维多利亚3开发日志#61 | 10/6 数据可视化

牧游社 牧有汉化翻译

Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #61 - Data Visualization

PDJR_Alastorn, Game Designer

Hello all, today we are going to talk about some of the data visualization in Victoria 3, how we on the team have iterated on it since our UX dev diary and what we think through when talking about such iterations.

大家吼啊，今天我们要谈的是维多利亚3的一些数据可视化的内容，自我们发布UX开发日志（开发日志#29）到现在，我们团队对其进行了怎样的迭代，以及在进行这种迭代时我们是如何思考的。

Aron is very busy doing what last bits of polish can be done before we lock down the game for release certification, so I have been asked to write this dev diary for you in their stead. I'm not officially a UX Designer but I do have my qualifications in user experience as QA and I also am quite opinionated about pie charts and other forms of data visualization as many of you in the community are no doubt aware of. I regularly get to be Aron and Henrik's rubber duck as we talk through solutions to problems on the UX side and it's part of my job that I thoroughly enjoy.

Aron（维多利亚3的用户体验设计师）目前忙于在我们确定游戏发布的最终版之前做最后一点打磨工作，所以由我来代替他完成这篇开发日志。我不是专业的用户体验设计师，但我作为QA确实有一定的用户体验方面的资格，而且我对饼状图和其他形式的数据可视化也很有想法。这一点，社区中的许多人都是知道的。当我和Aron和Henrik讨论用户体验方面的问题时，我经常成为他们的玩具，这是我工作的一部分，我也挺喜欢的。

(In fact the first draft of this diary was a full thesis on why pie charts are bad, but I was encouraged to tone down the rhetoric a little, so I will conclude they are aesthetically pretty but are horrible for conveying data.)

(事实上，这篇日志的第一稿是一篇关于饼图为什么不好的完整论文，但有人鼓励我把修辞改得温和一点，所以我将得出结论，饼图在审美上是漂亮的，但对于传达数据来说是可怕的。）

Just how angry is Paul? Even with the visualization you would still be guessing…

Paul到底有多生气？即使有可视化，你仍然只能猜测……

Now most of the time when we talk about Data Visualization in games, especially Paradox Games, the first thing that comes to mind is either line graphs or charts of some kind - giving a visual representation of data instead of just a pure numerical representation on the screen. This is not wrong, but data visualization is not solely about making some form of visual representation of abstract data. It is also about increasing the inherent cognitive understanding of the player by using known trends and patterns that are well established.

现在，当我们谈论游戏中的数据可视化时，特别是Paradox游戏中的可视化时，首先想到的是线图或其他类型的图表——将数据进行视觉呈现，而不是仅仅在屏幕上用纯数字表示。这并没有错，但数据可视化并不仅仅是对抽象的数据进行某种形式的视觉呈现。可视化也应该通过使用已知的趋势和模式来增强玩家内在的认知理解。

An easy example is the capacities, they are color-coded. When things are positive: it's green, when it's bad: it's red. We have a human tendency to impact meaning to color and thus it's a general rule of UX to never use Green and Red unless you are representing Good and Bad.

一个简单的例子是能力值，它们是用颜色标记的。当事情是有利的，它就是绿色的；而当它是负面的，它就是红色的。人类普遍有通过颜色来代表影响的倾向，因此，用户体验的一条基本规则是，永远不要使用绿色和红色，除非这代表了代表好和坏。

A quick glance at the capacities bar tells you all you need to know for the moment by color alone, and when you get its tooltip it continues such color coded summarization:

只需快速浏览一下能力值栏，仅凭颜色就能告诉你目前需要知道的一切。当你弄开它的提示栏时，它会继续以这种颜色总结。

Have any of you who've seen streams or images noticed that this dynamic changes in regards to income? When your nation is in a deficit the balance can show either as white (neutral) or red (bad) in the capacity summary and there is an inherent reason for that?

你们有谁之前在直播或图片中注意到与收入有关的动态变化吗？当你的国家处于赤字状态时，国库金额在能力值汇总中可能显示为白色（中性），也可能显示为红色（负面），这中间是有什么原因吗？

We do not show a negative income balance as red until it reflects an unhealthy economy, but what do we mean by this? Nations run deficits all the time, but not all deficits are bad, especially those which are investments into the country such as construction. Construction is classified as a temporary national expenditure as opposed to a fixed one, meaning that we calculate your fixed revenue vs expenditure to be positive once the construction is finished, and we keep the income balance showing a neutral tone because of it.

