Looking for feedback on the UI now that we have had people playing for 6 months or so. I don't plan on changing the default UI much other than enhancing function, but I am trying to plan ahead to develop some full UI mods by the end of May that could be optimized for different situations.

One of my current efforts, a photoshop mock up. Idea is to increase visibility and push the floaties out to the edge of the screen so they can run free w/o interfering with other UI elements. Also making it much easier to read. One suggestion has been to make larger secondary target boxes, these are slightly larger, but maybe some ones the size of the hot keys would be useful. I am more a fan of simple color schemes the odd blue green and not quite orange that we have now wouldn't be my choice.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4966230/Foxhound4.png

So mostly I would like to see layout and graphical suggestions that I myself can do through xml and image edits. Ones that require coding are of course welcome, but new features will be added only if our coders get free time (which they really dont have right now). What UI elements become important when you are in Oly vs which are important when you are in the Uni rush building could also help.

Thanks, Feathers.

Honestly I wouldn't want that.

I love the C2 interface, the only suggestion I would make is that we could have icons for squadmate's slaves and drones where you already see your own slaves, drones, and squadmates themselves.

Perhaps my only complaint is about the tooltip boxes that pop up for inventory items... Annoying as hell where the choose to pop up, and how they multiply, and sometimes the descriptions are cut off oddly.

As Kyp says, more in-depth and legible squadmate status and a complete revamp of tooltips would be my top priorities as well. Not sure if that's within the scope of your work.

Also, I agree that the color scheme of the default UI is off-putting.

I'd like to be able to select squad members slaves from a different menu, maybe in the pop up box with their health it can display their combat slaves health and energy. It would be helpful For a monk healing a slave swarm.

Some constructive criticism (I hope) for the c2 GUI in general, not so much suggestions for what I'd like to see in a new gui:

• Text in the top "ribbon" not vertically centered, such as level, credits etc.
• Station, Galaxy, Jumps columns in the trade tab... who even uses this? Should be check box like in c1
• Tabs not in view require you to press the arrow button to see the rest - even a dropdown would be preferable to this current implementation of tabs
• UI isn't high resolution friendly:
  
  • Without editing the XML, half of the top "ribbon" isn't even used.
  • Current text scaling implementation is weird: I have the text size on largest and it makes the chat text nice and big, but the input field text size doesn't increase. It also reduces the amount of visible text lines to like 5. Theres a trade off here for users of larger resolutions. Either you have tiny text and lots of lines, or you have legible text and can't see more than 5 lines (unless you edit the chat.xml). Having larger text also messes up the tabs even further, but doesn't change anything like the tiny text on the top ribbon.
  • Inventory is also messed up by increasing the text size since you can't resize the window, meaning that like the chat you feel rather claustrophobic when using it.
• Bottom bar doesn't remember the order of chats you move around. I preferred the old Event, All, Trade, Help, Galaxy order and when I start the client up I have to rearrange it. I don't think this order can be changed via XML but it should, or at least save it to a config file.
• The player base control tab isn't pretty; the labels should at least be made bold, and the buttons at the top could do with being made bigger to fit the text
• My suggestion for getting rid of the station concourse on player base general tabs and increasing the description size hasn't been implemented despite it being a good idea!
• When clicking the social button, the dialogue opens showing squad, when it should either be made so that it defaults to team. Could maybe even assign each tab (squad, team, friends) to separate buttons on the bottom bar.
• Add in a scalable map? I heard this wasn't already implemented for some reason but it should be a priority since the 1x and 2x buttons are bleh, except for the full screen one, which is ubar. Also the zoom slider is meh, the buttons from c1 worked better imo.
• Do something else with the avatar tab in the character dialogue, it looks so empty. Maybe put another XP progress bar there.
• Not really UI related but do some anti-aliasing on the radar, it looks like some 8bit mini game. Make it scalable too!
• Also not really UI related but add an option to disable the custom pointer
• Semi UI related as it covers how the user interfaces with the game, but instead of having the circular thing appear around objects on mouseover, it might be an idea to give a stroke to 3d objects and a hue/patterned overlay. Would help when trying to select things like ships all on one pile or stuff over a warp instead of ambiguous circles.
• Make the bulletin board unaffected by the text size unless it does it nicely, currently it looks gross on largest text size
• I'd remove the background images from the space station UI dialogues also, they detract from the user interface itself.
• Instead of horizontal scroll bars in the inventory (ew) maybe have the names of stuff that dont fit in the dialogue animate from side to side?
• Tooltips are good for certain things but for looking at the stats of things in inventory it would be cool if there was a little button in the bottom left that could extend a little info panel showing the stats of the current item selected, similar to the c1 implementation
• Add an option to keep the chat text input line visible at all times, noobs might not realise to hit the enter button
• Make it so that new dialogues being opened always appear on top of other dialogue boxes.
• Make an option to allow the user to choose where the target options appear: the current place on the right, the center, or next to the target in question if on screen
• Give the user a slider to adjust the hue of all UI elements.

