Yes, I'm using it already, thanks for the suggestion. No way to turn the minimap off and I really think it should not be a difficult thing for frontier to implement. One creates a little button in the game's options, with an on/off state and attached label that says 'turn the rushed, tacked-on minimap on or off.'
Odyssey's hideous first person HUD
- Thread starter aristide torchia
- Start date
I'm not easily offended, the on-foot HUD doesn't bother me.
I'm not any kind of weekend designer, I just play games...
I'm not any kind of weekend designer, I just play games...
Good for you. Enjoy.
I find the wheels a bit useless, but there are hotkeys for everything so it's not a big deal. The foot UI is a bit out of character for the game and more than a bit amature looking. But, the UI devs these days all seem to be from the "make it look like a flashy 3rd rate mobile app" school of UI design. This problem is not just a Fdev problem. It has infected Apple, (or maybe started with Apple), MS, Adobe, and many others as well that have forgotten that UI should just work.
It does indeed feel disjointed and out of character.
Not sure I agree about Apple - if anything I'd say they are the only ones providing consistently good design in the os space and are, by my estimations, 3-14 light years ahead of microsoft. I don't love nor fetishize them but I would never put their design capacity anywhere near MS or other such. It's day and night, both form and function wise and only got better since the days of Steve Jobs skeuomorphic obsessions. Anyways.
We as in – we gankers, we average round-the-mill elite players, or a different sort of we still?
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EDIT: Wrong thread!
I understand.
That's pretty much how the SRV works and I get no immersion out of that. I want a mini map though.Nah, I don't - you just need to read the two lines I wrote and look at the bottom left of the screen
There's the form and there's the function, but for what its worth, I guarantee you that if that minimap wasn't there you'd enjoy the gameplay just as much and then some, precisely because you don't magically know where everyone is at any given time and because you would start to actually take the world in - looking out for enemies, resources, terminals and such. Your immersion and enjoyment would go through the roof.
It's the old rockstar games curse - big immersive world yet gameplay reduced to constantly looking at a that little acursed minimap. It became almost obligatory in games because it's easy (and quite lazy) to design games around it, and because gamers got conditioned into believing that not having it is a bad thing.
I agree that we need HUD customization options. Can you make a concept design for a better HUD?
This I wholly agree with. I think the best "minimap" ever implemented was the Colonial Marine motion tracker in Rebellion's Aliens vs. Predator. Limited angle of scan, auditory clue when something was detected, also detected opening/closing doors etc so not 100% reliable god's eye.
In theory? Sure. In practice? Absolutely no time. I will say it again though - Elite already has AMAZING hud and interface design, which was one of the main reasons I got drawn to it, there's a sense of a simulation-like tangible realism to it, within common sense reason.
At the very least it could have been made optional, with a second option being that whatever entities I am tracking simply cast against the navigation bar instead.That's pretty much how the SRV works and I get no immersion out of that. I want a mini map though.
Minimaps like this — was the hud to be done nicely rather than clearly rushed out – could even be part of the suit you're wearing, or an optional module.
It's poorly made if they want you to use it. But have you considered the alternative? For many years, at least since the implementation of the chat "channels", it has seemed to me they dont want you to use chat. Most people who play games or do anything on the internet know chat programs, and the ease of using them in games. Then you play ED and you're like what? I have to click buttons to see chat? Where any normal game, if they want you to engage in chat, would probably just display all the chats, transparent, just to the side of your view, ED makes you click a button, then it loads up the text as if it has to learn how to type? I dont know the cost of running a game online, but to me, it seems, sending one character of text must be $'s. With how FDev have made it seem, the less amount of chatting/online interaction, the less they have to pay to run servers. Now thats just my imagination, but is there anything to that? I know some games run online for years, and then are shut down. So is it actually a thing to send less data?
FDev, for whatever reason, does not seem to encourage the use of chat or online activities.
So from that point of view, it's designed well, and in no way will I ever buy the idea that they don't know how to design stuff. But design it so you focus on fighting and playing the game more? Yes. Do I feel bad, if that's the case? No. If you want to chat, go to SC. I think you can chat in SC.
Somehow I actually like the FPS HUD. But, again, it's not for chatting.
Scam Citizen does this, and with the banal maunderings that flit through the windows like effluent being flushed, it is particularly loathsome... And apparently compulsory to have on one's screen!
It is garbage, not having the option to ignore other player's 'valuable contributions' in a game. Hence why FD have done exactly the right thing in needing to deliberately enable 'chat' (which even in this game, that should strt with an "S" rather than "C"...)
To each their own, of course...
As undisputably bad as the ingame chat UI is, at least we get the journal files and can extract it from there. That's a huge improvement over most other games. (I usually have it displayed on my second monitor, and/or push it into text-to-speech.)
We're stuck with FDev's UI for most other things. The thing I personally abhor the most is the outfitting UI, that insists on
making
me
wait
for
an
animation
which I've probably seen thousands of of times by now. After every single action.
We're stuck with FDev's UI for most other things. The thing I personally abhor the most is the outfitting UI, that insists on
making
me
wait
for
an
animation
which I've probably seen thousands of of times by now. After every single action.
Can we get some constructive mockups of better ones? It's all a bit easy to lay out gripes and suggest other games do it better but we need mockups to show how the ED specific features would be catered for. Not dissing any comments from before, just would be nice to see ideas instead of just gripes which we have all seen (and made) before.
Ctrl-Alt-G. (kinda joking; not totally)
There's both sounds and visuals enough that it is by and large not needed.
Wonder version would be having item wheel/dialogue/chat/text/mission updates still function while hud is off.
The minimap is the only way to tell "off the bat" (without serious training and practice), if a guard is close enough to do a scan.
-it also keeps track of enemies in a 360 arc once you scan them; if you don't need that you can turn off the HUD anyways.
While the wheel feels finicky at first, rebinding it lets you set some advanced multi-functions (item into emote/flashlight on stations)
The only seriously weird thing about the HUD is how it was reiterated quite a few times that the "dothair" (crosshair point) would not be allowed to be toggled in any way whatsoever. -either the game does calculations off it or something else is going on. (mission npc signs across stations is annoying tbh)
_
Considering the launch of the DLC it is probably a fair assumption. Having said that I recall the odd negative comment in the many previews we got before launch but I dont think there was a widespread dismay at what people saw. My main gripe was I couldnt switch the HUD off to fully admire the starry skies over the beautiful vistas, something that I would certainly do if I was to explore a hostile planet in reality.