Fixing the Horrid UI

[Atrocities]

There has been a lot of discussion about the UI and how in effective it is. While I cannot comment about what was said during the beta it is clear now that many of the people buying the game don't like the current UI configuration and lack of intuativeness. While I think the UI looks very professional, the functionality of it leaves a lot to be desired.

One of the most effective ways to affect change would be to isolate the discussion around the UI and suggestions for improving it. That way at some point a list can be presented to Aaron out lining what fans would like to see done to improve the UI.

Know this, there are literally dozens of UI improvements suggestions currently available to Aaron via other means, and as of yet he has been unable to focus his attention upon improving the AI because he has been working on taking out the bugs discovered in the retail version of the game.

So don't give up on seeing UI improvements. They are just going to take some time.

Is should also be noted that dramatic changes to the UI will not happen. IE the moving of the tabs to the top or the addition of tabs. So please keep that in mind if you choose to post an idea.

Suggestions should be kept to practile improvements that are witin the realm of feasablity for Aaron to do.

As an example of a simple yet extremely useful idea, click on the attachment above.

[Atrocities]

Improve the transfer cargo window

The current system lists out each individual troop and doen't group them together. This makes transfering of troops a major nightmare. A real click fest.

See attachment for more details.

[Atrocities]

Here is an idea for improving at a glance the systems you have control over. Take a look at the attached image to see what I mean.

[Phoenix-D]

AT: get the patches. The troop thing already has a condensed view option. The third would be already in-game, if the buttons above the quadrant map worked right..

[Atrocities]

I can't play the game after installing the 1.13 patch. The game just locks up after turn 2 on any new or saved game.

I have to alt Ctrl Del out of it and then close it down. Its very frustrating. Makes me want to say *uck this and unistall it and wait until a stable version can be cleanly installed.

I didn't see the troop condensed view option. When I get the damn game to work again I will look for it. Thanks Phoenix.

[Slick]

General comment: I really think MM should listen to fans' request for UI improvements because, no matter how "good" the game is, SE5 really loses its fun due to the UI. I just don't enjoy playing it, although I want to. The crappy UI just ruins the experience for me; it's too much work, too inefficient and aggrevating.

Specific recommendations:

Ship design:
- add "sensor range" & "sensor level" to both the create design screen and view design screen.
- allow installing any researched level of a component, not just the latest.

System view:
- add "system attributes" where there is only 1 entry per known system with all system-wide abilities shown

In various queues:
- allow drag/drop to reorder lists
- as a minimum, have "move to top", "move to bottom", "move up", "move down"

In research queue:
- add button that adjusts research percentage to "next # of turns" so that I can click to cycle a research project to finish in 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, etc. turns; or whatever is possible. This would be nice since I bet everyone is already tweaking the research percentage to get these anyway.
- for overlapping techs (like engines) add toggle option to either "upgrade to next level of same" or "upgrade to next higher component" so (for engines) I could decide to upgrade ion engines to higher levels of ion engines OR to jacketed photon engines based on this toggle. This may require restructuring the various files and/or adding another field to link them to the same family like in SE4.

In retrofit screen:
- allow retrofitting multiple ships at a time.

In Log screen:
- or better yet, a hotkey for: "take me to the location of the next log event and pop a small window telling me what happened there" That way, I don't have to keep coming back to the Log screen. I can just step thru the events, stopping as desired to take action at any/all locations.


In the help screen:
- show all versions of components, facilities, mounts, vehicle sizes, etc. so that the player can see how research is affecting higher levels and if higher levels are worth continued research. Make this easily viewable from the Designs screen and the construction queue screen for the purpose of upgrading.


In the cargo transfer screen:
- highlight the existing value so that I can just overwrite the existing number to be transferred. Having to backspace to delete the "1" is just insane.

In input dialogs for naming things:
- make the CAPS LOCK key work.
- make the ENTER key work



I have to eat dinner now. I'll add more later.

[Atrocities]

General comment: I really think MM should listen to fans' request for UI improvements because, no matter how "good" the game is, SE5 really loses its fun due to the UI. I just don't enjoy playing it, although I want to. The crappy UI just ruins the experience for me; it's too much work, too inefficient and aggrevating.

I agree 100%

[Wenin]

Atrocities said:
Here is an idea for improving at a glance the systems you have control over. Take a look at the attached image to see what I mean.

I noticed a condense check mark box at the bottom of the transfer screen to group items together.

[Baal]

Something that keeps me using shortcuts instead of the right click menu is that the right click menu is a mile long. Maybe have an options menu that lets you select the options you want to see in the right click menu a weed out the ones that you rarely/never use. This would make right clicking useful for me.

[bearclaw]

Ship Design screen not showing enough at a time
I have my screen set at a high resolution but still I can only see 5-6 components at a time. And the Mounts barely have enough space for all the options. What about mount-heavy mods? You'd have to scroll through a large list to find what you are looking for. And the right hand side of the ship design screen is difficult too. Instead of having such large 'buttons' for the items of the right, I think making them much smaller and taking up a much more compact space would allow for more room on the left hand side.

Perhaps if the right-hand side could be made smaller enough, then the mounts/components section could be in 2 rows, showing twice as many components/mounts.

The ship layout/component placement: I love that. Even though it only has a limited effect on your ships in the game (ie: decks don't matter), I love being able to design them as if they do. Engineering Deck, Command Deck, Armoury Deck.