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Waypoint Markers: Coming Changes.

[DE]Pablo

By [DE]Pablo,
in Developer Workshops

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[DE]Pablo

[DE]Pablo

Posted
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You may have noticed the Waypoint behaviour acting differently on last week's Devstream... here is the promised Dev Workshop!

Waypoint Markers are one of the vital systems that we’ve overlooked for a long, long time. So finally we are getting around to clearing out their cobwebs. Your eye muscles have probably adapted to the rapid game of minimap glancing as the in-world Waypoint Marking has been less than ideal - what follows below details some coming changes that will give your eye muscles a break.

First: Changing what is visible!
Currently we don`t show objective or extraction markers in-world so you have to play the minimap to follow them. After this change they will show in world, hopefully helping with navigating the environments you and your Warframe find yourself in. To reduce noise, some markers that currently appear in world will be either relegated to minimap only or changed to only show in world when you are in the same room as them (i.e  the survival Life Support drops from enemies).

Second: Simplify the path!
Currently the path for waypoint markers very closely follows the navigation mesh that AI uses. This leads to having a lot of extra stops along the way - you've probably have noticed markers tend to snap to lower left corner of doors for example, the new system makes all of them snap directly to the center of doors and not have as many small stops..

Third: Interpolation.
Right now when you are following the path of a waypoint marker it just snaps from one point in the path to the next. After this change it will move from point to point, which will help guide your eye to the next point more gradually.

Fourth: Stacking.
Another new change will now show you you when multiple markers of the same type are in a given direction, which will help with multiple objectives (i.e Mobile Defense).

Fifth: Notification.
Some important waypoint markers will also have notification effects when they appear to call your attention to them. Similar to the effects on the marker for Focus Convergence Boosts, this change applies to objective and extraction markers. Watching newer players stumble over the lack of clarity of 'what to do next' in world is an issue that can be solved with this change and we're pretty excited for the results.Please note FX are not final and the HUD is enlarged for video visibility.

What’s left?
There’s a couple issues we are still looking into.

Sometimes the markers will trick you; you walk to them and then they move in to a point behind you. I’m sure you’ve seen it happen to you. Unfortunately these need to be fixed by level designers in a case by case basis, as we worked on these new changes we fixed a few, but the game is huge and I'm sure there’s more. That’s where you come in, the community team will set up a thread so you can report any examples of this you find and we can fix them. It will require very specific screenshots (Taken with F6 so we can see the metadata) in order to fix up. If you've already saved some screenshots of this, you're ahead of the game!

The other thing is the path to markers can’t be calculated when you are too far off the navigation mesh, so sometimes when you are doing parkour the marker will not move up until you touch the ground, this leads to you thinking you have to go backwards and then you land and see it’s forwards. AI team is looking into possible solutions, but given how much mobility we have it’s a tough thing to solve.

You can expect this to come with a near Update (but maybe not this week).

 

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Syvarin

Syvarin

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Thank you very much for this. Waypoints are such a small part of the game but they're very useful and upgrading them will make navigation much smoother. I already love the recent changes such as seeing the total distance instead of distance to the next room.

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NightmareT12

NightmareT12

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Thanks Pablo! I really appreciate all these QoL changes you're pouring into the game as of late :)

I wanted to ask one of my biggest concerns: How could we deal with the Extraction marker on Survival and Excavation? I fear it's going to be annoying due the nature of them in those two.

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notlamprey

notlamprey

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Gotta confess that I was slightly distracted at first by the pleasingly hypnotic wiggle-waggle of that... syandana, but I like the gliding interpolation behavior. It's very comfy.

Also:

20 minutes ago, [DE]Pablo said:

Currently the path for waypoint markers very closely follows the navigation mesh that AI uses.

I had a slap-my-head "of course!" moment here - embarrassed that I didn't realize this earlier, because it explains a lot.

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[DE]Pablo

[DE]Pablo

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16 minutes ago, NightmareT12 said:

I wanted to ask one of my biggest concerns: How could we deal with the Extraction marker on Survival and Excavation? I fear it's going to be annoying due the nature of them in those two.

The extraction marker auto hides after a minute in these two modes if you havent extracted

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V45H

V45H

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34 minutes ago, [DE]Pablo said:

You may have noticed the Waypoint behaviour acting differently on last week's Devstream... here is the promised Dev Workshop!

Waypoint Markers are one of the vital systems that we’ve overlooked for a long, long time. So finally we are getting around to clearing out their cobwebs. Your eye muscles have probably adapted to the rapid game of minimap glancing as the in-world Waypoint Marking has been less than ideal - what follows below details some coming changes that will give your eye muscles a break.

First: Changing what is visible!
Currently we don`t show objective or extraction markers in-world so you have to play the minimap to follow them. After this change they will show in world, hopefully helping with navigating the environments you and your Warframe find yourself in. To reduce noise, some markers that currently appear in world will be either relegated to minimap only or changed to only show in world when you are in the same room as them (i.e  the survival Life Support drops from enemies).

Second: Simplify the path!
Currently the path for waypoint markers very closely follows the navigation mesh that AI uses. This leads to having a lot of extra stops along the way - you've probably have noticed markers tend to snap to lower left corner of doors for example, the new system makes all of them snap directly to the center of doors and not have as many small stops..

Third: Interpolation.
Right now when you are following the path of a waypoint marker it just snaps from one point in the path to the next. After this change it will move from point to point, which will help guide your eye to the next point more gradually.

Fourth: Stacking.
Another new change will now show you you when multiple markers of the same type are in a given direction, which will help with multiple objectives (i.e Mobile Defense).

