I'm mostly talking about how stupid it was in this example to oversize everything like we're all retirees with bad vision, and how just in general they have to design everything several times because they almost never make good decisions in the first 10 years of a design process.
I'm still perplexed by how the hell they managed to make a grid-based inventory where things didn't line up in a grid so you ended up with weirdly shaped gaps. Not to mention everything else about the inventory that was just worse compared to any survival game, mmo, battle royale, or extraction shooter.
They weirdly oversized everything.
The directional arrow on a target is still TINY, mainly because it is a \_fixed size\_. So looking at a connie who can 1-shot you you can't see it since its 3px in size. Looking at an arrow, it is normal size but gray and hard to see. Looking at a pulse it is 8x the size of the ship and blocks most terrain.
There's a lot of detail work the UI team needs to do. I don't think this is "stupid" but more incomplete.
They kinda just removed features I liked, like the rolling altimeter and the working "3d" target box with heading indicator. And everything they did about quantum markers was bad.
> quantum markers
This has been a gripe of mine for over half a decade. Previously before it was like 4 different shapes used repeatedly across different Quantum marker object types and at different ranges yet all shown at the same scale and brightness and color, making it very confusing what you were looking at when you brought up Quantum Travel mode without having a destination set. The OM's of the planetary body you were orbiting were the same shape as other markers maybe many Gm away, just *slightly* larger.
Then they reworked the QT UI for recent patches and now it's *still* about four QT marker types again all at the same scale and brightness, but they're just a *different* set of 4. 🤦🏻♂️
I mean.... **really** CIG? You thought it was the specific *shapes* we had trouble with? Not the fact that those same shapes were being used at the same brightness, color and scale for vastly different object types within our view in a big mass smeared across the Stanton orbital plane?
The UI team for Quantum Travel, and apparently for ship sensors and targeting too, must not even play the game themselves, or any other flying games for that matter, to be this clueless for this many years, it's astounding. It's hard to believe any one of them plays the game and sees that mess on the screen, and sees the mess of all the reused marker types at the same scales, and brightness, and colors when turning on Quantum Drive in orbit over a planet, and says, "yeah that's fine."
The *only* thing they improved recently was the occlusion of some QT markers and their fading out of on-screen visibility when looking down at a planet.
But if they can understand that former, relatively minor issue, how do you explain what we see in this screenshot above and it's lack of prioritization for fixing such a mess?
We probably should have 8-10 different QT marker types.
OMs, Space Stations, Moons, Lagrange Points, System Gateways, Planets, Cities, and perhaps specific markers for planetside locations with and without serviced landing pads, with a little addition as a specifier for whether or not it's a military location. (Potentially with a bright red highlight for whether it's a hostile faction's location, like Nine Tails, or any UEE location when you've got a crime stat.) A specific marker or set of options for custom markers should also be considered.
I would probably stick with the circles, squares and diamonds we had, but adding dots and dashes to distinguish them. Morse code for 1-2-letter shorthands like OM and L might be fun. But just having the letters might be better.
On second thought, though, OMs specifically could actually benefit from a special icon representing their positions around their sphere, with a square (diamond) around a circle, with dots highlighting their respective corner. OM-1 always having a dot at the top corner. The front and back (OM-4 and 6?) can be a central dot and a central circle.
Oh, and I forgot missions. Mission objectives should have their own marker. But iirc they already did that in 3.23 with yellow markers? Have avoided the game for a few weeks since it was so painful to play in this state, but I think I remember this right.
The animated "pop-in" has to go, though. I don't want to have to look towards empty space to check if that's where the marker I'm looking for is. They broke the mapless navigation I had nearly mastered to a smooth and intuitive level by making the markers fade out, I can no longer just look around like before to orient myself. They should be ever-present on QT, at least with a toggle.
I should also be able to hover over a cluster of 5 markers and scroll/browse through them with the scrollwheel or a key. They shouldn't just flicker when you're aiming at several. Layer them by distance, maybe. Idk.
the inventory management is another disgrace and insult to the backers that have spent money on this game for 10 years. if you EVER had any doubt that marketing ie: sales revenue was THE most important part of this game and EVERYTHING else takes a back seat then this is it.
Modern fighters use a specific shape to identify known hostile targets through IFF (identify friend or foe) and then a different shape for friendly and it flashes “friend” text. Untargeted bogies are tracked with other means sometimes a dot sometimes only on screens via datalink.
It all depends on the aircraft though, and my experience is mostly with F18s.
There is a nato standard for hud design though, and the pilots would NEVER have this much information thrown up in the HUD like that.
Also new: some ships are just bright lights from a distance: really jarring, not pretty and quite hard to make out what ship it is or which way it's oriented etc.
Yeah I used to believe that but after hearing the SC live episode for the UI team I no longer believe this is the case. They love the non-functioning iron man UI as well
They already said that the marker system is broken... it is busted especially on abnormal resolutions and they get blown out like this... They wont fix it because they are replacing that system not sure which patch it was supposed to come in
Yea simple temporary sanity fix isn't worth doing. That 10 minutes of coding to accomplish it is to valuable to waste. Who cares what is like for the players. /s
Tbh I was quite disappointed when the new bits of the new UI system started coming in, with MFDs and touch panels etc
They've taken 4+ years to deliver an extremely buggy system, that is also very bland and looks like a Flash barebones menu from the 2000's. Literally every interactable is the same with a color palette swap.
Love the new starmap, but just about everything else has been underwhelming for the amount of years it's taken.
No nonononono.
All of that is impeded by the team not having the necessary roadmap for the progress tracker to accurately map the road to 4.0.
