Map Visual Improvements

[johnpooch]

A community member raised several points about the map visuals:

1. Unit icons - Units are the same shape and quite small, making it hard to distinguish armies from fleets at a glance
2. Territory coloring - Non-supply center territories aren't colored by nation, which some players find less satisfying visually

Questions for the community:

• Should we use SVG graphics for the unit icons, e.g. a cannon and a ship?
• Are there other map clarity issues you've noticed?

About territory coloring:

The way this feature would work would be that if a player owns a province with a supply centre, e.g. Tunis, related provinces like North Africa would be coloured with that nation's color. This creates a satisfying effect when the user starts to control more and more territory, but some players might find it visually confusing.

This feature existed in the previous version of Diplicity, and some of the groundwork is already in place to add it back. However, enabling this would require additional configuration work for each variant - specifically, defining which provinces are "influenced by" each supply center to determine coloring. This adds to the maintenance burden when creating or updating variants.

Would the visual improvement be worth this tradeoff?

Implementation considerations:

If we do add territory coloring back, should it be:

• Always on for everyone
• Optional per-user (toggle in settings)
• Optional per-game (creator chooses when setting up the game)

My preference is to avoid optional modes where possible, as each configuration option increases complexity and maintenance burden. If there's a clear community preference for one approach, that would be ideal.

What's your take?

[JorenC]

I think it should be optional per user. It's a feature that people are quite opinionated about, and it's based on personal preference, so per game would not make sense...

[JorenC]

SVG graphics that are toggleable would definitely be my preference, ideally per map.. the A and F circles are simple and nice, but not at all good for older maps where i want to see era appropriate units

[johnpooch]

@JorenC I'm copying over your comment from a separate issue: #163

The map has a pattern over it (it's quite a large part of the 2mb) that makes it feel 'old'. It's a noise layer

One important distinction between how the map works in this version of Diplicity vs. the old version of Diplicity is that the map is generated programmatically from a JSON file rather than loading an SVG directly.

One of the main reasons for this is because the JSON file is then significantly smaller than the SVG file. Also, building the SVG from the JSON file programmatically allows us to make changes to how we render variants consistently across all variants, which I think could be a big win.

For example, the noise effect that you're describing. As you mentioned, it represents a large part of the original SVG file. This isn't ideal.

Instead, we could add the noise effect programmatically, so that it doesn't need to exist in the SVG file at all.

This would be my preference, but I just need to work out how that would work and whether it would have a significant impact on the rendering performance of the SVG.

[KittyofEvil]

1. I like the minimal approach to unit icons that Diplicity takes and find the detailed SVGs of cannons and battleships on other sites a bit ugly and hard-to-read on the map. However, I think there should be some kind of visual distinction between armies and fleets so that users can tell them apart at a glance. It could be as simple as keeping one of the units a circle and making the other a rounded rectangle, triangle, or trapezium.

I've made a very quick and dirty mockup of what these could look like. Personally, I like the rectangle for fleets, like the one in Constantinople.

If there are a lot of people who prefer graphical icons, like a battleship for fleets and a cannon for armies, this is the kind of thing that would be ideal for per-user settings. I suggest keeping the simple shapes as the default and allowing the fancier SVG shapes (preferably not so fancy that they're hard to read) in user settings if they are added.

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2. My preference for territory colouring would be simply to have non-SC areas follow the same colouring rules as SC areas: that if your unit ends the year in a territory, it changes to your colour. Areas considered part of your country would start the game with your colour (e.g., Yorkshire would start blue as it is English). This eliminates the need to tie territories together, making setting up new maps easier, but still allows for satisfying border painting. This is the system used by gamesbyemail.com, the site I used for many years.

I don't think that this should be a per-user option.

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Also, on the noise layer idea: I don't know if you've since solved this, but there is an SVG feature called FeTurbulence that you may be able to use to create a grainy noise layer over the map.