Either way I'd be disappointed if this will never be a proper feature. And it's deceiving and to be honest somewhat unfair to show the re-colored HUD like it was a natural thing while it's not. See the picture in the original post. I really thought it was a tease for 2.3. The default color is functionally good, but after so many hours it's extremely boring and often genuinely uncomfortable to look at it. So all I can do is to continue hoping. [blah]
HUD color change option in 2.3?
- Thread starter dreampage
- Start date
I'm not sure it's "deceiving" per se, since the shields in the image are red instead of blue. That matches the current implementation on the PC.
Honestly, I like the orange, but I understand the desires of others to customize it. I'll post a suggested implementation for a relatively low-cost fix and hopefully, FD will implement it at some point.
[update] Here's a link to my suggestion: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ion-of-custom-UI-colors?p=5243025#post5243025
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Maybe they're holding a few easy wins up their sleeves for a rainy day. 
It is sort of backed in (from what I remember them saying), so it isn't just an easy fix, though I'm sure it's something they could sort out well enough if they devoted the time and effort to it, but it isn't on the to-do list, just on the maybe-one-day-if-we-can-get-around-to-it list, so it likely gets passed over as being less of a priority than what the devs are actually working on. There's only so much time in the day, and not all the devs are driving the boat.
It is sort of backed in (from what I remember them saying), so it isn't just an easy fix, though I'm sure it's something they could sort out well enough if they devoted the time and effort to it, but it isn't on the to-do list, just on the maybe-one-day-if-we-can-get-around-to-it list, so it likely gets passed over as being less of a priority than what the devs are actually working on. There's only so much time in the day, and not all the devs are driving the boat.
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Can't be that hard. Can be changed right now with notepad. But an in-game way to change the hud colors and preserve other colors would be nice. For example, my hud change causes the faces on the mission board to appear in what is almost grayscale. I don't really know what part of my change did that. So, instead of me trying to find out the hard way, having the devs make a way that is more controlled would be nice.
Right, this is the reason that it isn't just an easy (relatively speaking) fix. If/when they bother with it, I'm sure they'll want to do it right, instead of just using what we have now.
Until such time, at least they unofficially support the notpad option for some of us. And honestly, console users should expect non-modifiable gaming, though wanting more is of course human nature.
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The console thing is rapidly changing. Bethesda has introduced a mod system that works for consoles, and changing display colors isn't exactly new, I know there are console games that allow that (none come to mind right now, but they have to be out there). I would rather see hud color changes over multicrew. the hud changes would actually be useful for me.
Choose wisely:
Hud colour settings
or
Orrey map
They can surely do both. Orrey requires more work though.
In Final Fantasy 7 you can change the menu colors in game, so I'm assuming you could on the PlayStation too... Sorry, I haven't really messed with consoles since the NES days of my youth. I'm familiar with them through various friends though.
As for Bethesda games, such as Skyrim Special Edition, it's nice that they're getting some modding on consoles too, though much limited in comparison to what can be done on PC. It is a hassle for them to get even that though, with the stuff they have to jump through. Console vendors are proprietary by nature; it's their main business model, really, so getting some flexibility there is like pulling teeth, I'm sure. On the other hand, they do want to make their boxes compelling enough for today's market, so there is at least that bit of wiggle room.
I personally don't really see the appeal, but that's just me. I've been an avid PC builder since my teens in the mid '90s, and have used PCs as consoles hooked up to my TVs and "home entertainment systems" for the last couple of decades. I still do have an NES though, and my wife has a PS2 I rebuilt for her with a few alterations – guilty pleasures.
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True, but that will delay other features. "Orrey requires more work" is not a given. It depends on their code base. Given their reluctance to implement custom UI colors, it can't be easy.
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I suspect it requires a refactoring of the Cobra engine, probably one that will take a bit of time to implement and one which Frontier is only really interested doing when it time to upgrade that part of the cobra engine.
Fact it wasn't implemented on Planet Coaster which uses an more up to date version of the cobra engine make me suspect this really isn't a priority for Frontier.