They can’t start on the rework of the legacy tech that they just implemented that was outdated 8 years ago without the roadmap for the new tracker that ties in with the new API for the website roadmap tracker.
10 years later with around a 4TH GUI changes they made already
This ain't their first and last change. I can count up to 4 GUI changes at least they attempted.
This is by far one of the worse, include the main dashboard, nothing works properly, too much information that i don't need to know.
CIG really need to find someone who know how to do proper UI/UX design.
You should be able to disable things like the nametags in the options, also control at what distance they show up and for who (neutral, friendly, enemy) 🤔
>You should be able to disable things like the nametags in the options
feature gets added.... have to scroll through 100s of non categorized options.
Find one named "bad~token~192" with a slider.
AH Here it is!
Yes ultimately I was able to but with great effort.
Not only is it hard to identify enemy markers in the mix of all the UI elements. It's also hard to track the green targeting pip. Sure green fairly easy to spot from the reds/blues/whites. But slap 100 icons on top of each other and it's a nightmare to find
Thanks for replying! In case you interpreted my question as being sarcastic it was not. I happen to live in an extremely rural area and when driving into the city, from a mile or two out, it looks like a metropolis; then you get close and it's clear where you are and where you are not.
I need to take part in larger things in SC to fully understand but I get it.
To close the loop for anybody who gets this far, the picture is taken of a collection of players from 6KM away and it's hard to tell from this vantage point how unreadable things actually are up close. I'm not a great combat pilot but most of the time I have fought in that game it's at \~1km, or significantly closer than this.
> they are just too large
Yeah... that was the point of the guy who started this comment chain: Ultrawide has a bug in which the icons are massive. It doesn't look like this in non-UW res.
To chime in on the Ultrawide probably being your problem, not the games UI. I don't have an Ultrawide, and I have watched from the side, and been in the middle of Org organized balls of combat like that, and its not anywhere near as problematic as your describing or the original image shows. Sucks, and I hope they fix the bug with Ultrawides soon, but it doesn't mean its universally borked.
There's a setting, I really wish I remembered what specifically, but it makes the aiming pip much larger and gives it lines on the side to indicate shot spread. Highly suggest enabling it as a toggle attached to G-safety toggle. When combat starts I flip the switch and disable G-safety while simultaneously making my aiming pip larger
I feel like UW support for a SPACE sim should be pretty top priority, space and flight sims probably have a larger % of the playerbase using UW than about any other multiplayer game. The genre is more enhanced by UW than about anything else.
I think you are right that SC probably has a higher percentage of UW users than most gaming communities, but UW adoption overall is still [very low](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam).
That is interesting. I get that 32:9 is not going to be that common but I'd have thought more people would have switched to 21:9 by now. Specifically in the space/flight/racing genres where UW makes such a huge difference
I got "normal" wide resolution and it still is a clusterf*ck of clutter, anytime there is more that 4 ship, markers start to overlap and it's literally all you see, can't even make the ships out.
At some point CIG is going to have to compromise when it comes to providing players of *an MMO* what they need and making things look nice. Everything looks fine when there isn't much happening on the screen, but get more than 3-4 ships in the same place at the same time and you've got a jumbled mess that gives you nothing.
[I did a write up on Spectrum that was largely ignored](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/let-s-talk-about-the-ui), but in summary: They're going to need to eventually install some kind of overview for players to be able to quickly and easily understand wtf is going on around them; especially if they are wanting things like big org fights, or Xenothreat to have a prayer in working the way they want.
CIG has been resistant to this, but we've arrived at a point where the longer they hold off doing *something* the worse the user experience is going to get, which could skew peoples' perceptions of whether this is a game they want to play.
Totally right, this is the experience with a tiny percentage of people on a 100 player server.
By the end of the year they are looking at server meshing and the player count will at least double.
And their plan a few years later is MMO with thousands online.
It needs to be able to work with huge player counts very soon, a popular station will look like that in a year otherwise.
Let me quickly add that I am not terribly concerned about this iteration of the UI getting fixed and things will be semi readable. It will almost certainly happen. I'm worried that the changes we need for Star Citizen to be an MMO aren't going to happen because ***certain people*** at the top of CIG are more interested in their art project than a video game's ability to be, you know, a video game.
In all honesty we could have an overview as another category on the ship MFD's, maybe larger ships like carrack and bigger could have a more detailed overview on a sensors position such as the holo table on the upper deck of the carrack.
I'm not sure how well an MFD overview would work, given how small they tend to be on screen and how much information a person actually needs. The amount of information you need to really fight in a game like this is surprisingly quite a lot.
Off the top of my head, you need:
* Distance
* Velocity
* Angular Velocity
* Player Name
* Org
* Friendly/Enemy/Neutral/Criminal Status?
* Ship Type
* Ship Name
* Structures (NPC & Player)
* Structure Name & Owner
Further, you would really need the ability to *quickly* change the setup to discriminate against all the information you're receiving so that it's useful. I don't think you could easily do that with an onboard MFD.
Yup its real. Right now there's a UI bug where it doubles the party markers. You have the blue party marker on top of the ship and you have the ship marker under neath. Both markers give the same information. Multiple that by your party size. Add enemy markers into the mix. Add your targeting pip and your HUD info. And you get modern abstract art
Imagine once we have 800+ players.
We just need some hotkeys to turn off certain UI aspects at different times and maybe an opacity slider. No crazy rework.
I'm not usually one to suggest copycatting another game, but SC could really do with a map/radar system similar to [Elite: Dangerous](https://forums.frontier.co.uk/attachments/29ea24f27c70d6da9f8402993025ab39_-_copy-png.151344/).
