A couple of basic responses to common questions:

1) the new UI is not meant to look like Windows. Only the parts that still use the "default" graphics (console, options) look kind of bad and a little Windowsy. The parts where all the graphics have been replaced look like.. well, the station menu. We've prioritized the graphical redux based on utilization, so the options menus and things will be the last to be redone.. but they will be redone.

2) Yes, running 10.4.4 is probably faster than running earlier versions of OS X.

3) All loading screens and "speeding through space" screens are temporary placeholders. Also, you will eventually be able to chat while jumping.

4) Scalability on large screens will be improved. The new UI scales based on font size, and we'll be rendering out a whole bunch of different sizes for various resolutions. I don't terribly like running in 800x600 on my 21" monitor (and 6800GT) either. Also, we're still using the original font for the moment, but we're looking at replacing it with something different.

5) There's a lot of parts of the menu where new functionality is intended to go.. but the functionality requires new client/server communications mechanisms.. which can't be done without a protocol update (therefore, the new client must be in production for this to happen). Examples include the "Guild" menu and so on.

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I'll take basic questions in this thread. Please don't turn this into a major Suggestions thread though, we still aren't ready for that yet. Also, please keep the "feedback" thread specific to bug reports and free of editorials. We really want to try and fix the big glaring problems and get this thing stable and usable.. then we can focus on higher-level issues.

Is the black colouring intentional?

Yes. Basically, the intention was originally for the Black (and darker near-black) colors to be reserved for the Order of Akan faction. But at this point, I realized that whenever I get around to adding that faction, we'll be adding custom ships and things for them anyway. So there was no real point in keeping the darker colors unavailable. People had always wanted darker colors, so we just.. made them available.

They were always there, for bots and such, we just cut off the lower bit of the selection palette. The new client has the entire palette.

Can you give us a rundown or "targeted" graphic hardware for this beta?

(aka, UI is dang slow on my dual 2ghz G5 w/ it's 64Meg Radeon 9600Pro)

There's a problem with our settings "auto-detection" system. Basically, we detect the amount of videocard memory, and derive default settings from that. The problem is that the current settings for 64MB cards end up using a lot more than 64MB of memory. Any time you start to saturate a card's video memory, you induce what's called "texture thrashing", or the card drivers trying frantically to keep everything locally resident by uploading over the AGP bus. This is very slow. On a lower end machine, it's like 2 FPS type slow. Your machine (with AGP 8x) may be fast enough to do it more quickly.

We can resolve this by simply changing the default detail for various memory footprints. You can fix your client temporarily by just reducing texture detail under Options.

The fact of the matter is.. with all the new Stuff we're adding (new specularity and bump maps to existing ships, plus lots of new ships) there's going to be a larger memory footprint.. which will require reduced detail on cards that have more limited texture memory (64MB or less). We should be ok on 128MB cards for a little while. I'll be doing measurements of this over the next week.

For the hell of it, I'll run xbench before and after updating to 10.4.4, to see if the graphic card drivers did anything.

Results 10.4.3(sorry if it's too long)
Results 35.57
System Info
Xbench Version 1.2
System Version 10.4.3 (8F46)
Physical RAM 768 MB
Model PowerMac6,4
Processor PowerPC G4 @ 1.25 GHz
L1 Cache 32K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 512K @ 1.25 GHz
Bus Frequency 167 MHz
Video Card ATY,RV280
Drive Type ST380011A
CPU Test 51.31
GCD Loop 103.42 5.45 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 34.33 815.78 Mflop/sec
vecLib FFT 72.76 2.40 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 39.34 6.85 Mops/sec
Thread Test 54.23
Computation 53.47 1.08 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 55.01 2.37 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 28.52
System 31.51
Allocate 115.59 424.48 Kalloc/sec
Fill 26.95 1310.44 MB/sec
Copy 20.22 417.74 MB/sec
Stream 26.05
Copy 25.13 519.09 MB/sec [altivec]
Scale 25.02 517.00 MB/sec [altivec]
Add 27.15 578.27 MB/sec [altivec]
Triad 27.07 579.16 MB/sec [altivec]
Quartz Graphics Test 41.98
Line 33.51 2.23 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 38.51 11.50 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 39.45 3.22 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 41.03 1.03 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 73.66 4.61 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 66.10
Spinning Squares 66.10 83.86 frames/sec
User Interface Test 28.42
Elements 28.42 130.41 refresh/sec
Disk Test 20.15
Sequential 59.70
Uncached Write 56.28 34.56 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 49.90 28.24 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 84.87 24.84 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 57.43 28.86 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 12.12
Uncached Write 3.61 0.38 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 33.53 10.74 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 83.94 0.59 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 90.01 16.70 MB/sec [256K blocks]

SUGGESTIONS:

IN-STATION:

Startup: When logging in, it should not say "Entering World..." It should say "Entering Universe..." (OK, a placeholder, gotit)

Station menu: top right: Station name looks like a button, but clicking on it does nothing.

