UI-Design improvements and ideas

[ranje]

Hi Frontier crew - andfirst a big thanks to the poor chap who´s gonna go through all the players suggestions ;-D

had a few thoughts on the UI Design of the game


- hud color modifier into the game settings
at the moment we can edit the hud color style via the config, and every update wipes it. Dutch people may not really require the option to change it
from orange to anything else (no offense^^), but some of us commanders either can´t stand it or just have seen enough of orange. Having this within
the in-game settings would be neat, and having this setting kept after patching would also be a joy.

- adding a favorites tab to the galaxy navigation menu + eventually the option to add personal notes - at the moment we´re trying to keep up with excel sheets, notepad, pen+paper and more ancients methods of data gathering ;-)

- music tab / mp3 cockpit controls (maybe as a secondary for the Info tab) - just a simple mp3 player that can access the local drive system / create simple playlists + turn on / off the ingame
soundtrack would be enough.

Although it could be nice if added to the cockpit interior, some would maybe consider it as silly, asides of the massive work involved in doing this. Adding another menu screen would propably not
be a big job at the other hand. For those who don´t like the idea...you maybe can´t remember the intro of bitmap brothers "General Z" (1996 strategy game)



keep up the good work, Frontier!

 

[Tryst]

The inside of the cockpit is quite large in some ships and there is also a second seat that's empty in some. I presume, at some later date, there is going to be a use for that second seat, (taking VIP's to other places maybe?).

I also hope that, at some point we will be able to get up while in a station, make ourselves a coffee or whatever and use other terminals behind the pilots seat. I feel really trapped in that seat after a while with no way to get up and stretch my legs. It would be nice if we can go visit the bar in the station later and maybe get more exclusive missions that pay well and offer good rep with, let's say, less favourable groups, from NPC's in the bar. Not proposing avatars for other players though, I'd rather not see another WIS failure like Eve, just you and a load of NPC's in the bar as an alternative to the existing mission list.

 

[Joe Akeem]

About the hud color. A while ago a staff member mentioned something about being forced to redo a lot of textures to make custom colors work. If he meant the baked-in orange hue on the dashboard I couldn't care less if my blue hud have a slight orange illumination, but maybe there are more areas that need to be retextured.

 

[ranje]

Yes Joe, i know what your talking about. Indeed that orange glow belongs to the interior texture (i always thought it came from the hud light acting as a light source - but in fact that would be a waste of performance, from game design pov)

So the "trick" is that every cockpit has this orange glow already in place. You´d need all those cockpit textures cleaned + fix this problem somehow to get the glow back (beeing able to alter its color) i.e. via another overlay texture, or more gpu intense added light source etc (making this whole thing in this case a bit too complex to just quickly add i guess) But i share your point - i do not care at all about the glow. It looks still good with a different hud style on top of it:

Just to give a small showcase how it can work together as it is right now.

 

[ranje]

just seen on screenshots that the glow is fixed in 1.1 Well Let´s see if there will be a menu option once - probably yes if that has been addressed..
thanks frontier ^^