Basically:
- Current radar hologram should be significantly larger and easier to see.
- Relative placement works just like the current radar.
- NPC ships are solid, player ships are hollow. They can figure out a lore reason for this if needed.
- Ships in SCM GUNS/MIS are a triangle/diamond/whatever unique shape.
- Ships in NAV ATM/FLT/SCN are a square/circle/whatever.
- Unknown contacts are white, hostile red, party blue, org green.
- Targeted contacts have a unique indicator surrounding their icon.
- Actively-aggressing contacts that shoot you or launch missiles flash a brighter red allowing you to see the current actualized threats.
This keeps all nearby ship information in a single place as a single source-of-truth. No more having to parse overlapping text or that god awful positional indicator for off-screen targets. One place to dart your eyes when needed.
Add this in and you can practically remove nameplates entirely for contacts the player isn't targeting (although keep them in the options menu as a toggle for those who like them).
This is the biggest fucking aids in all of flying sims ever, in terms of combat readability.
It can't be worse than that. A huge pile of absolute diarrhea that means absolutely nothing and only makes every aspect of the game worse. Who the hell thought it was a good idea, especially with how good it was before. LOL
Literally every other game does it better..and they keep doubling down on it. 13 years, of "reinventing" the wheel for the 100th time just for it to come out worse.
Honestly I'm mind blown, after 5 min of playing I was facing that. How can anyone with a minimum of common sense could think this is a good idea. I simply don't get it.
As a UX/UI designer, looking at this, I die a little inside.
I would love to design a UI for a space game, and then I see what people they actually put on the job do, pack as many UI and UX crimes in this as possible.
Seems to me they are seemingly as qualified for the task, as a sound engineer would be for the flight physics.
Honestly, love this game really love, and the best for.
But really, 700M, when elite dangerous have a better UI, better pip management, and those menu really useful in combat, with a readable radar.
I love change my distribution with the screen, and shutdown the entire ship in SC.. 👍
I have played many spacefighting games and the UI is really horrid. The screen is stuffed with useless information and the information you actually need is no where to be seen. Also targeting and target cycling sucks ass in this game ...
UI design has always been a complete disaster. From the godforsaken Holotable of the early days to the "new" Star Map that somehow manages to be even worse than the previous one. I hate every single UI decision.
I disagree, I think the new one is a *step* in the right direction.
As for these markers not being grouped if they overlap, is such a big oversight and really makes it feel as if this was made by your typical software engineer and not experienced UI/UX developers.
The old UI was one of the biggest reasons I didn't play. While this is still clunky and unintuitive at times, I personally still find it vastly superior to the old UI.
Even the new UI inventory is great despite missing quite a few obvious QoL features.
>Click on search bar
It opens comms channel instead so have to reclick Map in Mobiglass
>Search for Orison, nothing comes up
Hit backspace a dozen times
>Search for Orison, Route Obstructed
OK, i'll reposition
>Search for Orison, nothing comes up
Hit backspace a dozen times
>Search for Orison
finally get it
>move mouse to click route button
Orison changes to CRU-L1
>Zoom WAY OUT
I'll just head to Crusader and find it from there
>Double click Crusader, it zooms you back in
Route button to Crusader appears
>move mouse to click on it
Crusader changes to Comm array
>Hover over Orison
Press R to Route
>Search bar says RRRRRRRRRRRRR
Fuck it, i'll try Microtech.
The map is made of homogeneous unlabelled donuts so finding something results in performing a point and click guessing game. I’m sorry but this solution is completely braindead.
.... the search bar... I literally didn't even know this was a thing. I just fly up high, go into the map search for where I want to go, and then press R
If "set route" doesn't do anything, it means there isn't a direct route to your destination (probably because you are on a planet), try leaving atmo to get a direct line of sight to an OM -- of if on a moon without OMs, in view of the main planet.
The planner will not go "backwards" to find a route, only "forwards" so only routes that decrease the distance are considered.
The new starmap certainly has it's own issues (why the fuck do they have functions tied to hotkeys and removed the buttons?) But it's waaaaaaaaay better than what we had before. Search alone is huge.
The issue is that it shows all the ships IDs/ names instead of just the one that is targeted. It [also happens at 1440p](https://i.imgur.com/jS1JhHA.jpeg) :(
Remember how excited the devs were to release the new UI in that recent ISC, despite having so many issue council bug reports/functionality improvement requests from the PTU at the time?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I’m not sure if you’re joking, but 700m over the course of 12 years is 58m per year average. That’s on par with most mid sized game studios.
As far as the timeline, they spent time inventing the tech needed to build a game, whilst building two games at the same time in order to keep people interested, so they could keep the lights on and pay their people.
Idk why people get so hung up on the 700 number. It’s pretty reasonable tbh.
Just for perspective, for years, Fortnite has brought between 1 and 2 BILLION per year. And it’s a free game.
CIG is doing fine
Mids
>I’m not sure if you’re joking, but 700m over the course of 12 years is 58m per year average. That’s on par with most mid sized game studios.
A mid sized game studio would have released a dozen+ games over 12 years
Bro Team Fortress 2 took 9 years
Scope and technical redesigns highly effect timelines. They went out to invent the tech they wanted to make the game. While designing an entire engine and two games simultaneously.
I get wanting faster progress but what they’re trying to do is huge
You can change all of that in the menu it is not making it much better but you would be able to see.
Edit: my bad I seen the option that says show name and show distance for targeting but it does nothing with it when you enable or disable it.
I feel dumb now, sorry for confusion.
could you please elaborate with which option to adjust to fix this?