In the Ship --> Ship Cargo menu, the "Unload/Sell" should probably read "Unload & Sell" (Since that's what it DOES...)

Overall chat window typesize WAY too small.

In the Ship --> Weapon Ammo menu, it would be helpful to see in what ship the weapons were equipped, and where that ship was docked.

In the Ship tab, (and throughout) the arrow keys do not scroll up and or down.

In the Ship tab --> Weapon Groups, I REALLY LIKE the visual feedback to setting weapon groups, where the weapon icons bounce. Outstanding.

In the Ship tab --> Weapon Groups, it should not say WEAPON groups, it should say EQUIPMENT setup or something, many times ships will have no weapons. (i.e miners, etc.)

In the Ship tab --> Ship equipment, you should be able to change the color of your ship whenever you feel like it, instead of having to buy a new ship. Perhaps this costs a little bit.

In the Ship tab --> Ship equipment, this screen SCREAMS for drag-n-drop.

In the Character tab --> Universe Inventory: The inventory should remember what menus you had condensed/expanded instead of always opening up to have everything expanded. ALSO - the folders should be little stations NOT folders. Additionally, I think there should be another level of organization (maybe 2) - Show the Systems as categories above stations, and maybe NATION (Serco, Itani, UIT, Grayspace) above systems. More organization is good.

In the Character tab --> Faction Standings: I LOVE the bars. However the numerical standing should just be on the right side of the bar, you should not have to scroll over the bar to see the number.

In the StationNet tab, there should be a separate listing for bounties and news. Additionally, Bounties should have CLAIMED bounties, and current bounties on players.

In the StationNet tab, double-clicking should pull up the specific story or mission or bounty announcement or whatever.

OUT-OF-STATION:

You no longer get messages in your chat window for "FA on/FA off/ etc etc"

"Speeding thru Space..." is kind of a funny message to get as you go thru wormholes. I suggest an animation like Stargate, zooming thru a "tube" in your ship. Or perhaps stars streaking by, or something. (Oh I see yer gonna do somethin, ok)
EDIT after reading Mogul's comments: How about a picture of Phaserlight exploding?

Quick Leber. Erase that post before PahserL8t turns ranty and pulls a few snide comments at you.

These "speeding through space" (etc) messages are placeholder for something else.

eh, I don't mean to come off as ranty, I just tend to be very opinionated.

/displayshippos: best. easter. egg. evar!

Feedback/feature request: (This is probably already planned, but I'm going to list it anyways) It would be nice if the charinfo screen at character selection displayed a nice 3D view of yer ship.

Feedback/feature request: I really liked the custom character information text field that Leber had in his station interface mockup. A character description field where we can enter our own information. Perhaps even with a publically viewable portion that could represent the rumors, misconceptions and occasional truths others might come across. Something like this could encourage and facilitate roleplaying.

Incarnate wrote: "We should be ok on 128MB cards for a little while."

I'll keep this short. Whoa. How long is "a little while?" There's probably a huge installed base in the world of PC, Linux and even Mac (Hello, new Intel-powered iMac?) with 128mb-equiped video cards.

A question: What is the optimal balance between eye-candy and playability in a MMORPG?

in the former 'select ships' tab, we could see what weapons were equipped on a ship before selecting it, thanks to little icons at the bottom, I found it very usefull when you have several ships of the same type in a station, but with different weapons.
It would be cool if it could be back there ( 'your ships' tab )

LeadFist, I wasn't saying that 128MB cards won't be sufficient to play the game. I'm saying that the existing auto-configure settings for 128MB cards will probably be sufficient, without changing them, for a little while.

64MB cards are still fine to play the game too. I just need to fix auto-configuration for them, so they aren't like 2 FPS on startup.

We cannot add new ships and other graphical content without adding new textures. I'm not raising the system requirements at all, I'm just pointing out that our default settings are out of date.

Leber: Like I said in the initial post, this thread isn't really intended for suggestions. We want those, eventually, but I'll create a specific thread for it in the Suggestions forum. This is mostly to answer questions and clear up misconceptions. Thanks for the input and all, but I'd rather have it in one place where I can easily go back and reread what everyone thinks in another week or so when (hopefully) we'll have fixed the Great Big Bugs.

I'm playing on a 32M video card just fine, just not running in full "eye candy" mode.

I posted this in the Suggestions thread, but then I realized it would be more appropriate in this thread:

Thanks for making it run on 10.2.8 Ray. When are you going to release the patched version that DOES run on 10.2.8???

Yeah.
-Calder

Is there/what is the command to show FPS now? Whenever I go to a loading screen, my video card makes this weird chirpy noise. I remember hearing it whenever I hit a loading screen or something and my FPS goes up to 800... not good that my vid card is screaming in pain, but probably not your fault. Still. Be interesting to find out.

1) It's be real interesting if I even heard a video card scream in pain.

2) A week sounds like Soon™ to me.