The UI

What specific problems do you have with the interface?

I played SEIV for a year or so before SEV came out. I agree there was a learning curve and 5.1.2 resolved alot of annoyances, but what about the v. V interface do you detest so much?

Kerry-

"...I say we must move forward, not backward, upward, but forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!"
-Kodos for President

Problem is, with a game this complex the UI is ALWAYS going to be hard to get.

That said, SEIV's UI was probably better than this games in a LOT of ways.
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There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

I have some things I definitely don't like about the UI. Note that I get around 20 FPS while I have any menu up, so any problem with the UI is made worse. I seem to be one of the few with this issue, so I will try to mention things I expect are a concern even with normal framerate.

• The research screen is tedius to use. Having to keep changing to percent to find where .1 years is remaining is a pointless task, and having a snap-to-next-turn-complete button would ease this common task greatly.
• The UI doesn't scale for higher resolutions. This is an issue in many games (Oblivion comes to mind). I run at 1280x1024, but the UI seems to take up a space for 1024x768. Expanding the lower right command section to show the standard buttons, plus buttons for slightly less common, but still regulary used, commands would be great.
  This also applies to the various menus, such as ship design and planets lists. Having more room for more components or extra items in the layouts would speed up these tasks.
• In the lower right command section, hiding any icons that can't be used, and hiding any sections that don't have any commands that can be used (like Stellar Manip for most ships) would clean things up.
• Having common tasks available from screens relating to those tasks, such as scrapping facilities available from the planet screen, would save time and be more intuitive for new users.
• Being able to drag and drop ships, units, and cargo in the fleet, cargo transfer, launch/recover, etc, screens woulds be more familiar to new comers and would reduce mouse movement in many of these screens.
• Clicking on the transfer screen transfer amount should clear it like the planet construction queue window does.

That's all the more annoying things I can remember at the moment. The entire combat setup has several problems that need addressed too, but that's a discussion for another time.

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Watch for my mod - codename: Dimensions - coming by Summer, 2007!

More about the research:
- clear spending button gets you to the top of the list automatically (very annoying)
- techs are not sortable by columns. While other tables usually are. Great.
- the whole research system is one big mistake.
When you are playing the game you are usually switching between researching of many areas, while still wanting to have the single projects completed ASAP. That means you are researching 1, 2, max 3 subjects in the turn neglecting completely others. Of course, in the next turn you have to change them... tediously clicking all those terrible percents bars. Disaster. In my opinion, research should be done as simple queue (just like in construction) where we add tech area. After researching one of them, the rest of points would be spent on the next and so on.

Lack of "economical amount" and "maximum per one turn amount" options in construction queues. Economical amount is the lowest numbers of items, when we gain one of them extra per turn.
For example - we need 1 turn for 1 research center, 4 turns for 4, but still only 4 turns for five research centers. So the 5 research centers is the economical amount.
"Maximum per one turn amount" = just add to queue as many (for example) fighters as you can produce in one turn.

No TOTAL ETAs of the productions in construction queues: for example when I add, 1 intel center to queue and then 10 single troops I don't know exactly how many of them will be produced after one turn. The game only tells me that every item should be done in one turn, so if I would believe in it the whole production would last 11 turns which is of course NOT TRUE.

Trading techs with aliens is a perfect Golgotha and Sisyphus work combination. When we are picking our techs, we don't know how high level of it have we - and the aliens (or, at least what our intel reports about them).
The same is when we pick techs we'd like to get from them. Therefore we really do not know the deal has any sense to us/them... unless we don't remember all the tech research level details. Ours and aliens. Or maybe have them written down in the notepad earlier? Viva playability.

And finally about most annoying thing in the UI (lack of autocenter) I've written already here: http://spaceempires5.com/en-US/node/2028

I frequently use the way the system is set up to my advantage, finishing 2/3 techs in one turn, while having 1/2 "expensive" techs just churning away, slowly, with a few % points.
_______________________
There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

I don't understand what the huge problem with the interface is... I don't have any difficulty at all. I mean, I understand what everyone's saying -- it could certainly be better... a lot of the suggestions made here would be awesome if implemented -- especially the ones about a "Complete in one Turn" button, in both research and construction -- but it's not like the user interface actively gets in the way. I've definitely seen worse.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to the biggest flaw of Space Empires -- it's a niche game, supported by a small market, and funded by the profit-motive. The design team wasn't able to take as much time with anything as they wanted to. Because of this, there's a whole slew of problems that really aren't anyone's fault... the game just wasn't ready for realease, but conditions, I'm sure, demanded that it be released.

Fortunately, we've got a great team that'll fix any problems in their order of significance. And, frankly, I think the user interface isn't a top priority. Some parts of the game aren't even workable (or weren't, until recent patches), and I think that fully implementing all parts of the game is more important than fixing up a UI that already works.

For example, one of my favorite themes in the SE universe is space pirates -- I love playing an incredibly violent, somewhat-less-than-intelligent race, and stealing anything and everything that isn't nailed down, while not being afraid to pull a few nails out to make the conditions for privateering just right. This concept just couldn't fly until Deconstruct and Analyze worked properly... which, thanks to the 1.20 patch, now does. I'd rather have had the team working on that than on the user interface, and I'd rather them continue this kind of work than turn to the UI, because without a doubt, there's still someone out there that, for some reason or another, can't play their favorite concept, because that aspect of the game isn't fully implemented.

The design team said, somewhere, that bugs and holes in the game come before the UI, and I tend to agree with this.

~ Kingside_Bishop

[/communication]

Just so you know, this development team is actually only one person, Aaron Hall. There is one other person that does some of the graphics (tech pictures, UI pictures, and race images, IIRC), but Aaron does everything else.

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Watch for my mod - codename: Dimensions - coming by Summer, 2007!

Good god. That's amazing...

~ Kingside_Bishop

*worships Aaron Hall*

What really bugs me currently is that UI customization is not fully implemented.

The only things you can move around are the main buttons, and the only thing you can resize is the galaxy map. What's left beyond these two UI mods is the basic HUD facade change. If Aaron has no time to improve the UI, then he should open up the UI settings to FULL customization by modders.

My secondary (and perhaps now useless) complaint regarding the UI is its out-of-the-box feel -- the stock skin is just too much like a plastic toy. It's round, shiny, and 3D with no purpose. It's distracting and takes away from game immersion. Design experts will tell you that an interface needs to be functionally intuitive and visually subtle. The stock skin reminds me of when Stardock's Windowblinds started gaining popularity and became inundated with bloated and extraneously detailed user themes.

Now, I've replaced the default skin with one of my own (made a post about it in the mod forum) that's less visually intrusive (taking out the distracting blue & gray textures and Unix-Blackbox style 3D stylization), but the current skinning and UI customization potential is still severely limited by the code, as I've described above.

I agree that the UI is very difficult. Modability is about the only feature that might still sell me on this game.