UI feedback

It's really great to hear this
I wrote so many threads/posts about destracting elements over 4 years ...
(Darkstarr told, you will focus on Quest Journal now - unfortunately I saw it won't be done for R55.)
I am still in hope for the next Releases

A)
Please consider to design the Quest Journal with Chapters, for example:
I Path of Love
II Path of Truth
III Path of Courage
IV Path of Oracle
V Further Virtue Quests
1. Virtue Armor
2. Virtue Banner
3. Virtue Statue (Ardoris Students)

V Further Quests (not connected directly to virtue paths)
Ardoris: "Bunny"
Desolis:

VI Highvale
1. Braemar
2. Owl's Head
...

Next stage of comfort:
At each chapter beginning:
% of our progress (67% of 100%)
Received XP:
Received rewards:
- Virtue Armor / Weapon ...
- Gold

Quest tasks on the screen can be toggled
- complete off
- on / off for each chapter


B)
Map should show only places we explored (also towns)

Showing all from beginning
- takes away a huge fun experience of exploring the realm!
- is very hard for new players to know where they have(n't) been

 

Thanks @Scottie! I know it doesn't happen all at once, but it's handy to have a list of bullets.

 

My only beefs so far with the new UI is parts where it is too transparent.
I would suggest sliders for the opacity of the ui perhaps in different windows if that's ok?
Even a global ui opacity slider would be great.

Also when you have your inventory on the right hand side it STILL overlaps the entire inventory with the tool tip.
This bug has been in there since like release ... I dunno when.

Put the inventory on the LEFT and hover over your items, see how it offsets? Now put it on the right. It does not behave the same.

 

The UI in a snowy biome during daylight and at night using night vision is very hard to read.

The crafting, NPC dialogs, property manager. and the map seem okay.

Depending on the terrain in the background and time of day, the character sheet item icons and the glyphs on the left of the Skills menu are harder to see.
The menus and boxes have clearly defined outlines, whereas the character sheet just fades out.

The white and gray text without drop-shadowing on transparent menus becomes almost invisible, especially the lot marker and town access.
Town Access menu: The text under Resident and Steward is barely visible.
Lot Marker: The text under Private Residence and Claimed by _____ is barely visible, nearly invisible in the white gradient area.

 

My biggest thing I found not liking is that the utility bar is cropped to much and the combat bar and then 2nd the skills are to dark and lost a lot of color. To many borders still there I like a more seamless design. Further, I like the dark color backgrounds. Topic starter already gave a lot of feedback where I also agreed on.

 

The thing I notice, on a 1080p display, is that the utility bar glyphs look badly scaled, with a lot of aliasing, such as the circles around the Healing Touch / Healing Ray glyphs. Is anyone else seeing this?

The best thing to test something like this on is a Shroud. One of the most annoying things is bringing up the window from a housing sign/stone and most of the window is over your bright shroud without much transparency to block it. The only things truly readable are the words "Village Lot", because they aren't over transparency.

 

On the subject of opacity...



...also this shows what I mean about the glyphs. Look at the Light glyph closely.

 

I've only had limited testing of the new UI, but based on my initial impressions, these 2 posts mirror my exact thoughts. I knew that some appearance changes (border colors, etc.) were being made, but was really hoping that we would also be getting functionality improvements too. Most importantly for me would be the ability to move and resize/rescale UI windows to allow me to actually use them!

I'll give you an example of what I mean:

One computer that I play on has a small 17" monitor with 1280x1024 resolution. Without the ability to resize the elements, when I do something as simple as crafting at a crafting station, the pertinent things I would need to use (crafting window, inventory, recipe book) all overlap each other and I have to click between them to be able to use them. When I do, it brings that window to the front and it covers up the others.



That's moving them around as best I can just to be able to use them. Ideally, I'd like the recipe book in bottom left, crafting station in top left, and the inventory up higher so I can drag items onto the table easier with a quick lateral drag to the left. If I do that now, I can't read the item names in inventory without clicking on that panel first (bringing it to the top). So, I'm stuck with either doing that extra mouse click each time... or bringing inventory to the bottom "open space" and having to drag things a further distance. Neither is a good option.