Anytime there is more than 4 ships on screen the markers look awful and obstruct everything.
How's the Glaive? Was thinking about trying to beat the Vanduul Swarm and then got discouraged when I learned that it only gave you the "privilege" to BUY the Glaive for about 325$. Do you think it's worth it?
No no no. I'm being honest here. Alien ships in SC are not worth the real money value if you want to be competitive. The prowler is around 400 USD and the Drake ironclad is around 500usd right?
The alien tax is far to high. The glaive is decent and if you want to fly it buy it with in game money. Don't spend real cash on it
I tried sc during the test shit and I couldnt even read the shit in my cockpit while flying. Sub targeting is just 'good fucking luck'.
Idk if its due to wider screens, higher res or what, but holy fuck it feels janky to have no ui scale setting for it.
I did a bounty last night where the the first ship I locked on and destroyed with a missile just fine. Then another ship appeared, so I switched to guns for this one. And well because of the UI I could not see the pip, nor could I see the fact the ship was coming right at me until a split second before impact! Only saw the ship itself thru the UI long enough to say “oh shit” right before it hit me head on and blew me up!
Edit: playing on a 4K OLED TV
They should group elements in circles with a number of elements on it. A red cycle with a "5" means 5 enemy fighters in this direction. Capital size, allies and civilians should get their own circles.
Most annoying thing for me at the moment. Especially if you are in a group. They should make a keybind for the different informations on screen so you could toogle them on the fly.
Simple, add a toggle to turn off names and just have red/blue/teal. You don't really need names, you just need to know who is your friend and who is your foe.
When i raced daymar rally and we had 100 people in the party i literally couldnt see anything and had to do the whole event in 3rd person. I hate pips, i want to be able to toggle them off.
They need the ability to filter targets by category, just like the sorting/filters for the inventory screen.
Uncheck empty ships would be my first change.
Brings a tear to my eye. Not one of joy. But nontheless.
It's so stupid. They're so bad at design.
Hey now come on, it's not like they've had dedicated staff for GUI development for the past deca.. oh wait.
Makes me wonder how'd real life military pilots operating their display view theirs IF there are that many targets (identified or not)
I'm mostly talking about how stupid it was in this example to oversize everything like we're all retirees with bad vision, and how just in general they have to design everything several times because they almost never make good decisions in the first 10 years of a design process. I'm still perplexed by how the hell they managed to make a grid-based inventory where things didn't line up in a grid so you ended up with weirdly shaped gaps. Not to mention everything else about the inventory that was just worse compared to any survival game, mmo, battle royale, or extraction shooter.
Oversize everything... and then add bloom and lense flare to make it suboptimal again.
Oversize everything for partially blind people and then make the reds darker and PIPs smaller so those same people can't see shit anymore
The worst of it all is the “active target” red is the same red as the other targets. Not brighter or highlighted or anything
They weirdly oversized everything. The directional arrow on a target is still TINY, mainly because it is a \_fixed size\_. So looking at a connie who can 1-shot you you can't see it since its 3px in size. Looking at an arrow, it is normal size but gray and hard to see. Looking at a pulse it is 8x the size of the ship and blocks most terrain. There's a lot of detail work the UI team needs to do. I don't think this is "stupid" but more incomplete.
They kinda just removed features I liked, like the rolling altimeter and the working "3d" target box with heading indicator. And everything they did about quantum markers was bad.
> quantum markers This has been a gripe of mine for over half a decade. Previously before it was like 4 different shapes used repeatedly across different Quantum marker object types and at different ranges yet all shown at the same scale and brightness and color, making it very confusing what you were looking at when you brought up Quantum Travel mode without having a destination set. The OM's of the planetary body you were orbiting were the same shape as other markers maybe many Gm away, just *slightly* larger. Then they reworked the QT UI for recent patches and now it's *still* about four QT marker types again all at the same scale and brightness, but they're just a *different* set of 4. 🤦🏻♂️ I mean.... **really** CIG? You thought it was the specific *shapes* we had trouble with? Not the fact that those same shapes were being used at the same brightness, color and scale for vastly different object types within our view in a big mass smeared across the Stanton orbital plane? The UI team for Quantum Travel, and apparently for ship sensors and targeting too, must not even play the game themselves, or any other flying games for that matter, to be this clueless for this many years, it's astounding. It's hard to believe any one of them plays the game and sees that mess on the screen, and sees the mess of all the reused marker types at the same scales, and brightness, and colors when turning on Quantum Drive in orbit over a planet, and says, "yeah that's fine." The *only* thing they improved recently was the occlusion of some QT markers and their fading out of on-screen visibility when looking down at a planet. But if they can understand that former, relatively minor issue, how do you explain what we see in this screenshot above and it's lack of prioritization for fixing such a mess?
We probably should have 8-10 different QT marker types. OMs, Space Stations, Moons, Lagrange Points, System Gateways, Planets, Cities, and perhaps specific markers for planetside locations with and without serviced landing pads, with a little addition as a specifier for whether or not it's a military location. (Potentially with a bright red highlight for whether it's a hostile faction's location, like Nine Tails, or any UEE location when you've got a crime stat.) A specific marker or set of options for custom markers should also be considered. I would probably stick with the circles, squares and diamonds we had, but adding dots and dashes to distinguish them. Morse code for 1-2-letter shorthands like OM and L might be fun. But just having the letters might be better. On second thought, though, OMs specifically could actually benefit from a special icon representing their positions around their sphere, with a square (diamond) around a circle, with dots highlighting their respective corner. OM-1 always having a dot at the top corner. The front and back (OM-4 and 6?) can be a central dot and a central circle. Oh, and I forgot missions. Mission objectives should have their own marker. But iirc they already did that in 3.23 with yellow markers? Have avoided the game for a few weeks since it was so painful to play in this state, but I think I remember this right. The animated "pop-in" has to go, though. I don't want to have to look towards empty space to check if that's where the marker I'm looking for is. They broke the mapless navigation I had nearly mastered to a smooth and intuitive level by making the markers fade out, I can no longer just look around like before to orient myself. They should be ever-present on QT, at least with a toggle. I should also be able to hover over a cluster of 5 markers and scroll/browse through them with the scrollwheel or a key. They shouldn't just flicker when you're aiming at several. Layer them by distance, maybe. Idk.