我们不会把负的收入显示为红色，除非其反映出你的经济不健康，但我们这样做是什么意思呢？国家一直都有赤字，但不是所有的赤字都是坏的，尤其是那些对国家的投资，如建造建筑。建造被归类为临时性的国家支出，而不是固定的支出，这意味着我们计算得出一旦建造完成你的固定收支结余还是正数，因此收入显示为中性颜色。

This is to reflect that your money is going down, but the fundamentals are fine. What this allows you to notice is when this fundamental changes and turns red, signaling a larger issue of your economic fundamentals being out of balance that could cause future problems.

这反映了你的资金正在下降，但经济的基本面是好的。当这个基本面发生变化并变成红色时，就会让你注意到，预示着你的经济基本面失去平衡，并可能在未来导致问题。

We may be losing money now but the fundamentals of the economy are okay if we ever stop building new factories…

我们现在可能会亏损，但如果我们停止建造新工厂，那么经济的基本面是没有问题的……

This is a lot of what we have been trying to iterate on in Victoria 3 at this point in its development: we don't want to just show you the static image of what's going on just that moment but we want you to know the dynamic trends of where the data is going.

这就是我们在维多利亚3开发阶段中一直在努力迭代的内容：我们不想只向你展示那一刻正在发生的静态图像，而是希望你能知道数据的动态趋势。

What do I mean by this? Well let me give you an example: see our buildings list (to make it clearer about what I am talking about I have gone with the minimized mode - didn't know there was a minimized mode? Now you do!)

我这样说是什么意思？好吧，让我给你举个例子：看看我们的建筑列表（为了更清楚地说明我在说什么，我采用了最小化模式——不知道有一个最小化模式？现在你知道了！)

Behold the glorious minimized building menu and color-coded gold reserve bars. (Bars are color coded on regular view as well)

请看荣耀的最小化建筑菜单和彩色的黄金储备条（在常规视图中，这些平衡条也是用颜色区分的）。

Before cash reserves were only golden, and you would have to physically watch the bar tick along and hopefully notice the trend of your reserves. The data was still informative but you were only able to easily glance if your business had cash reserves (meaning it could afford a price disruption or could help supplement the investment pool). Now we use the historical data we would normally use to fill out a line graph to color the bar and add trend markers to show if the cash reserves is going up or down, coloring it green or red respectively.

之前，现金储备只有金色的，而你必须实际观察那个平衡条如何变化，才有可能注意到你储备的趋势。这样的数据虽然仍有信息，但你只能很直观地看到你的行业是否有现金储备（意味着它可以承受价格骤降或可以帮助补充投资池）。现在，我们用历史数据（我们常用其来填写线性图的）来给平衡条上色，并添加趋势标记（别用绿色与红色来上色）以显示现金储备是上升还是下降。

Now at a quick glance you not only see how your economy is doing, but where it is going and you would be amazed at how significant such a small change can be. This is combined with our usage of red, white, and green to symbolize whether productivity is good or bad - to give you further depth of information: sugar industries in this picture are not failing but soon will be if you do not do something about it. Meanwhile the arms industry has stalled outright.

现在粗略一看，你不仅能看到你的经济情况如何，而且还能看到它的发展方向，你该对这么一点小改动带来的大变化感到震惊。再结合上我们用红色、白色和绿色来表示生产力好还是坏的做法，我们能给你进一步的信息深度：这张图中的制糖工业还没有倒闭，但你如果无动于衷，那它就快到头了。同时，武器工厂已经彻底瘫痪了。

A lot of these data visualization changes, you might never see or notice, because when they work well their understanding becomes second nature, but here's another one I want to call out: we recoloured the market summary tab:

很多这些可视化的改动，你可能永远不会看到或察觉到，因为当它们运作良好时，对它们的理解就会成为你的第二本能，但这里还有另一个我想指出的：我们对市场总结的标签页进行了重新上色。

Behold the new Market Panel, with corrected colors and balance bars to show the magnitude of the effect.