When I want to look up recipes in my recipe book while crafting (like to prepare for doing something next on another table while my batches are in progress) I need to click on the book and bring it to the front. This will hide the progress bar of the crafting that is going on now... and if the internal clock in my head is off I end up wasting batch time because I couldn't see the progress bar.

Now, there are also times when instead of looking through the recipe book, I want to watch the progress of my crafting skill training on the Skills window...





I have to click on the Skills window to be able to see it or else the Crafting station window hides the skills underneath.

Right now, my screen size / resolution does not allow me to see a few pertinent windows at the same time without cycling between window panels. This could easily be resolved by simply making all of these elements resizable so they all fit on the screen at once.

So @Scottie & @wizardsmoke - Please focus on screen space issue first before trying to make things look prettier because if I can't even see it on my screen then the cosmetics won't even matter.

 

To be honest, not really a fan of the changes so far aesthetically. It seems like all they did was remove the gold borders, but now it looks less polished.

 

You just made me realize what a HUGE waste of space the crafting window is. Look at "Equipped Tool." Giant empty space that could be used for all of the buttons along the bottom (also spread out all over and containing a huge amount of empty space.)

Look at the bar at the top. Move "Butchery Station +5" down in line with the top, or put it down by the Cleaver, and you've just shaved off more room.

 

Yes, I agree there is a lot of wasted space on just about all of these windows. Fixing that would be a big help. But, keep in mind though that the name of the recipe matching the ingredients on the table will show next to the tool, and on some other tables the recipe name can be quite long... so some of that space will get used occasionally.

Therefore, not sure you could squeeze in all the buttons in that space as you are suggesting. I think they would prefer to not have them bunched up anyway (Salvage and Repair) to prevent accidental destruction.

Even if they did trim the crafting station window, I'd still like the ability to just drag a corner to resize it and fit my screen. I think the time involved to add that simple feature would be better spent than all the artistic changes being done.

 

Very much agree and this is a great example. Space is enormously important to help our brains group and make sense of information. The use of space in this design varies widely, with information jammed in for some screens (e.g. character window stats), and oddly sparse for others. The recipe portion of the crafting screen, and perhaps most egregiously the skills windows, take up huge portions of the screen. I think the team is focusing on use of color and clarity for this pass, but there are definitely things to work on spatially too.

On this note, i really do love the way RG thinks -- to draw the player into an alternate reality. The UI should enable this too. The original attempts were perhaps too skeuomorphic (at a time when the rest of the planet had moved away from this), but i personally believe there is something worth pursuing for screens like the crafting window where the player is drawn in to the crafting table. It just feels right. For things like combat however, i hope to see a shift in the other direction, to see the UI disappear as much as possible so we can focus on what our characters are seeing. My previous rants on the combat interface still apply.

 

What is that, and what have we moved onto since then?

 

Apologies, and this might be better for a Discord conversation, but the term means to emulate or to represent real world things with the user interface. For instance, as you likely remember, in early versions of the crafting interface the user was presented with a bag and a surface area for the crafting table. It was a mix of user interface that used literal elements to represent storage, work surface, tools, and ingredients. A portion of the game mechanic involved dragging elements to the virtual table. This was highly skeuomorphic, both as interface and as mechanic.

While theoretically interesting, the result was both tedious as gameplay and difficult to understand as mechanics for new users. Thus, it was deliberately evolved to what we have today.

Now, as a digital experience not all literal representations are bad. Books are an example. People really seem to enjoy that literal representation. Although i argue strenuously that the fonts used are unnecessarily difficult to read. We do have typesetting in this alternate universe so save the monk's script for the handwritten books that can be represented as full 3d models. Which *might* lead us to VR, skeuomorphism at the ultimate scale. Please forgive the digression, but how much fun would that be? Wandering around in our own creations? ^_^

 

Well it's a UI thread for feedback on Port modernizing the UI, so makes sense here.

So @Aeryk what does a modern sota UI look like?