Just wanted to post some thoughts on the HUD and how I'm experiencing it.

I recently bought a 30" monitor that can do 2650x1600 (it's yummy). On a regular desktop it works great as I can keep several things on top and only have to shift my eyers (instead of alt-tab'ing) to shift context. In the game however I'm discovering that it's a problem. The different information content of the HUD is so spread out that it can in certain situations break up concentration in the middle of a fight.

Ship status and enemy status are both far away from the middle of the screen which is what you're trying to focus on when fighting. Certain HUD elements are unnecessarily large, such as the tactical display. Radars get hidden away in separate corners (massive eye movement spotting an entity going from back to front).

I think a solution might be to move as many elements as possible to a "console" in the bottom middle of the screen. This would allow more of the sides to be used for visually spotting enemies (as you would in a fighter plane) and you would have the console with information protruding closer to the center of the screen for quick visual inspection.

I'd also be willing to give up completely a strip of the bottom of my screen to use for non-critical information such as the chat and equipment field. (Multiple chat windows would also be nice.)

I'll see if I can make a mock-up to demonstrate what I'm talking about and if I'm feeling frisky I might even have a go at making a skin. :)

Comments please!

I think your problem could be solved if we had the ability to easily customise our HUD. I know that there are a few plugins out there that make changes to the HUD. Perhaps the Devs could make it easier to do this - perhaps the lua HUD class could be extended for this purpose.

Perhaps this thread should be moved to the Suggestions forum.

sit farther away from your monitor

A modular HUD has always been in the plan, just not a priority now as so many things are being tweaked that would impact the HUD.

This IS a suggestion, and we'll move it later today.

I have a 23" monitor. I just go windowed mode to keep the resolution at a decent size. (1600x1200). This way I can watch movies and the like when I'm doing tedious things like trading, but have enough screen space that VO looks amazing as well (and it works just fine for fighting).

Gotta say, I'm jealous of your 30" :p.

Information being faaar away in the corners is precisely why i made customHUD plugin, try it: http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/9/18790#234390

In the short term, we could potentially keep the HUD to a square or 4:3 region of the center of the 16:9 screen. We do this with Matrox Triplehead2Go stuff. We could make some sort of default for doing that if the resolution is greater than X, and the aspect ratio is widescreen.. to try and automatically account for larger monitors. For instance, all the 24" monitors on NewEgg are at least 1920 in horizontal res.. we could say anything of that scale or higher gets a centered 4:3 HUD.

I don't want to do this for all widescreens, of course.. some of the little netbooks have widescreen displays (on like 10" monitors) where we would probably want the current HUD.

My laptop is 1920 wide but is only a 17".

Currently my house also has a 24" monitor, also 1920 wide, a 28" monitor, 1920 wide, and a 30" monitor, 2650 wide. Although there is a correlation between monitor size and resolution, a 17" and a 28" screen are quite different in size. Granted, the 28" thing is only used as a TV in the living room (it has huuge pixels, around 65dpi), more HUD customisation is the way forward here I think.

Windowed mode is used on all because fullscreening and unfullscreening in Linux will currently sometimes grab the screen without grabbing the keyboard, which will make it impossible to quit the game normally or play it, which requires killing vo and restarting it.

darkgrey: Agreed, I don't quite see why the hud elements have to be statically placed, potentially they could be any size, shape or location. I think this could also lead to some very interesting experimental skins.

peytros: thanks for participating... (teacher says; could do try harder) :)

Whistler: Isn't the fact that tweaks impact the HUD even more reason to decouple it? It was intended as a general observation but I see now that it would fit better under suggesions. :)

aticephyr: Yup, I've got it windowed (so I can easily reference web pages) but the window is 2048x1536, which still makes everything too far apart.
When I saw it demoed with a game I just had to get one. ;)

maq: Excellent! Thanks for making that. :)

incarnate: That would probably help a little, but I think it's not just a widescreen issue, it's about total screen real estate. Good temporary fix though. :)

The HUD is what it is.. I agree that changing it to more dynamic, configurable elements would be very cool. However, it would require some time as well, as it really.. isn't that way at all, right now. The centralized-4:3-HUD thing is the best I can do on short notice to try and mitigate things, as I'm pretty sure that's not very hard for us to implement.

Is modularizing the HUD something that's on the task list? If it is, does it have a priority (as in a target release or target date)?

No, it doesn't have a target release at this time. A configurable HUD would be great, but it wouldn't fundamentally create more Stuff To Do in the game. This is our current and foreseeable focus.

FYI, my "quick" solution to the above issue has been added as a ticket into our system.

Damn, and I thought I'd heard a rumor that the only thing left standing in the way of player controlled cap ships was that the HUD wasn't big enough.