Interface makeover

[Farant]

I've been thinking about it for a while. My opinion is that game interface isn't good enough. The game itself is pretty complex, there's a lot of information, yet the interface is so lacking it makes me cringe every single time I move my horses or cull my mares, or look for a stud or a horse to buy, or try to determine who's the best at competitions. The long story short, the interface makes my experience worse, slows me down and irritates me a lot!

I'll add things later, but I want to start with regular pastures.



This is the original. As you can see there's a lot of blank space, energy bar isn't very visible and there's just one possible action - go to the horse's page. I don't think that wasting so much space is a good idea. Here's how I'd do it.



I'm not good at drawing so I'll explain.
I'd like to see some information right on the pasture's page. Age, breed, body type, energy, weight, and quick overview of breeder's report (squares represent stats). I also want to be able to move my horses around without scrolling through every horse's page individually. It might be fine while you have 10 or 30 horses, but when you're breeding for a record, you can have 100 horses at any given moment and they need to be moved around all the time! It's very annoying.

[Qim]

The long story short, the interface makes my experience worse, slows me down and irritates me a lot!

Agreed! Having returned to the game after another long hiatus, development has still only produced a slight amount of cosmetic elements. Dev time to produce this stuff comes at the expense of core gameplay improvement, which is a tad depressing, since I'm a huge fan of this game. The potential is massive, but so is the stagnation.

Dunno how relevant the concept of 'HWO2' is at this point, as mentioned in this thread: https://www.horseworldonline.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19624
but it's certainly something that makes me question the realistic advancement of this game.

[LucentWings]

.

I support!

[Mlloftus]

I've been thinking about it for a while. My opinion is that game interface isn't good enough. The game itself is pretty complex, there's a lot of information, yet the interface is so lacking it makes me cringe every single time I move my horses or cull my mares, or look for a stud or a horse to buy, or try to determine who's the best at competitions. The long story short, the interface makes my experience worse, slows me down and irritates me a lot!

I'll add things later, but I want to start with regular pastures.



This is the original. As you can see there's a lot of blank space, energy bar isn't very visible and there's just one possible action - go to the horse's page. I don't think that wasting so much space is a good idea. Here's how I'd do it.



I'm not good at drawing so I'll explain.
I'd like to see some information right on the pasture's page. Age, breed, body type, energy, weight, and quick overview of breeder's report (squares represent stats). I also want to be able to move my horses around without scrolling through every horse's page individually. It might be fine while you have 10 or 30 horses, but when you're breeding for a record, you can have 100 horses at any given moment and they need to be moved around all the time! It's very annoying.

YES! This would be wonderful!

[Soaring Hooves]

i agree

I've been thinking about it for a while. My opinion is that game interface isn't good enough. The game itself is pretty complex, there's a lot of information, yet the interface is so lacking it makes me cringe every single time I move my horses or cull my mares, or look for a stud or a horse to buy, or try to determine who's the best at competitions. The long story short, the interface makes my experience worse, slows me down and irritates me a lot!

I'll add things later, but I want to start with regular pastures.



This is the original. As you can see there's a lot of blank space, energy bar isn't very visible and there's just one possible action - go to the horse's page. I don't think that wasting so much space is a good idea. Here's how I'd do it.



I'm not good at drawing so I'll explain.
I'd like to see some information right on the pasture's page. Age, breed, body type, energy, weight, and quick overview of breeder's report (squares represent stats). I also want to be able to move my horses around without scrolling through every horse's page individually. It might be fine while you have 10 or 30 horses, but when you're breeding for a record, you can have 100 horses at any given moment and they need to be moved around all the time! It's very annoying.

YES! This would be wonderful!

[Tom]

This isn't a bad idea and I looked into what it would take to implement. This isn't easy to explain but I'll do my best. Most of the information on the horse page is stored per-horse in the database, which makes sense when you want to view one horse. Some of the information is stored as a list of horses, such as the names of horses in each pasture. And some of the information is cached from the horse database into the pasture database so it can be displayed on the pasture view without accessing the horse database.
What this means is that when you look at the pasture page the game has to pull from one database and when you look at the horse page it pulls from another database (they are actually the same database, but different areas. It's complicated computer stuff.) If we want to display more in depth information on each horse on the pasture page that means the game has to go in and pull the list of horses in the pasture, then go and pull information from each horse to display. This means that each time you go to the pasture it's like you're asking the game to open every single horse page for every horse in that pasture, which is a lot more work for the server.
It's not that we can't do it, but it's a lot more complicated that it sounds.
Some things will probably not be too hard so we will try and add those things.
In the meantime you can use the notes on each horse to show information that is relevant to your own projects.