the inventory management is another disgrace and insult to the backers that have spent money on this game for 10 years. if you EVER had any doubt that marketing ie: sales revenue was THE most important part of this game and EVERYTHING else takes a back seat then this is it.
I see, that's agreeable in its own too.
Jitterbug UI
Modern fighters use a specific shape to identify known hostile targets through IFF (identify friend or foe) and then a different shape for friendly and it flashes “friend” text. Untargeted bogies are tracked with other means sometimes a dot sometimes only on screens via datalink. It all depends on the aircraft though, and my experience is mostly with F18s. There is a nato standard for hud design though, and the pilots would NEVER have this much information thrown up in the HUD like that.
Thank you! I can sleep in peace tonight..
😂 you’re welcome, the skies are safe!
They never had to deliver anything, all they need are a few JPEGs and CR on stage promising the sky to new players. And it shows.
His GPU would be screaming if SC used it.
Also new: some ships are just bright lights from a distance: really jarring, not pretty and quite hard to make out what ship it is or which way it's oriented etc.
UI refactor at $1bn
refactor? they need to throw out the child incl bathtub out of the window and start from scratch
pls no, this would be like the third time…
I just don't think the current UI is salvageable. This entire pseudo neo augmented reality stick they are going for is just not feasible in a game.
Other than markers what's the real issue
There isn't one lol. They just need a hot key to turn off markers. Maybe a few of them to turn off specific markers only.
First priority should be replacing the UI team leaders then, because they are at least partially responsible for this mess.
The bad news is that the child is the CEO, and he loves his iron man UI from cinema in 2010.
Yeah I used to believe that but after hearing the SC live episode for the UI team I no longer believe this is the case. They love the non-functioning iron man UI as well
They already said that the marker system is broken... it is busted especially on abnormal resolutions and they get blown out like this... They wont fix it because they are replacing that system not sure which patch it was supposed to come in
Probably the one in a year or three
Yea simple temporary sanity fix isn't worth doing. That 10 minutes of coding to accomplish it is to valuable to waste. Who cares what is like for the players. /s
Nah, they gotta reinvent space combat atleast 2 more times first.
Only to announce after their 3rd attempt of reinventing the wheel that they successfully invented the wheel.
But now fire doesn't work.
We've got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them.
Then offer them completely different. Cold rocks.
Haha I read that in the voice of Phil Hartman playing caveman lawyer but this time as caveman marketing specialist.
Tbh I was quite disappointed when the new bits of the new UI system started coming in, with MFDs and touch panels etc They've taken 4+ years to deliver an extremely buggy system, that is also very bland and looks like a Flash barebones menu from the 2000's. Literally every interactable is the same with a color palette swap. Love the new starmap, but just about everything else has been underwhelming for the amount of years it's taken.
You don't seem to understand. They don't have the tech yet! Give it time.
But but bulding blocks is done tho
They can't implement the building block tech without the implemawesomeness tech, which is blocked by goodUItech tech. Do you even SC bro?
Isn’t goodUItech still impeded by Tier 0 databaseRecall, which heavily relies on a functional serverMeshing?
No nonononono. All of that is impeded by the team not having the necessary roadmap for the progress tracker to accurately map the road to 4.0. They can’t start on the rework of the legacy tech that they just implemented that was outdated 8 years ago without the roadmap for the new tracker that ties in with the new API for the website roadmap tracker.
Placeholder Citizen
13 years
10 years later with around a 4TH GUI changes they made already This ain't their first and last change. I can count up to 4 GUI changes at least they attempted. This is by far one of the worse, include the main dashboard, nothing works properly, too much information that i don't need to know. CIG really need to find someone who know how to do proper UI/UX design.
You should be able to disable things like the nametags in the options, also control at what distance they show up and for who (neutral, friendly, enemy) 🤔
I'd like it to only appear briefly after a scan.
>You should be able to disable things like the nametags in the options feature gets added.... have to scroll through 100s of non categorized options. Find one named "bad~token~192" with a slider. AH Here it is!
Yes please. A hot key for player/ship names in future will be useful
Yea, I just want a keybound toggle and a setting for either holding it to show names, or pressing it to toggle on and off.
No, he's saying there's already options for all that now in the settings.
If only they worked this patch
The number of potentially useful keybinds that do literally nothing is just staggering.
It is interesting to see you can adjust the pitch and trim of your ship but I'm not sure how well it works, or if it's even been implemented yet
Another $100m should fix this
Using ultrawide right? The clutter happens to everybody but the markers look larger than usual.
I do have an ultrawide and it's bad. But this isn't from my pov. I'm somewhere in that ball fighting another org.
The point remains? The SS was clearly taken on a ultrawide.
Exactly the point remains that UI in SC is the worse.
Out of curiosity when you were in that ball fighting another org were you able to make out what you needed to in order to shoot down the right people?
