Bigjoe5 wrote:I've edited that post to remove the numbers. My point, in case it's still not clear, is that interpreting the total green area as the total remaining health is vastly more intuitive than interpreting the total width of the bars as the total remaining health.
I could not disagree with you more. I would disagree with you even if "intuitive" were the key concern here (which I don't think it is, since all but the most common types of graphs need various labels to be made sense of). I strongly assert that people are generally
not at all used to assessing bar graphs in terms of sums of area of the different bars, and for most people that possibility wouldn't cross their mind at all. The total linear width in a bar chart is normally not as important as in Mitten's proposal, but it very often does have some type of significance, and assigning this additional significance is not counter-intuitive in my opinion.
Even after you've instructed them on the significance,
they'll have a tremendously harder time assessing the sum of areas instead of a simple linear extent. My quick search couldn't find a relevant article but I really don't think that humans are nearly so good at adding up areas of differently dimensioned rectangles as they are at assessing a simple linear extent. If I had to guess, I'd say that the total green area of the top row (in your latest chart) is perhaps around 2/3 of the total green area of the lower one; I'm very uncertain of that guess and I had to look very hard at the chart and imagine stacking things up (to essentially convert area to a linear extent) in order to make the estimate at all. Anyone else care to make a guess before BigJoe informs us of the actual ratio?
Without any explanation, what does a new player see? My best guess would be that width and height together somehow indicate the total max structure of a particular fleet....Regardless of anything else, my initial instinct, simply based on the green area, is that the lower empire is significantly better off than the upper empire, which is completely false.
So, assume that the total area is what matters, and then you tell me that the assumption gives poor results.
Of course, for ANY chart, if you remove the explanatory labels and then assume it means something different than it does, it's fairly likely to give bad results. The assumption seems like a poor assumption to me, truly, and you haven't even given me any information in these posts with which to assess even how good or bad the results of that assumption would actually be. You just tell me that it gives very poor results and somehow assert that to be an indictment of the intentionally maimed graph rather than of the assumption or the maiming.
Contrast this with the second mockup I posted - the bars are all the same height, so it's obvious that the width of a bar represents the max structure of a ship. The ship's remaining health is then represented by the green segment.
That's not at all obvious-- without any labels or explanation it could be possible that the width represents total attack or something. The idea that the chart is supposed to be readily understandable without any labels or explanation does not make any sense to me and I do not at all think it is possible. I'll have to blame Mitten, though, for starting off with initial instruction "It is intended to make sense, so please take a look at the screenshots in this post before reading the more detailed explanation in the next one to get a feel of how much you feel you can get out of the summary without explanation." It looks to me like that introduction very strongly influenced Geoff's responses.
It took a few iterations of explanations and not knowing what was going on before you guys (and I as well) were able to understand Mitten's representation. That in and of itself is an indication that we can improve on the design.
I don't see where you get this interpretation of the thread, and I certainly disagree regarding myself. By far most of the representation was readily understandable with the first explanation. It looks to me like everyone who's actually tried the graphs likes them. Also, in an attempt to satisfy Geoff's concerns Mitten has proposed some changes which you don't appear to acknowledge or address at all.
Mitten's code is fairly easy to modify. I suggest that anyone wanting to propose some different significance to the graph dimensions actually try the thing both ways in gameplay, and take any graphs for discussion from actual screenshots so that you can be sure they are internally consistent or else they make a rather poor focal point for discussion.
If I provided any code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0