Greetings.

I have been playing Vendetta in the 2002-2004 period, during early development. I enjoyed it so much that now I'm giving it a try.

The improvements are great, except one thing: The station menu sucks! It is crazy designed, it has too many levels and is too confusing, because things tend to move (description text are not always in the same place etc.).

I can help you in designing a better one, if you are willing to modify it. Some of my ideas would require efforts (i'm a developer so I understand how hard it is to make even minor changes). You may start with minor changes and decide wether to take the major ones if you want.

What I'd like to hear is if you are willing to evaluate these changes, because if you are not I just don't take the time to think about it.

Just to make a couple of examples:

- Buy ship, proposes ship data in a area too small, so clicking ship1 and ship2 repeatly won't allow you to compare characteristics, because only the first ones (Mass, Armor, etc.) are visible without scrolling, and switching ship resets the scrolling.

- Configure ship has two more buttons as sub-menu, like "Addons" and "Groups", instead, as there is enough space, put those buttons inline with "Select Ship" and "configure Ship" like:

"Select Ship", "Ship addons", "Configure groups"

There are thousands of examples like this, in other words you should try to eliminate the third sub-menu in most places, it is really stunning!!!

Also i find it confusing to be able to do the same things in more ways.. for example I think I found at least 4 different ways to unload and sell ship cargo, and 2 different ways to repair ship damages.

I hope this will be useful to you to improve this beautiful game, if you need further help from me, just tell!

Regards

Follow-up: I read another thread speaking about the ability to "walk" inside the stations. Well, nothing like that but here is another idea:

What about separating the station in "rooms"? I think you already have something like that.. it is "Commerce", "Ship", and "Your PDA" (well, PDA is not actually a room..but you may turn it into briefing room, and ship could be hangar/officine).

Now that makes sense in the following way: If you customize the interface a little based on the room you select, like a background picture, button colors theme, etc. it is easier for human brain to group functionalities with colors and background picture, and it won't happen that "where the fsck is that screen???", selecting all the buttons at random until you find that. Having your mind associate the right room by colors/music/image would reduce the area to search for that paricular screen..i.e. you KNOW it is in the commerce room, so you have less buttons to try. And it would also give a feeling of going around the station, seeing different backgrounds of internal shots (have you ever seen Battlestar Galactica?). :-)

I absolutly agree. Even after playing for quite some time, it still happens that I search through the menus. E.g. it took me some time until I found the "Sell" sub-sub-menu in the commodities menu for selling my station cargo. Please eliminate all sub-sub-menus!

-- Schelling

It actually isn't that hard to modify the layout of the station interface. Post your ideas, and some mockups as needed, and one of the resident lua hackers might help put that together.

ill make a mockupof what I think it should look like

I agree to the new station menu..

I just started to play, and i like so far. except for the station menu's.. It just doesn't look like the rest of the game.

Maybe some 3d in the menu's? a docking bay with you're ships in it.
3d weapons, etc. etc.

-Ronald

Just an idea ...

In the screen where you allocate weaponry/equipment to ports on your ship, add a tab on the right that displays the list of all items the station has for sale (only those items that can be bolted to your ship obviously). Then you can just drag and drop from the list onto a port. The item is automatically purchased and installed.

This would save a ton of time (and clicking).

Yes, I know, drag and drop has been suggested before, this is just an added use for it.

I agree the station menu is not laid out the best. I'm focused elsewhere right now, and have no one else to really work on it, but I welcome feedback, mockups and ideas. The challenge is keeping the really useful stuff available quickly for veterans, while also making things intuitive for newbies. It might be better, in the long run, to go with multiple optional interface sets. But, that's kind of the idea of opening up Lua, as well, that people can configure things how they like.

Don't expect anything more than a menu interface with a background in the near term. We don't have the resources to work on any fancy 3D interfaces right now. But, we could definitely improve the basic menu concepts.

incarnate's post, unnecessary text redacted:

"Don't expect anything more... right now. We could definitely improve."

Well, more like "don't expect me to do stuff right now, I like ideas, it needs improvement, feel free to try fixing it yourselves".

I do want the ideas and mockups and input and stuff, so they're here for reference on the thread when I come back to it later.

So guys, here it is my idea. Fetch it here:

http://www.themnemonic.org/vendetta1.png

You may find out that some changes are similar to how the station interface was in early 2003, when I happened to play Vendetta and liked it much more than it is now.

I can notice that you were trying to distinguish the "commerce" activities from the "war" activities, but the result is a big mess. My solution distributes the operations
in a different way. To commerce, you have to buy (in the shop) and unload your cargo (hangar deck). To war, you have to go exactly in the same places because
the shop sells both commodities and ships+weapons, and in the hangar deck you can configure them.

I *recommend* that the first level buttons are associated with the idea of moving between ROOMS, so you should change a background picture for each of the five rooms, this is because it is easier for our mind to associate ideas with sounds/images.

Note that this is NOT about 3d menus or fancy stuff, so please don't be off topic any longer in this thread with those things. Btw, i used to be a NetHack player (without GUIs), so for those who knows that RPG game, you can understand why i care little about graphics, and A LOT about entertainment and usability.

So, check out my drawing and tell me if there is something wrong. The final menu tree should be something like this:

Welcome (no sub menus)

Shop (Ships, Small things, large things, power cells, commodities)

Hangar Deck (Select ship, load/unload [*sell here*], configure ship, slot groups)

The Bar (no sub menus)

PDA (leave as it is now)

Thank you for your attention!

--
JohnnyTH / themnemonic

Awesome, I like that. Care to take a whack at the "hangar deck" submenus?

Use something different than really, REALLY light stuff on a white background... It'd be fine with like; blue, red, and green! Monitor colors FTW.

Oh, and nice idea BTW

Offhand, why not jsut bring back the old station interface?

Because it had a miniscule fraction of the abilities of the current station interface?

BTW: I actually like the current interface, so my vote is against changing it in any way other than minor reorganization.

Back when I cared for VO development, I wrote my ideas on the menu structure. Since I never bothered to send them to John, I may as well do it now, just to add some ideas into the blender.

http://www.mekwars.org/vo-menu.pdf

Themnemonic:
I like your station setup. It would allow different stations to use a unique station background image set. Perhaps this could depend upon the station type. This is just like how Escape Velocity used different images for each world when the player landed.

The interface you suggest is quite practical and would really enhance the experience.

Syylk:
I like how you renamed and resorted the menus. However, I would prefer a streamlined system like the one suggested by themnemonic.