This thread is for UI enhancements and usability improvements for the new client (currently in Beta 4). Please keep this just to minor suggestions for improving menu flow and usability of existing features.

This thread is not for adding major new features.

This thread is also not for Bugs or Crashes (post those to the thread in General).

This thread *is* for things like "It would be better to move the Buy Ship menu to the Commerce tab". Or "I wish the chat didn't always keep keyboard focus when you click on other things".

Anyway.. on that note, please help us polish up the new client :).

REGARDING FONTS and READABILITY (and HUD scaling):

We're working on a solution to improve this, and offer a selection of fonts (hopefully different types as well as sizes) and auto-scale fonts and hud components based on resolution.

So, please Wait and See rather than making a lot of suggestions related to that specific issue.

There is no linear workflow through the UI. You have to go back and forth a lot to make something happen. For example, to purchase and equip a new rag, you have to take 9 trips back and forth across the screen, accessing two tabs on the left, 4 subtabs on the right, and 3 equipment lists again on the left. The greatest improvement you could make to the UI is to put the subtabs and the main tabs on the same side of the screen. Following that, put all the ships and equipment on the same tab. Until we can actually load weapons and equipment as cargo, it has no place in the commerce tab.

-tm

does that include italic? so we can add stuff like [i.] to our messages? it'd clear up alotta misunderstandings..

and I'd have pwnd FiReMaGe :P

Model of ships in the equipment/weapon group tabs to be replaced with jazzy wireframe.

It just looks out-of-place as-is. Add some drag'n'drop functionality, too.

Maybe highlight selected char in the char selection screen.

Clicking on the chat window in the nav map and stations should activate the text input field. Less need to aim with the curser that way.

usability problems are Bugs, as important as graphics problems or lua errors.

there is nothing 'minor' about suggesting something like 'fix keyboard shortcuts', as to do it properly would take several days of tedious work.

I forgot wich one it was (replenish ammo?) but there are sometimes buttons that spawn across the entire width of the screen, under a list. On my Cinema Display 20", it just didn't look like a button but just a separator or header of some kind. I spent a lot of time looking for it (and it was in my face!).

This is just not intuitive. It would be better for buttons to have a maximum width (based on text label width) and line up the buttons on either side of the screen:

| (button) (button) (wide button) ................................................................|

where the . are just white space (er ... blue space) within the |...| screen boundary.

I agree about Thumbly's workflow issue. It's perhaps just a question of getting used to the new layout, but unless you've made a preset, creating a new ship is somewhat time consuming.

The Set Preset # buttons are sometimes confusing. Are you setting the preset of the current sip you have, or the ship you have displayed in the Buy Ship list?

I'd like to see a small button in the top left of the station interface that hides/unhides the rest of it, just to "spy" on the stuff outside.

For the group screen (when it replaces your damage stuff), it might be cool to have the screen list where players are if they're not in the same sector as you, so you don't need to keep referring to group chat for their (often outdated) location information.

I haven't touched client 4 yet, but here's my take as of client 3 (also posted in the bugs thread) :

1) In the Weapons and Equipment tabs, it would be nice to have the right-side info frame divided in a (large) upper section and a (small) lower section, giving space for (in the small, lower section) a model or wireframe of the ship you currently have selected. For even more convenience, it would be neat if selecting this ship frame would give you (in the above info frame) information on that ship/layout.

2) In the Ship Selection tab, it would be much easier if the ships were sorted by type within location, and more importantly, that there is a way (from this screen) to see what is equipped to each (list equipment at the bottom or side of the model frame like it is in the old client - add perhaps text info on specific weapon type as well as the icons)

Also, purchasing and equipping of weapons, etc... should be done in the same main tab, if not in the same submenu. It's too confusing and time-consuming to go back and forth multiple times while outfitting a ship.

Cosmetics:

1) In the equip and weapon groups tabs, I'd much rather see a green (or damage-showing choropleth color spectrum, Green-Red) wireframe than a full, textured model of the ship.

pretty much what UD said on the cosmetics..

Suggestion: have screenshots save out as jpeg's instead of extremely large, 5.4 meg targa's

They are saved in a lossless format so the game doesn't have to compress them. Personally, I'd go for PNGs.

PNGs are compressed, and often take longer to compress than JPEG, since the compression is lossless...

have a third-party program or your OS handle the screencaps then... I use Hoversnap, and I have done so for games long before VO. It can save in several different formats, though I have it set to PNG.

My computer can't even *read* targa...

Or just periodically execute this shell script:

#!/bin/sh
cd ~/.vendetta #Vendetta directory
TODAY=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
mkdir originals-${TODAY}
mkdir compressed-${TODAY}
for i in *.tga
do
    M=`basename $i .tga`.jpg #Change jpg to png for PNGs
    convert $i $M
    mv $i originals-${TODAY}
    mv $M compressed-${TODAY}
done

Gonna throw my 2 cents at UDave and tumblemonster.

The buy ship screen takes too much moving back and forth, its jarring.

Seeing what's on the ship we're browsing without having to select it and switch tabs to check the equipment would be nice too.

Udave's Wireframe idea is really cool too.

Well it'd be really nice when we can customize our UIs to our individual tastes, but...

I think that managing ships and weapons should all be under a single station tab. Buying, loading, and selling cargo should be under a second tab.

Before the traders start to complain that I'm favoring fighters over traders, here's my reasoning. Okay, I am favoring fighters over trading but there's a very specific reason. People who PvP are going to be dying and changing ships and weapons far more frequently than a trader. With ships and weapons under a single tab, a pilot can experiment with their ships far more easily. If a trader isn't attacked very often, they can stick to the cargo tab to manage their cargo quickly and get back out into space.

Anyway yea, I think that would streamline things with the UI

As well, in the ship tab, it should probably be organized from top to bottom,
-Ship
--Buy
---Buy Ship
---Buy Weapons
--Manage
---Ship Equipment
---Weapon Groups
---Your Ships
--Sell

So you can see, there's something like a workflow there. You buy all your stuff, move down, load and group weapons, and then you launch. If you want to try new weapons on an existing ship, you buy weapons, select the ship, and load them. And if you want to sell your ship, you unload your weapons, move down and sell.

What do you think?

A few minor things:

== Station ==

News - can you have the items display in a sort-of table format (eg. have the news item names line up underneath each other). This gets tiring to read:

Mon 31st July 2005, 01:23 This is an item
Tues 1st August 2005, 01:23 This is another item
Wed 2nd August 2005, 01:23 This is yet another item
etc.

Universal inventory - current for each station you have an imitation of a Windows Explorer folder icon. It'd probably look a bit better if you had something more in the theme of the rest of it, eg. a station icon, or a simple circle that changes when the 'folder' is open/closed, etc. The folder looks a bit cheesy, sorry. :S

Button clicking - When in the station, it'd be nice if the click areas for the buttons on the right-hand-side was made slightly larger. I find myself almost clicking them (missing by a couple of pixels), repositioning, and trying again.

Button positioning - In general, I find the stretched-out spacing of the buttons on the right to be a little ugly. I'm not sure if this is an artefact of how the new UI was coded, or a concious design choice, but it might be an idea to have them closer together at the top end of the side-bar.

== In-Flight ==

Chat Window Scollbar Spacing - At the moment, the scrollbar is jammed up against the text in the comm window (in flight). Could you space it out a little more?

Thanks for the work you chaps have put in. :)

- Tol Kerhys

Oh, I'm not sure if I like having the "Disconnect" button on the docking window. Is there a particular reason why it's there?