User interface, I'm assuming.

@key, you mind linking me to some game views from what you have in mind?

-WebDip Admin

I have always thought that the move/support/retreat arrows look sorta ugly.

you can turn those off just go to settings

it's at the bottom

Here are a couple links:
http://www.backstabbr.com/game/5579685406703616
http://www.backstabbr.com/game/4688822753296384

I think it is a matter of opinion. It would be cool to have variations of the UI that people could switch between, but that also adds in additional work that not all people are guaranteed to even use. Personally, I have become quite fond of this UI and the backstabbr UI takes some getting used to, I imagine that had I joined backstabbr first, I might think otherwise.

I have taught a few friends how to play, and this sites UI was one of the easiest for them to learn.

@Espi I can definitely see that being the case; regardless of the visual style, I'd much rather play here for the stats and RR & such.

I play everything out in War Room. It means I have to put the moves in manually each season, but I can see the board and the movement more clearly.

I juat looked at the backstabber links and thought circles and triangles would not be an improvement.

I agree that in webDip I sometimes need to zoom in to tell the difference between a tank and a fleet (depending on arrow congestion) but the Backstabber lack of arrows, territory owner colour, and using different size of circles for Supply Centres and Armies is unattractive to me.

Graphically I much prefer WebDip.

I have a friend who I introduced to Diplomacy, and he now exclusively plays on PlayDip because their map looks way nicer than ours. Everything else (messaging, entering orders, looking at past results) is way worse on their UI, but our map really is quite appalling. Territory borders, arrows and armies/fleets are all pixelated.

How difficult would it be to use a high-resolution map of the board? Would that increase page loading times? Could we vectorise these images?

Sounds like you have one less friend now

The large map view seems to be a pretty decent resolution for clarity. That's what I use when the board gets too cluttered. You want a higher res than the 1300 x 1000 map?

The PlayDip map looks like shit. Take your friend to an optometrist.

I do like the simple pieces on backstabbr better than the tanks and ships on webDip though.

There are a bunch of things I would propose to change: On the big map, all lines are embarrassingly pixelated. For example, look at the border between Naf and Tun. I think it would also look better with thicker lines and less jagged borders in for example Serbia or Bulgaria. The arrows are sometimes in front of the units, and sometimes behind. And the territory names overlap with the units.

The color scheme on PlayDip is bad though. We should definitely keep our color scheme.

By the way, my friend is an optometrist. Not really, but he is a professor studying, amongst other things, visual perception.

@basvano now that you mention it, my looking just now is the first time I really noticed it. Hasn't bothered me yet

A SVG map would be great to have :) Customizable nation colours would be nice too

I would also prefer coloured triangles, squares, circles, or other simple geometrical forms instead of the same uniformly grey battleships and green battletanks (in 1901?) for everyone.
Supply centres (and territory ownership) are better indicated on bounced, jdip, playdip, vdip, or webdip, than on backstabbr. However, I don't think any is intrinsically better; I guess everyone could get used to any map.

And yes, webdip's large map is actually worse than the small map

Yes, map reform is absolutely on the list, and something that has been discussed a lot internally. We have some really nice features of our map (the choices of which orders to display are good, the province colouring is nice), but we also have some rough features too - the map is really pixelated, sometimes it can be hard to tell which unit is which type (Bulgaria is a particularly nasty culprit here), it's not clear to (some) new users what country the units belong to, etc.

My preference is for an SVG map with coloured stars and anchors for the units, provinces coloured, and a stack of other small changes we've been looking at.

The problem with the map (and other webdip features and improvements) isn't ideas - it's time. We only have a limited amount of time to work on features. A couple of times over the last couple of years different people have offered to add SVG map support, but it's never come to anything.

The vDip classic map is actually slightly different - I think it ensures that province text never obscures the unit, which is an improvement.

Keep in mind that we have a stack of map features already implemented - when changing the map, we'd need to redo preview, ensure that it works with the colourblindness tools, etc etc.

As always, if anyone has the php/mysql chops and wants to give a hand helping out, we are open source and welcome contributions. Instructions for contributions are here:

http://webdiplomacy.net/developers.php

~webDip Dev Team

On a separate note, I'm actually active on webdiplomacy because I didn't like the order entry on playdiplomacy. It's all a matter of preference :)

I'll be very sad if the actual land/sea vessels are replaced with clip art abstract shapes

^ I agree. Diplomacy is hard enough for beginners without having to learn that a triangle is a ship and a square is an army or whatever.

Great to see people are working on this. I love the colorblindness tools by the way. Unfortunately php and MySQL are very much not my chops. But I'll be happy to co tribute if I can.