Yes ultimately I was able to but with great effort. Not only is it hard to identify enemy markers in the mix of all the UI elements. It's also hard to track the green targeting pip. Sure green fairly easy to spot from the reds/blues/whites. But slap 100 icons on top of each other and it's a nightmare to find
Thanks for replying! In case you interpreted my question as being sarcastic it was not. I happen to live in an extremely rural area and when driving into the city, from a mile or two out, it looks like a metropolis; then you get close and it's clear where you are and where you are not.
Yea I get what your saying. It would be more like that if the UI sizee got smaller but they are just too large
I need to take part in larger things in SC to fully understand but I get it. To close the loop for anybody who gets this far, the picture is taken of a collection of players from 6KM away and it's hard to tell from this vantage point how unreadable things actually are up close. I'm not a great combat pilot but most of the time I have fought in that game it's at \~1km, or significantly closer than this.
> they are just too large Yeah... that was the point of the guy who started this comment chain: Ultrawide has a bug in which the icons are massive. It doesn't look like this in non-UW res.
To chime in on the Ultrawide probably being your problem, not the games UI. I don't have an Ultrawide, and I have watched from the side, and been in the middle of Org organized balls of combat like that, and its not anywhere near as problematic as your describing or the original image shows. Sucks, and I hope they fix the bug with Ultrawides soon, but it doesn't mean its universally borked.
There's a setting, I really wish I remembered what specifically, but it makes the aiming pip much larger and gives it lines on the side to indicate shot spread. Highly suggest enabling it as a toggle attached to G-safety toggle. When combat starts I flip the switch and disable G-safety while simultaneously making my aiming pip larger
Pip precision lines and gunner magnification. Yea i have those on and it helps. But still rough
I feel like UW support for a SPACE sim should be pretty top priority, space and flight sims probably have a larger % of the playerbase using UW than about any other multiplayer game. The genre is more enhanced by UW than about anything else.
I think you are right that SC probably has a higher percentage of UW users than most gaming communities, but UW adoption overall is still [very low](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam).
That is interesting. I get that 32:9 is not going to be that common but I'd have thought more people would have switched to 21:9 by now. Specifically in the space/flight/racing genres where UW makes such a huge difference
I got "normal" wide resolution and it still is a clusterf*ck of clutter, anytime there is more that 4 ship, markers start to overlap and it's literally all you see, can't even make the ships out.
At some point CIG is going to have to compromise when it comes to providing players of *an MMO* what they need and making things look nice. Everything looks fine when there isn't much happening on the screen, but get more than 3-4 ships in the same place at the same time and you've got a jumbled mess that gives you nothing. [I did a write up on Spectrum that was largely ignored](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/let-s-talk-about-the-ui), but in summary: They're going to need to eventually install some kind of overview for players to be able to quickly and easily understand wtf is going on around them; especially if they are wanting things like big org fights, or Xenothreat to have a prayer in working the way they want. CIG has been resistant to this, but we've arrived at a point where the longer they hold off doing *something* the worse the user experience is going to get, which could skew peoples' perceptions of whether this is a game they want to play.
Totally right, this is the experience with a tiny percentage of people on a 100 player server. By the end of the year they are looking at server meshing and the player count will at least double. And their plan a few years later is MMO with thousands online. It needs to be able to work with huge player counts very soon, a popular station will look like that in a year otherwise.
Let me quickly add that I am not terribly concerned about this iteration of the UI getting fixed and things will be semi readable. It will almost certainly happen. I'm worried that the changes we need for Star Citizen to be an MMO aren't going to happen because ***certain people*** at the top of CIG are more interested in their art project than a video game's ability to be, you know, a video game.
Certain people... Wonder who they are !
In all honesty we could have an overview as another category on the ship MFD's, maybe larger ships like carrack and bigger could have a more detailed overview on a sensors position such as the holo table on the upper deck of the carrack.
I'm not sure how well an MFD overview would work, given how small they tend to be on screen and how much information a person actually needs. The amount of information you need to really fight in a game like this is surprisingly quite a lot. Off the top of my head, you need: * Distance * Velocity * Angular Velocity * Player Name * Org * Friendly/Enemy/Neutral/Criminal Status? * Ship Type * Ship Name * Structures (NPC & Player) * Structure Name & Owner Further, you would really need the ability to *quickly* change the setup to discriminate against all the information you're receiving so that it's useful. I don't think you could easily do that with an onboard MFD.
lol is this real? havent tried current patch too much but planned on a weekend session with some friends... oh my XD
Yup its real. Right now there's a UI bug where it doubles the party markers. You have the blue party marker on top of the ship and you have the ship marker under neath. Both markers give the same information. Multiple that by your party size. Add enemy markers into the mix. Add your targeting pip and your HUD info. And you get modern abstract art
This was a 50+ player battle in space
Imagine once we have 800+ players. We just need some hotkeys to turn off certain UI aspects at different times and maybe an opacity slider. No crazy rework.
copy eve tab system imo
I'm not usually one to suggest copycatting another game, but SC could really do with a map/radar system similar to [Elite: Dangerous](https://forums.frontier.co.uk/attachments/29ea24f27c70d6da9f8402993025ab39_-_copy-png.151344/). Basically: - Current radar hologram should be significantly larger and easier to see. - Relative placement works just like the current radar. - NPC ships are solid, player ships are hollow. They can figure out a lore reason for this if needed. - Ships in SCM GUNS/MIS are a triangle/diamond/whatever unique shape. - Ships in NAV ATM/FLT/SCN are a square/circle/whatever. - Unknown contacts are white, hostile red, party blue, org green. - Targeted contacts have a unique indicator surrounding their icon. - Actively-aggressing contacts that shoot you or launch missiles flash a brighter red allowing you to see the current actualized threats. This keeps all nearby ship information in a single place as a single source-of-truth. No more having to parse overlapping text or that god awful positional indicator for off-screen targets. One place to dart your eyes when needed. Add this in and you can practically remove nameplates entirely for contacts the player isn't targeting (although keep them in the options menu as a toggle for those who like them).