Thank you for your ideas and support.

[Farant]

This isn't a bad idea and I looked into what it would take to implement. This isn't easy to explain but I'll do my best. Most of the information on the horse page is stored per-horse in the database, which makes sense when you want to view one horse. Some of the information is stored as a list of horses, such as the names of horses in each pasture. And some of the information is cached from the horse database into the pasture database so it can be displayed on the pasture view without accessing the horse database.
What this means is that when you look at the pasture page the game has to pull from one database and when you look at the horse page it pulls from another database (they are actually the same database, but different areas. It's complicated computer stuff.) If we want to display more in depth information on each horse on the pasture page that means the game has to go in and pull the list of horses in the pasture, then go and pull information from each horse to display. This means that each time you go to the pasture it's like you're asking the game to open every single horse page for every horse in that pasture, which is a lot more work for the server.
It's not that we can't do it, but it's a lot more complicated that it sounds.
Some things will probably not be too hard so we will try and add those things.
In the meantime you can use the notes on each horse to show information that is relevant to your own projects.

Thank you for your ideas and support.

Hello, Tom.
I've spent some time playing with databases so I understand what you're talking about. Would be cool to see some improvements.
The downside of notes is that I have to write them by hand for every horse. Or copypaste, which isn't that different. I'm talking about something EVERY player can see and use. Sales ans studs should have some kind of system in place so people can search for horses effectively (visual clues), without scrolling through hundreds of horses and reading every single BR. Making the game complex and not providing adequate tools to handle that complexity effectively is bad, don't you agree?

Is there an option to increase the size of pastures so I'd at least see all my broodmares in one pasture instead of 3 different ones? I guess that it's not that hard to implement.

[Tom]

The larger the pasture the more load there is pulling horses and on some lower power devices a full max size pasture is already pushing it. There is always a trade-off when making decisions about how much stuff we have on each page.
We're looking at what we can do though. Keep your ideas coming, we enjoy reading them and it's good to have more perspectives.

[Farant]

The larger the pasture the more load there is pulling horses and on some lower power devices a full max size pasture is already pushing it. There is always a trade-off when making decisions about how much stuff we have on each page.
We're looking at what we can do though. Keep your ideas coming, we enjoy reading them and it's good to have more perspectives.

Can we decide what size of pastures we want to buy? Make them expensive, it's not a problem, but I think they should be available. People will decide whether or not their machines can handle the load. Current max amount is kinda ridiculous, tbh. I'm spending more time moving horses around than actually playing the game.
Another option to handle this is to turn off all fancy images on the top of the page if player wants to. Kind of mobile version for weaker devices. I guess it creates most of the load?

[larissar]

I would love to allow for increased barn and pastures sizes however there are many technical aspects to consider.
Currently the average load time for a large pasture is 5.81 seconds. This breaks down to 1.06 seconds for the initial page load and for the page to reach a "interactive state". The remaining time is spent loading the horse images and rendering them on the page. This is CPU load on both the client side and the server side.
The second consideration is memory load. A half filled large pasture consumes about 8MB* of memory load. It may not seem like much, but considering that some people are still using older machines, or cell phones, to play the game that 8MB can actually have a significant effect.

Thirdly is that if the option were available for people with better hardware to purchase larger pastures that doesn't stop people with poor hardware from buying them. People generally don't read warnings either. So we would likely end up with many users buying the largest pastures, and in some cases needing to make real money purchases to do so, then the game starts crashing for them and they have a poor experience and leave the game altogether, demanding a refund. Even if they did read the warning about not buying the largest pasture, there is nothing to prevent them from going into someone elses largest pasture and having the same problems.

The solution to this is a radical redesign to the way pastures/barn/horses work. We have been discussing many options, each with their own pros and cons, however we haven't decided on a path as of yet so our current goal is to continue moving forward the way things are. If there are simple things we can do to improve the experience then we are more than happy to consider them, but some things that seem simple, in reality, are much more complex.

Thanks for all your other suggestions, we'll see what we can do to implement change.

Edit: 8MB memory load will vary by computer. I've seen 4MB on another computer, and google ads and other thirdparty resources can add another 25MB to memory load.