Quality of Life & Modernisation
Posted: Mon May 12, 2025 12:13 am
There are several things that I've always wanted as quality of life improvements & modernisations to Myth. These are also things that I think would help new players more easily get into Myth.
1) The biggest one for me is a toggle for minimap rotation: When unchecked, you have the classic Myth behaviour where the camera icon on the minimap rotates, while the minimap itself remains still. But when this option is checked, you would have the modern minimap behaviour where the camera remains pointing straight upward and the minimap rotates around the camera (see attached picture).
Minimap rotation would make it so much easier to glance at the minimap and see if the red dots and the green dots are to the left or to the right of my current camera location and orientation, without having to do mental rotation while staring at the minimap.
It should have at least one or two markers at the top or bottom of the minimap so that you can keep track of its original orientation if needed (e.g., in missions where you are meant to travel from one end of the map to the other). Using neutral markers is preferable to using an "up" or "North" arrow at the top because some maps have you travelling left-to-right, or top-to-bottom, and so an arrow may confuse players into thinking they are meant to travel up in every map. And avoiding NESW markers is probably a good idea because some maps may not be oriented according to a canonical North direction when you consider the journal/briefing information.
Could optionally have a key (maybe an F-key) to toggle between these two modes in the middle of a game.
2) UI Scaling: At 4K resolutions, the UI can get very teensy. So having some kind of UI scaling option would be handy.
3) Default modern controls & behaviour: Maybe when installing the Project Magma patch you could have a checkbox to either leave all the options unchanged, or to automatically set the options and controls to a more modern layout. The main things are highlighted in the attached picture:
* Scroll to zoom,
* Only right-click to command units and left-click to select,
* Strafing with A and D to match the muscle memory of modern FPS games,
* And setting and recalling groups of units using Ctrl like modern RTS games.
That would make newer players feel more at home.
One wrinkle with this is that the tutorial may need to be changed. The first thing new players are likely to do is play the tutorial, and maybe we could edit the audio files and subtitles to swap "A and D keys" with "Z and X keys".
And adjust how he describes to set formations.
4) Tooltips for the items in the preferences and the controls menus (and multiplayer options). It is good that you can press the "?" button to open up a PDF describing what each one does, but it would be so much more user-friendly if a tooltip would just appear at your cursor when you moused-over an item in the options and controls menus. Because a lot of those things' names don't make it obvious why you might want to toggle them on or off (like "Alternate Unit Selection").
5) "Total War" Dragging/Painting Formations: A toggle in the options to have the classic Myth behaviour of dragging from the centre-front of the formation and pointing it in a certain direction, or having the modern "Total War" behaviour of dragging the formation from left to right to determine its position and orientation (and ideally width/depth as well, but I imagine that could be a very complex thing to implement).
Going hand-in-hand with this is having a toggle to change the unit placement icons from circles to directional arrows like in Total War, so that you can see the orientation of each individual unit in the formation.
6) (Low priority) Middle-click-drag to pan or orbit camera: This is a relatively minor thing, but being able to middle-click and drag to either pan or orbit the camera around the location you middle-clicked would make it more consistent with more modern free-camera games like Black & White 2.
I'll post below if I think of any more quality of life / modernisation things.
Does anyone else have any ideas?
Honestly, the biggest thing is I just really wish it had minimap rotation. How difficult would that be to implement?
1) The biggest one for me is a toggle for minimap rotation: When unchecked, you have the classic Myth behaviour where the camera icon on the minimap rotates, while the minimap itself remains still. But when this option is checked, you would have the modern minimap behaviour where the camera remains pointing straight upward and the minimap rotates around the camera (see attached picture).
- Minimap03C0.jpg (173.65 KiB) Viewed 27075 times
It should have at least one or two markers at the top or bottom of the minimap so that you can keep track of its original orientation if needed (e.g., in missions where you are meant to travel from one end of the map to the other). Using neutral markers is preferable to using an "up" or "North" arrow at the top because some maps have you travelling left-to-right, or top-to-bottom, and so an arrow may confuse players into thinking they are meant to travel up in every map. And avoiding NESW markers is probably a good idea because some maps may not be oriented according to a canonical North direction when you consider the journal/briefing information.
Could optionally have a key (maybe an F-key) to toggle between these two modes in the middle of a game.
2) UI Scaling: At 4K resolutions, the UI can get very teensy. So having some kind of UI scaling option would be handy.
3) Default modern controls & behaviour: Maybe when installing the Project Magma patch you could have a checkbox to either leave all the options unchanged, or to automatically set the options and controls to a more modern layout. The main things are highlighted in the attached picture:
- Options00.png (586.16 KiB) Viewed 27075 times
* Only right-click to command units and left-click to select,
* Strafing with A and D to match the muscle memory of modern FPS games,
* And setting and recalling groups of units using Ctrl like modern RTS games.
That would make newer players feel more at home.
One wrinkle with this is that the tutorial may need to be changed. The first thing new players are likely to do is play the tutorial, and maybe we could edit the audio files and subtitles to swap "A and D keys" with "Z and X keys".
And adjust how he describes to set formations.
4) Tooltips for the items in the preferences and the controls menus (and multiplayer options). It is good that you can press the "?" button to open up a PDF describing what each one does, but it would be so much more user-friendly if a tooltip would just appear at your cursor when you moused-over an item in the options and controls menus. Because a lot of those things' names don't make it obvious why you might want to toggle them on or off (like "Alternate Unit Selection").
5) "Total War" Dragging/Painting Formations: A toggle in the options to have the classic Myth behaviour of dragging from the centre-front of the formation and pointing it in a certain direction, or having the modern "Total War" behaviour of dragging the formation from left to right to determine its position and orientation (and ideally width/depth as well, but I imagine that could be a very complex thing to implement).
Going hand-in-hand with this is having a toggle to change the unit placement icons from circles to directional arrows like in Total War, so that you can see the orientation of each individual unit in the formation.
6) (Low priority) Middle-click-drag to pan or orbit camera: This is a relatively minor thing, but being able to middle-click and drag to either pan or orbit the camera around the location you middle-clicked would make it more consistent with more modern free-camera games like Black & White 2.
I'll post below if I think of any more quality of life / modernisation things.
Does anyone else have any ideas?
Honestly, the biggest thing is I just really wish it had minimap rotation. How difficult would that be to implement?