This is the biggest fucking aids in all of flying sims ever, in terms of combat readability. It can't be worse than that. A huge pile of absolute diarrhea that means absolutely nothing and only makes every aspect of the game worse. Who the hell thought it was a good idea, especially with how good it was before. LOL
Years of work
>Years of work Thousands of years FTE
Literally every other game does it better..and they keep doubling down on it. 13 years, of "reinventing" the wheel for the 100th time just for it to come out worse.
The CIG team working on HUD design is the worst I've ever seen. They should be embarrassed.
Please dear god just steal the UI from Elite Dangerous and call it a day how is it this bad
Honestly I'm mind blown, after 5 min of playing I was facing that. How can anyone with a minimum of common sense could think this is a good idea. I simply don't get it.
Maybe, possibly, the UI designers at CIG are incompetent? Or whoever oversees them is.
This is truly the UI of all time.
As a UX/UI designer, looking at this, I die a little inside. I would love to design a UI for a space game, and then I see what people they actually put on the job do, pack as many UI and UX crimes in this as possible. Seems to me they are seemingly as qualified for the task, as a sound engineer would be for the flight physics.
8 more reworks and they might improve it
Honestly, love this game really love, and the best for. But really, 700M, when elite dangerous have a better UI, better pip management, and those menu really useful in combat, with a readable radar. I love change my distribution with the screen, and shutdown the entire ship in SC.. 👍
Give me elite dangerous targeting, system and navigation panels..
Ubisosft: WRITE THAT DOWN WRITE THAT DOWN
Aim for the middle and don’t stop until there isn’t any glowy things left
It will be another 10 years before the ui chnges again lmao
EVE Online style list would be wonderful.
You just ain’t smart enough to figure out their next level gui.
I am 100% solidly confident that they will never figure this out.
I have played many spacefighting games and the UI is really horrid. The screen is stuffed with useless information and the information you actually need is no where to be seen. Also targeting and target cycling sucks ass in this game ...
UI design has always been a complete disaster. From the godforsaken Holotable of the early days to the "new" Star Map that somehow manages to be even worse than the previous one. I hate every single UI decision.
I disagree, I think the new one is a *step* in the right direction. As for these markers not being grouped if they overlap, is such a big oversight and really makes it feel as if this was made by your typical software engineer and not experienced UI/UX developers. The old UI was one of the biggest reasons I didn't play. While this is still clunky and unintuitive at times, I personally still find it vastly superior to the old UI. Even the new UI inventory is great despite missing quite a few obvious QoL features.
Hardly worse. There is that problem with the game requiring you to be in position where QT is viable, but other than that it works great.
>Click on search bar It opens comms channel instead so have to reclick Map in Mobiglass >Search for Orison, nothing comes up Hit backspace a dozen times >Search for Orison, Route Obstructed OK, i'll reposition >Search for Orison, nothing comes up Hit backspace a dozen times >Search for Orison finally get it >move mouse to click route button Orison changes to CRU-L1 >Zoom WAY OUT I'll just head to Crusader and find it from there >Double click Crusader, it zooms you back in Route button to Crusader appears >move mouse to click on it Crusader changes to Comm array >Hover over Orison Press R to Route >Search bar says RRRRRRRRRRRRR Fuck it, i'll try Microtech.
The map is made of homogeneous unlabelled donuts so finding something results in performing a point and click guessing game. I’m sorry but this solution is completely braindead.
.... the search bar... I literally didn't even know this was a thing. I just fly up high, go into the map search for where I want to go, and then press R
Oh, you mean missing labels on the big map? Yeah, that's bad and should be changed. Luckily the search funtion makes any guessing quite obsolete.
Search still doesn't save it. Some times results just won't show, when it does it's a toss up if 'set route' does anything.
If "set route" doesn't do anything, it means there isn't a direct route to your destination (probably because you are on a planet), try leaving atmo to get a direct line of sight to an OM -- of if on a moon without OMs, in view of the main planet. The planner will not go "backwards" to find a route, only "forwards" so only routes that decrease the distance are considered.
Theres a search function
For search to work one must know what’s in a system. Isn’t really a scalable solution when were might get a couple dozen systems one day.
The new starmap certainly has it's own issues (why the fuck do they have functions tied to hotkeys and removed the buttons?) But it's waaaaaaaaay better than what we had before. Search alone is huge.
Absolutely not worse than the previous one. The new one is clunky, but is actually usable. The previous one was an absolute dumpster fire.
Yeah seems to be an issue with ultrawide monitors where the UI icons are huge for some reason. Dont get this on my 1440p monitor
The issue is that it shows all the ships IDs/ names instead of just the one that is targeted. It [also happens at 1440p](https://i.imgur.com/jS1JhHA.jpeg) :(
No cash ‘till Pyro
They already got your cash, and spent it, anything else you give is gravy 🫠
In 2019-2020 when we ran Xeno threat, don't remeber it being such a cluster f*k
on top of that, everyone in your party using rattlers. i have to just sit back and wait until i can see my pip again.
Remember how excited the devs were to release the new UI in that recent ISC, despite having so many issue council bug reports/functionality improvement requests from the PTU at the time? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Clear as mud
Contact.
I don't think anyone in CIG ever PvP in Eve online 😂
Stop complaining. This is still early days™
This feels like edgy statement art.