请看新的市场界面，已用修正后的颜色与平衡条来展示效果的影响程度。

The older Market Panel, serviceable but flawed with its data presentation.

老版本的市场界面，可以使用，但在数据展示方面有缺陷。

Okay we changed like 3 things, I hear you say - but why is that so damn important? I'm glad you asked that community strawman here's why.

好的，那么我们对三个方面做了改动。我听到你说：“但为啥这个能这么重要？”社区的稻草人们，我很高兴你会这么问，以下是原因。

We removed the Red/Green visualization of the balance and by doing that we helped make our understanding of the market system clearer to the player. Remember, this is Victoria 3, imbalances are not inherently bad. Sometimes maintaining a shortage of a good can be done intentionally to prop up an industry or ensure the wealth of specific pops. (I went into the logic of why for this in my talk at PDXCON and if we are lucky at some point in the future I will get a copy of that up on the forums as well). We found that when we colored the items green/red we were inherently having players react in ways that they themselves found was not always good or what they wanted. In this case, this mostly meant players reacting to red numbers being “bad” and trying to make the number go green.

我们删除了基于红/绿的结余可视化，这么做有助于让玩家更清晰地知晓我们对于市场系统的理解。请记住，这是维多利亚3，而收入开支不平衡本身并不是坏事。有时候，我们可以故意维持某种商品的短缺，来支撑对应产业，或保障特定人群的财富（我在PDXCON的演讲中阐述了这个逻辑，如果运气好，将来某刻，我也会在论坛上发一下该演讲的副本）。我们发现，当我们将物品染上绿/红色时，我们实际上让玩家们作出的反应恐怕并不总是好的或玩家他们想要的。具体而言，这主要意味着玩家对红色的反应是“坏”，并试图把数字变成绿色。

We also added balance bars, to help show you the magnitude of what those numbers mean in the scope of its total buy/sell volume and price scale. Can you tell from the old version above what the relative difference to your economy the liquor and sugar shortages are?). By giving more perspective on these offsets from equilibrium we help you better understand the cause and effect of your actions or most importantly; opportunity cost. If merely looking at high prices you might find yourself focusing on furniture or paper, but technically getting food prices lower is shown to have a larger impact on your economy, which is illustrated by the bars below the Balance values. The more blue or gold that bar is, the higher impact that Good's imbalance has on your market. This impact may differ greatly per Good if it is good or bad, but that's up to you to determine.

我们还增加了平衡条，来帮助你了解这些数字在总购买/销售量和价格规模范围内意味着什么。（你能从上面的旧版本中看出白酒和糖的短缺对你经济影响的相对差异吗？）通过对这些偏离平衡的情况给出更多视角，我们可以帮助你更好地理解自己的行为造成的因果关系，或最重要的：机会成本。如果只看高价，你可能会发现自己更关注家具或纸张，但从技术上看，让食品价格降低对你的经济会有更大影响，这都可以通过平衡数值下的平衡条来描述出来。该平衡条内的蓝色或金色越多，该商品的不平衡就对你的市场影响越大。这种影响可能视具体商品来判断或好或坏，但这由你来决定。

That's just a few examples in the game of where we are iterating on data visualization. Mostly because these are the one's I can easily remember and chat about. We are by no means done, Henrik, Aron and myself will continue in the trenches experimenting and iterating on such workflows throughout the game. We look forward to reading your feedback on release and use that to help us prioritize our backlog of ideas.

这只是我们正在对游戏中数据可视化的部分进行迭代的几个例子。主要因为提到的这些点我都记得很清楚，可以聊。我们还没干完活，Henrik、Aron和我将继续在游戏中试验和迭代这些工作流程。我们期待着在日志发布时看到你们的反馈，并通过这些反馈帮助我们确定积压的想法的优先级。

If you thought this dev diary was a sight to behold, just wait till you hear about the next one, which is the Audio of Victoria 3 which will be written by Franco Freda, our Head of Audio.

如果你觉得本篇开发日志还不错，那就敬请倾听下一篇，将会是由我们的音频领队Franco Freda撰写，有关维多利亚3的音频。

翻译：铿尔舍瑟 月蚀

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