UI critiques.

[AdmiralTigerclaw]

Okay, so I have four areas for improvement in the UI that I've noticed while playing:

Area 1: The upgrades list, and similar lists, could really use subcategory trees rather than have everything in one long list broken with headers. While there is no inherent confusion caused by this, it does become a little annoying to have to scroll up and down the entire equipment list if you want to just pop in to one of the sub-categories, such as the autopilots, and do a swap on them. Interfaces nest equipment inside categories and sub-categories like this for ease of access, provided they aren't MMO fast button shortcuts that you need to tap NOW. (Your HUD gets CROWDED in MMOs.)

Area 2: Certain interaction fields can be troublesome in the menus. I'm aware of two at this point:
First, in the tuning screen, each tuning slider has the corresponding information display telling you what it does. In order to select this info, however, you must click on the slider or slider line, as expected. The problem begins at this click, if you aren't careful in your click, the slider will jump to a new setting immediately upon the selection click, resulting in a change of tuning instead of just selecting to read the display ABOUT that tuning. I think there needs to be a selection interaction box encompassing each slider, so that you can click 'near' it to get the information display without moving the slider.

A similar problem occurs on the trading market screen. The scroll wheel of a mouse has a function conflict on this screen. The mouse-wheel is used both to scroll up and down through the materials list, and to 'scroll' the buy/sell slider. The conflict occurs because the scrolling up and down steps are not synced with the vertical size of each materials selection box. You can place your mouse in a blank space and 'scroll down' for example, but one or two steps later, your mouse will be on one of the buy/sell sliders, and will scroll that left or right instead, resulting in an accidental purchase or sale. I would personally suggest disabling the scroll option for the sliders.

Why the market screen is something as imprecise as a slider in the first place is beyond me, but just about any other game is going to make that ticker buttons and a type-able text field for numbers, coupled with a button for 'buy' or 'sell' to the side. This way, you can put in what you wish to sell, see what the payout is going to be, THEN hit the button to confirm.

But right now, getting rid of that scroll conflict is more important.

Area 3: Information on the HUD introduced by the ship's advanced autopilot is not clear. I don't know what the ring of marker lines around the ship represents aside from observation showing it to be 'contacts' around you. Neither the color of the lines, nor their length are explained as far as I can see. At this time I am ASSUMING they represent size or density readings of contacts. I am uncertain. My main engine exhaust plume shows up on it, so I'm not even certain if it's that, or a thermal reading. Or even a proximity indication.

Area 4:
On the equipment upgrades screen, and I think also the tuning screen, you have an active graphical display of power stats and behaviors of the ship displayed over time when you have an option selected. At first, I was uncertain if these graphs were purely cosmetic, but I've come to the conclusion that they are actually representative of things like the ship's power curve as you use a specific component. It needs to be made clear to the player that these graphs DO actually hold meaning, and that they are live representations of what an equipment alteration does to the performance curves.

[Koder]

Thank you for taking your time writing this down! Feedback like this really helps me to tune in the game to player expectations.

1. The collapsable upgrade menu is on the backlog already, I'll start working on it as soon as I finish the current batch of story content upgrades.
2a. Tuning screen - good point, I think I'll add question mark icon to just display the information.
2b. Mineral market - already fixed in 0.188.3, available right now in experimental branch.
3. Those are indeed contacts. Actually, it's a lidar display - same as on your lidar screen. I was hoping the synchronized refresh rate would make it obvious, but I see it was not clear.
4. While I agree, I don't have an idea right now how exactly to convey that these charts are meaningful beyond what is in the game now. What's your suggestion?

[AdmiralTigerclaw]

1: Okay cool.
2a: Understood.
2b: Also understood.

3: The LIDAR screen is hard to read (due to it being small) in its base form and fairly useless outside of the upgrades provided by the camera drone upgrades. (I'm assuming the color cloud effects are the gravimetric drone, and that they represent a 'topographic' style resource density map. It sure seemed that way when I followed it towards redder and redder areas.) Due to the LIDAR being hard to read (outside the upgrades), I never at any point noticed it was even remotely in-sync with the HUD contact ring.

Now, I know the overall HUD is scale-able, but I'm one of those players who likes his playfield unobstructed (thank you for fixing the auto-zooming camera, BTW, that thing drove me bonkers), and will set HUD elements that aren't essential aside or small if possible. A suggestion I would make that would solve this is to have each of the HUD elements individually resize-able and perhaps even move-able so players can put all the info they consider relevant where their eyes can find it best.

Alternately, or even in-tandem with adjustable HUD elements, 'M' for 'MAP', as many games do already. Everyone does that for a reason after all. But a 'MAP' command to bring the LIDAR screen up front and center nice and large for clear inspection of the environment.

Finally, on this point. What you really need to really clear problems is one of the simplest things. A visual reference screen for your various HUD and LIDAR map elements. I'm aware the game's start throws a sort of Tutorial for control at you on first play, but its explanations are by nature of Tutorials, not in-depth, and easy to miss if you're the type of player to 'come on, come on, just let me fool around for a bit!' The easiest way I can see to do this is through an Escape-menu option that takes you to a little 'book' (a powerpoint slideshow, really. It's not rocket science, that's what an Elon Interstellar drive is for) that you can thumb through. And in that 'book', would be screenshots with the appropriate markings and explanations to go with them. Simple, but essential. Also easy to update if you make an element change, and handy if someone forgets how something works and needs a reference in the moment. I can't tell you how many video games I've played where I've looked up keybindings just to remember controls. This is like that, but not for the controls.

What's really funny, is I've seen your screenshots on the updates, and up until today I couldn't for the life of me figure out where that HUD contact ring came from... Because I hadn't gotten far enough without being pincushioned by a pirate to bother getting a better autopilot.* Hilariously, I have a program called audio-visualizer (It's an EQ visualization program) that has a 'ring' style display that looks just like that. So I was chuckling to myself quietly that maybe you were 'jammin to some mining music'.


As for point
4:
You're going to hate me for the simplicity of this but... But, when you go to a screen with the graphs like the vessel upgrades, default those graphs HIDDEN, and place a toggle button in the top right corner. Name that button: "Show Ship Power Curve" and when someone toggles the graph open, the full title should be something like: "Estimated Ship Power Curve Over Time" (Because if school EVER managed to get something right, it was reminding me that having a title for a graph is rather important for getting the graph to make sense.)

One of the reasons this will help make it clear that the graph is actually functional, is that it is an active element the player turns on. You wouldn't put a pointless cosmetic feature behind a button after all, that makes no sense.

Then, if you go with my suggestion for a reference guide in the escape menu, have a page dedicated to explaining the graph. I'm assuming it comes down to a simple statement along the lines of: "This graph shows an estimate of how your ship's power-supply will function if you install this component and use it. It shows your reactor temp, the generated power, and your ultracapacitor charge, and takes into account your ship's current configuration."










*I'm an ORBITER 2010 and KSP veteran with a really good handling of thruster-controlled maneuvers. Compared to me, the autopilot guzzles remass. And that reminds me. Can we get a command input for 'stop rotation' ? No amount of delicate taps stops a drifting spin.

[deMangler]

found this thread while looking for this exact info. Very helpful.
I also am a veteran or Orbitersim. Nothing like it. Highly recommended.

To stop rotation I just do right-click and hold for a brief moment.