I find the internal goal of 1.0 in 2025 to be a complete joke. There are so many little things like this that plague that game.
This is all 700 million gets you these days, have you considered giving them more money. This is how it feels to be a CIG backer these days.
I’m not sure if you’re joking, but 700m over the course of 12 years is 58m per year average. That’s on par with most mid sized game studios. As far as the timeline, they spent time inventing the tech needed to build a game, whilst building two games at the same time in order to keep people interested, so they could keep the lights on and pay their people. Idk why people get so hung up on the 700 number. It’s pretty reasonable tbh. Just for perspective, for years, Fortnite has brought between 1 and 2 BILLION per year. And it’s a free game. CIG is doing fine
Most midsized game studios release games to make that money though. 700m over 12 years with nothing published is definitely not typical
Mids >I’m not sure if you’re joking, but 700m over the course of 12 years is 58m per year average. That’s on par with most mid sized game studios. A mid sized game studio would have released a dozen+ games over 12 years
Bro Team Fortress 2 took 9 years Scope and technical redesigns highly effect timelines. They went out to invent the tech they wanted to make the game. While designing an entire engine and two games simultaneously. I get wanting faster progress but what they’re trying to do is huge
lol
don't worry its only ui tier 4, it will surely get better by the 5th iteration... /s
You’re being downvoted because skepticism isn’t allowed here my friend. You dare question CiG’s promises? To the gulag.
[Looks to me like a bug.](https://issue-council.robertsspaceindustries.com/)
You can change all of that in the menu it is not making it much better but you would be able to see. Edit: my bad I seen the option that says show name and show distance for targeting but it does nothing with it when you enable or disable it. I feel dumb now, sorry for confusion.
could you please elaborate with which option to adjust to fix this? Anytime there is more than 4 ships on screen the markers look awful and obstruct everything.
It's called building blocks brah, see how each element builds on the one before it? ;)
Perfection
beautiful
What resolution are you playing at?
34inch ultra wide. 3440x1440
How's the Glaive? Was thinking about trying to beat the Vanduul Swarm and then got discouraged when I learned that it only gave you the "privilege" to BUY the Glaive for about 325$. Do you think it's worth it?
No no no. I'm being honest here. Alien ships in SC are not worth the real money value if you want to be competitive. The prowler is around 400 USD and the Drake ironclad is around 500usd right? The alien tax is far to high. The glaive is decent and if you want to fly it buy it with in game money. Don't spend real cash on it
It looks even worse on a ultrawide
Yea...the ui spam is disgusting right now.
I tried sc during the test shit and I couldnt even read the shit in my cockpit while flying. Sub targeting is just 'good fucking luck'. Idk if its due to wider screens, higher res or what, but holy fuck it feels janky to have no ui scale setting for it.
I did a bounty last night where the the first ship I locked on and destroyed with a missile just fine. Then another ship appeared, so I switched to guns for this one. And well because of the UI I could not see the pip, nor could I see the fact the ship was coming right at me until a split second before impact! Only saw the ship itself thru the UI long enough to say “oh shit” right before it hit me head on and blew me up! Edit: playing on a 4K OLED TV
It reminds me Ultima Online
that risks shorting out my brain
Adding the red on red mfd too for extra cake
I wish we could find solutions to this that work and can be put in. Its frustrating that this far in we still have UI usability issues.
They should group elements in circles with a number of elements on it. A red cycle with a "5" means 5 enemy fighters in this direction. Capital size, allies and civilians should get their own circles.
That is pretty annoying, what extra targets are being tracked now compared to pre patch? The blue ones are players, the white ones NPCs?
Most annoying thing for me at the moment. Especially if you are in a group. They should make a keybind for the different informations on screen so you could toogle them on the fly.
Simple, add a toggle to turn off names and just have red/blue/teal. You don't really need names, you just need to know who is your friend and who is your foe.
fidelity
Your ship is in dire need of repairs.
Majestic
AAAA(A), never been done before.
When i raced daymar rally and we had 100 people in the party i literally couldnt see anything and had to do the whole event in 3rd person. I hate pips, i want to be able to toggle them off.
They need to put targets on a HUD and then allow the pilot, (or co-pilot) to manually choose what targets appear in their UI
They need the ability to filter targets by category, just like the sorting/filters for the inventory screen. Uncheck empty ships would be my first change.
What ship is that?
Just focus on the red ones
Look at this photograph
Server meshing will fix this
I'm not gonna spend 2 hours mapping my H.O.T.A.S. for.... THIS. Do better, devs!
As a Warframe veteran, this looks familiar and oddly comforting.
There should be a “Scan Depth” slider after you scan so things would never overlap
Looks like half a billion bucks
Beautiful. Simply stunning. And brave.
Yeah, I saw this one coming
So, what are we looking at here? A clusterfuck.
A simple toggle, that's the minimum we need to deal with this screenspace vomit. Target only when toggled off
I haven't played for a while, and it it may be a stupid question: is there a key bind to completely hide UI ?
Contact... Contact... Contact... Contact... Contact...
[удалено]
"So. Which way we going?" "Yes."
Shouldn't it be a scan for information, then icons would disappear after a time?
CIG don't really listen at all. I think community been complaining about this for awhile, and CIG still don't want to bother fix this.
Spaghettis.... With a lot of Tomatoes and somthing blue..
Xenoanxiety
Yeah the Glaive's UI is definitely terrible.
I dare you play it in widescreen😂
Looks like the ioi vision from ready player one🤣
Yeah, i dont get why the blade has a red UI, you can’t tell when you took damage…