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There are only a handful of games ever made that have cost more than $200 million to develop (including marketing). About 5 of them.
Interesting fact: 99/100 games don't allow HUD colour changes.
Meanwhile on the ED forum: FDEV are clearly amateurs and don't know how to develop games if they didn't think about players wanting to change HUD colours.
(made it all up, no facts were hurt making this comment)
Meanwhile on the ED forum: FDEV are clearly amateurs and don't know how to develop games if they didn't think about players wanting to change HUD colours.
(made it all up, no facts were hurt making this comment)
This a thousand times
They need to get on this though. I would have quit long ago if I still had to stare at that garbage orange.
It's actually a whooooole lot more complicated because like someone else pointed out this isn't some genric "Plastered over the screen" UI texture assets.
The HUD in Elite Dangerous exists in the world space it is a physical thing within the game world that interacts with its environment and if/when you change colour schemes this includes the light the HUD projects out onto the environment.... the reason it's done this way is because Frontier had to design it for the future, this includes VR utilisation so that all UI elements are physical objects with tangible distances and position but also for later on when we're walking around said environments where we'll be able to see various control station HUD elements being projected out from surfaces as 3D holograms and walk around viewing the projection from any angle.
Short term vision wise, sure Frontier could have hand designed every single little facet of the UI and custom picked every details colour and then made things exposable and gone "Hey guys! Customise the smegging heck out of this all you want!"... but they would have ended up with something that required a absolutely absurd amount of additional manpower time everytime they wanted to add a new UI element or redesign an existing UI screen as the game grew.
So instead the complex UI we have utilises (Edit: a set of) static RGB matrices that dictates the set parameters for ALL UI elements across the board. This way Frontier can redesign windows, add entirely new parts of the UI and they don't have to go through the slog of re-doing what they've done a dozen thousand times before for the rest of the UI.
Those type of comment kind of just shows a lack of understanding over just how complicated and time consuming such a request/demand actually is. Such a thing isn't a "Do it once and then it's done" effort, it's something that would drag Frontier down indefinitely for the continued life of development and make things increasingly more fiddly and hassle enducing the more complicated the demands of the UI becomes to fit all future needs.
What is available isn't "HUD customisation", as more it's "Flailing around with RGB matrices and if you're lucky ending up with something that's able to display 80% of the default HUD in a semi-tolerable manner, leaving the other 20% indistinquishable to anything else.
For example the default HUD has 3 radar blip states.
Red = Hostile.
Yellow(I think?) = Neutral
Green = Friendly.
Change the HUD colour scheme and in any tolerable colour scheme you're pretty much committed to only having two radar blip states.
Colour 1 = Hostile & Neutral.
Colour 2 = Friendly.
Other schemes have things like the outfitting window fail to properly display distinguishable colours between performance gains and performance losses, the really bad schemes out there even make much of the UI menus borderline unusable because you can't tell what's selected or what's displaying what. And getting a scheme that is remotely suitable to play the game is a carefully drawn out balancing act.
This is why Frontier don't make arsing about with such things exposable through the game itself, because it IS NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE. Players can flail around and override XML files if they want to screw up their game, that's their decision, but Frontier should not be expected to officially present something as a HUD customisation option that would deliver broken half working solutions and allow the player to come up with settings that will make the game unplayable for them. That's never something that should be presented as an official in-game tool.
For those that perhaps don't quite grasp just how NOT A CUSTOMISATION OPTION the hack around many of us use, and mistakingly think it's anything like being able to say "I want my friendlies pink, my enemies Brown and my shield rings Red"... here's the entirety of the options that govern what EVERY SINGLE UI element in the game bases its colour off of.
That's it. There's nothing else to it.... and even that is about 3 times more 'fool proof' to avoid totally botching up your UI than it used to be. At least now there are some tests that ensure overriding the colour scheme to a blue heavy style doesn't turn all NPC avatar images into washed out smurfs like it did when the new avatar images were first introduced with the mission board redesign some time back.
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But for the other 99 games the HUD is a background element. In ED it is core of the gameplay.
Yes, and in 99 games the HUD is crap compared to the piece of art we have in ED.