Fifth: Notification.
Some important waypoint markers will also have notification effects when they appear to call your attention to them. Similar to the effects on the marker for Focus Convergence Boosts, this change applies to objective and extraction markers. Watching newer players stumble over the lack of clarity of 'what to do next' in world is an issue that can be solved with this change and we're pretty excited for the results.Please note FX are not final and the HUD is enlarged for video visibility.

What’s left?
There’s a couple issues we are still looking into.

Sometimes the markers will trick you; you walk to them and then they move in to a point behind you. I’m sure you’ve seen it happen to you. Unfortunately these need to be fixed by level designers in a case by case basis, as we worked on these new changes we fixed a few, but the game is huge and I'm sure there’s more. That’s where you come in, the community team will set up a thread so you can report any examples of this you find and we can fix them. It will require very specific screenshots (Taken with F6 so we can see the metadata) in order to fix up. If you've already saved some screenshots of this, you're ahead of the game!

The other thing is the path to markers can’t be calculated when you are too far off the navigation mesh, so sometimes when you are doing parkour the marker will not move up until you touch the ground, this leads to you thinking you have to go backwards and then you land and see it’s forwards. AI team is looking into possible solutions, but given how much mobility we have it’s a tough thing to solve.

You can expect this to come with a near Update (but maybe not this week).

 

thats awesome but can downed player/companion markers be like a flashing excamation point? or something similar? also you ui guys are awwesome its always been my favorite department a nice clean ui can make or break a game for me personally i struggle to stay interested in a game with poor ui design

keep up the great work and if you ever wanna hangout and talk about ui im here (that last bit is considerably unlikely)

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OniDax

OniDax

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Posted (edited)
1 minute ago, V45H said:

thats awesome but can downed player/companion markers be like a flashing excamation point? or something similar? also you ui guys are awwesome its always been my favorite department a nice clean ui can make or break a game for me personally i struggle to stay interested in a game with poor ui design

keep up the great work and if you ever wanna hangout and talk about ui im here (that last bit is considerably unlikely)

That's a very good suggestion!

I got another suggestion (although maybe or maybe not appropriate for Pablo): It'd be nice if we could press a button to call for help. That'd be very beneficial to new players especially. I've been playing a lot of For Honor, and they've got a thing like that and it's pretty effective in alerting friends that you're down. I know other games have a similar system.

Edited by A-p-o-l-l-y-o-n
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Aurea_Hiigara

Aurea_Hiigara

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Can you work on the wonky behavior of 'Next Enemy' markers if you've fallen a few rooms behind the rest of your group? The marker ends up being the exact location of the enemy, five rooms ahead of you around randomly twisted corridors, meaning you sit in a big room with NO CLUE which door leads onwards anymore.

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Khunvyel

Khunvyel

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That sounds all quite good, I wait to see if the biggest problem for me is fixed in this regard, which has nothing to do with "smooth transitions" although I did reckon the waypoint kinda follows AI pathing

My main feedback is about individual rooms that have many varying levels and entry/exit points on different heights. The waypoint system so far seems to be designed for ground moving, but considering many are airborne more than half the time during travel, that simply doesn't cut it. So sometimes you get a way that follows through a room really... "plain".

Will waypoints be put to the actual exit of the room so we can see which direction we have to go and then we "move our way through" ? Or will you rather cut down on the transition paths so we only get to the next point that's crucial? Will we get some kind of opacity slider so we can decide if we want things to be solid? If lots of things float around the map, it gets kind of clustered. Opacity levels might allow you to immediately identify how much is in a "stack" without eyeing in on the number.

1 hour ago, [DE]Pablo said:

The other thing is the path to markers can’t be calculated when you are too far off the navigation mesh, so sometimes when you are doing parkour the marker will not move up until you touch the ground, this leads to you thinking you have to go backwards and then you land and see it’s forwards. AI team is looking into possible solutions, but given how much mobility we have it’s a tough thing to solve.

Why rely on the AI team? How much "smart automation" does the waypoint system really need, compared to some hand-placed waypoint entities when you know you have to go through that single bottleneck to reach the next room? I don't think automation is that smart a choice to make when certain points are simply obvious, especially when you just have to mark the next exit. Some levels are very obvious, but others are very crowded. Now the question remains how much hand-holding a player requires. If we play the game of "follow the yellow breadcrumb" then they will always single in on that and will never quite cherish the environment around them, nor will they explore that much. So finding one's way through the environment can be very rewarding in itself. I can only speak for myself, but I've been the most bothered by a waypoint that jumps around and only realizing that the actual exit was right there, even in plain sight. Each time I wished the waypoint would be sitting right there, on that entry point to the next room, and it's my part to find my way there. Less handholding, more spatial awareness.

Speaking about awareness; I found it a great change that we can see the energy canisters for Excavators now on the minimap. But the Void Trace and "Infested Salvage Injector" visibility radius is very poor. Sometimes you see them from further ahead with your naked eye before the tracking system even picks up. That's not an issue in open environments, but in tight spaces with plenty of walls blocking sight, it's not exactly helpful. Will you be addressing that too?

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AzoreanEve

AzoreanEve

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Will there be an option to disable markers in world?

At the moment we already have the life support thingies be a bother on missions, where you have 5 or so markers dancing around that you can never get fully rid of as more life support drops. Adding to that, having the green marker of extraction dancing around as well on the screen? I feel as it would clutter the screen too much and as much as I am aware some might prefer to have it, I would be happy if you could disable it for some situations.

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