For those of you want to see what I mean when I say the text sizes changes are iffy, click here for a look of the standard text size and here for a look of the largest text size. In both situations I am using the increased size of the chat window (its tiny otherwise). This is on one of my 1080p screens.

Probably missing some points, I'll edit this post if I come up with anymore

p.s. if you dont want this big ass post in your topic I'll go make another topic about c2 gui complaints

I think there was an edit on social to show squad first as this is what is usually needed quickly in combat situations. Anyone have other opinions on this? I don't think there is room to expand the options on the bottom bar anymore than there already is.

There is a way to use hardware cursor, it is in the starting graphical options, which I feel by default should show up every time. You may have to do an .xml edit to get it to show up or it could be in options.

I really hate bold text of all kinds, I personally find it allot harder to read. All caps as well is quite hard to read.

Scale-able map was possible with code iirc, but the performance hit was ridiculous when scaling. I think it was in the seconds of lock up on the client.

I think the Avatar tab is probably waiting on future content. I think a good thing for it would be more achievements like the number of kills, such as kill ratios and mission completions. It is a bit empty atm, but it is a good root tab for that set.

I really do not like the hue or patterned over lay. If you find the circle to be inadequate then do a pattern fill on it.

What is your reason for requiring large text size? Right now I think all text is 11pt or 12pt. It was a pain in the ass to go through every dialog and make it all work with that font size.

*** oh wow, saw your pictures, that is hard as hell to read. I HATE that font. It is absolutely terrible. The whole client looks like it has been bolded. Look at the screen shot in my first post, you can see it is the font the game used to have. I find it so much more legible. I really hate bold fonts for player/ai names as well.

Enter to chat is fairly universal. And the option to keep input line visible at all times would have to be the default. I am really not sure how the chat is coded atm. Can't even change its appearance yet.

new dialogues on top of old seems obvious, not sure why it isn't that way now.

I can't move the target options box atm, it is hard codded one of my request to coders now.

I think a hue slider was on the too do list at one point. Hopefully that could be an easy addition.

I would prefer no horiz slide bar in inventory and no animation. Just clip the names and let tool tip have the whole name, thoughts?

Yeah the background images pumped things up in the beginning but they arent any good now.

Thanks for a great post, will look at getting all this stuff sorted if I can.

*didn't know there was a chat order change, that is pretty annoying. I haven't played in 3 months and can't play for another 2 so keep that in mind, screen shots help me see what you guys will want.

Anyone actually like the station backgrounds?

Only like some of them and if all of them were good would want to keep them?

Station backgrounds are useless.

Please add this.

Aye, I done that. You can find it here with my other stuff: JeffML


I converted the map to all XML the other day, SI is in progress of removing all the hard coded-ness and converting it to be customizable, so scaling and having different sizes than the default will be possible.


JeffML


As for my own opinions, the UI from an editing point of view is one of them love-hate things, I don't love to hate it, nor hate to love it though. I just love and hate it at the same time. Some of it is really confusing and complex for what it actually does. This is something I hope to improve as 'I-go-along'. Jey has sort of made me his UI go to guy when he needs new XML. If Feathers wanted to do a redo of the default UI and such with a programmer to do any new code required, I'd be happy to help him with it.

As for the user end of things, the UI can be a bit annoying in places. The buttons for full screen map and map seem backwards (P for full screen, F6 for normal??), some dialogs can be annoying and don't disappear when they should (gal info won't disappear if you have your mouse over it or such and close the map, you have to reopen the map to close it, same can happen for inventory which can sometimes be annoying).
I don't have any kind of beef with the colour scheme.

Signed and signed.

General - Crap because the light in the hallway blocks text descriptions.
Trade - I don't mind it.
Colony - c1 planets with actual visible colonies. Either change it to look c2 or make c2 have visible colonies in it.
Ships - The pic looks a bit blurry maybe have a better quality image?
Bulletin Board- Ok
Goods Records - Fine as well.