Forums » Suggestions
Should the menus be revamped?
I spent a good deal of time as a new player, trying to navigate the menus.
I had trouble figuring out how to repair my ship, rearm it, and figure out which tabs allowed to purchase ships, and which ones allowed me to purchase commodities. It seems like a huge obstacle for new players.
But, the thing is, I never wrote any of instances of confusion down, and I've already played enough that I don't notice it anymore. But does anyone else think this might be a huge issue for new players and that it might be something worth looking into?
All we would have to do, is the developers introduce someone new to the game, and have them write down notes on what they were most confused by.
I had trouble figuring out how to repair my ship, rearm it, and figure out which tabs allowed to purchase ships, and which ones allowed me to purchase commodities. It seems like a huge obstacle for new players.
But, the thing is, I never wrote any of instances of confusion down, and I've already played enough that I don't notice it anymore. But does anyone else think this might be a huge issue for new players and that it might be something worth looking into?
All we would have to do, is the developers introduce someone new to the game, and have them write down notes on what they were most confused by.
That would be like...an essay...nay...a thesis
yes.
Things like having to 'accept' trade before being able to see the trade missions has always irked me.
The devs are already aware of inefficiencies and trouble areas in the GUI. However, making the sort of wholesale changes necessary to improve the GUI is not a simple task. This is a project that could potentially take months to do and get right.
What would be more helpful is, rather than suggesting that it be fixed in some nebulous fashion, offer a solution for something better. It's a lot easier to make changes when there is a clear path to follow.
All that aside, I have actually been slowly working on my own completely custom GUI (some of the progress can be seen in Community Projects).
What would be more helpful is, rather than suggesting that it be fixed in some nebulous fashion, offer a solution for something better. It's a lot easier to make changes when there is a clear path to follow.
All that aside, I have actually been slowly working on my own completely custom GUI (some of the progress can be seen in Community Projects).
Basically, the UI needs to be re-architected whenever we add more content to it. The current UI was designed for 800x600 PC monitors, with drastically less "stuff", and has since had a lot of new features wedged into it. At one time I had some vague master-plan that we would re-do the UI every 2-3 years. But this hasn't happened, simply because of the huge time investment it requires, as draugath says. Plus, "new and improved UI!" does not garner the kind of press response that helps to keep us in business.
But we definitely need an improved UI. Especially as we're now straddling several interface styles, including traditional mouse/keyboard PC, touch UI, controller-only (console-style), as well as VR usage.
We are working towards a goal of redoing everything, and have discussed part of it internally within the last few weeks. The best thing people can do to help (like draugath says) is to provide ideas and mockups and general discussion on how the UI might be improved for their usage cases.
But we definitely need an improved UI. Especially as we're now straddling several interface styles, including traditional mouse/keyboard PC, touch UI, controller-only (console-style), as well as VR usage.
We are working towards a goal of redoing everything, and have discussed part of it internally within the last few weeks. The best thing people can do to help (like draugath says) is to provide ideas and mockups and general discussion on how the UI might be improved for their usage cases.
Thanks for addressing this Incarnate.
Here's my wish list:
Make tabs visually unique to buttons.
Buttons should be in common locations. They seem to be in all corners of all windows as is.
The right pane with missions/navigation/sensor log etc should be horizontally tabbed across the top, below the chat with sub-tabs below that or quick drop downs. I never understood why it was off to the side, seemingly disconnected from it's content by a frame to the right.
"Buy ship" should be renamed to something like "shipyard" so as not to be confused with "purchase ship".
Only one Inventory button is needed.
Inventory data should be sortable/filter by amount, location, type, weapons, ships, equipment (it's quite cumbersome as is)
Instead of the radio buttons for channel (which are damn near impossible to select on a tablet), a drop down menu directly beside the text prompt to choose your channel/sector/guild/group would be better.
The Station Inventory on the welcome tab is completely useless and redundant. You can not sell, equip, load or do anything from that window. It's just noise.
When you look around the window and see empty panes, it's a waste of space. I'm all for white space, but there are often boxes/frames with nothing in them. I feel like you could merge some of these many inventory panes and have less of these boxed frames everywhere. Load/unload, inventory, other inventory, cargo, station inventory should all be under the same tab.
Landing in Xang Xi station I am greeted with 3 paragraphs of text that I don't think I've ever bothered to read. It sure takes up a lot of space on my screen though. Too much clutter.
Here's my wish list:
Make tabs visually unique to buttons.
Buttons should be in common locations. They seem to be in all corners of all windows as is.
The right pane with missions/navigation/sensor log etc should be horizontally tabbed across the top, below the chat with sub-tabs below that or quick drop downs. I never understood why it was off to the side, seemingly disconnected from it's content by a frame to the right.
"Buy ship" should be renamed to something like "shipyard" so as not to be confused with "purchase ship".
Only one Inventory button is needed.
Inventory data should be sortable/filter by amount, location, type, weapons, ships, equipment (it's quite cumbersome as is)
Instead of the radio buttons for channel (which are damn near impossible to select on a tablet), a drop down menu directly beside the text prompt to choose your channel/sector/guild/group would be better.
The Station Inventory on the welcome tab is completely useless and redundant. You can not sell, equip, load or do anything from that window. It's just noise.
When you look around the window and see empty panes, it's a waste of space. I'm all for white space, but there are often boxes/frames with nothing in them. I feel like you could merge some of these many inventory panes and have less of these boxed frames everywhere. Load/unload, inventory, other inventory, cargo, station inventory should all be under the same tab.
Landing in Xang Xi station I am greeted with 3 paragraphs of text that I don't think I've ever bothered to read. It sure takes up a lot of space on my screen though. Too much clutter.
Also chat window should have tabs across the top so you can look at the 'all' chat output like normal, or select another tab which will show only PMs, and other tabs that will be the currently open channels. Maybe even separate PMs by sender.