide information and controls for all train operations. There will be the following different levels of this aid:
- Information - graphical display of cars' IDs, type, fuel, brake and handbrake statuses.
- Passenger - graphical display like 'information' but additionally with coupling controls.
- Freight - graphical display like 'passenger' but additionally with brake and handbrake controls.
The 'information' display is intended for people who like to see what's going on, but don't need any controls, and will be the most compact version. The passenger and freight levels will have interactive controls and will be the default display levels in an activity (selected based on the player's train type).
Driver Aid Visuals
The aim of all the drivers aids will be to leave the view as unobstructed as possible, without sacrificing readability and clarity of information. To that end, there will be an option that controls the size of all of the aids - both text and graphics.
All text will be rendered either on a solid background (e.g. white on black) or with at least twice the stroke width in border (for reference, all the HUD text has only once the stroke width in border).
Feedback
All feedback is appreciated! Note that nothing in this proposal is carved in stone, but please be constructive when suggesting alterations. In particular, the precise details of the different levels of the aids is very much open for discussion, but I would like to see some consensus on the principals outlines above.
Thanks!