It was a nice talk and extremely important for SC! I had the pleasure of talking to Todd Pappy (such a great down to earth guy!) on the airport in Manchester and he said the new UI tools are extremely helpful because up until now the relatively small UI team has been putting out one fire after the other. I was a bit surprised to hear this decoupling of interface is not standard practice in game development. In industrial automation and web development this is standard practice. Still, these guys did an awesome job! And this is also why dev tools and tech are everything. Better focus on that instead of quick short term fixes.
Todd Papy is a great guy. I spoke with David Jaffe about him on one of his streams and he spoke very highly of Papy. In case you don't know who Jaffe is, he is the creator of God of War and they worked together at Sony Santa Monica.
Many games don't couple UI because most games are more specific in focus than SC. SC needed a flexible and easy to use system that can be used for multiple different types of applications and in various styles that would be easy to use and maintain... Most games you don't need that much flexibility for the same system.
@@vorpalrobot To be fair, they didn't just have to take it out, they had to replace it with a better interaction system as well. was a piece of UI but the underlying interaction functionality is really what caused the pain, not a bitmap.
Just wanted to say thank you to all the UI staff and designers. You guys make a critical part of the game world alive, without you the game would not work and we would not be pushing new ideas into game development. You guys are awesome and deserve every praise you get!
that isn't strictly UI, that'd much more fall into the backend where they need to group armor variants together so you can just click on 1 type of armor and then select blue or red or whatever other color.
They just need to have a UI tab under the OPTIONS menu. Give us traditional color grid for all UI elements. This would solve color blind issues and allow full customization
@@Imortist They've modified the engine so much that it's arguably a "different" engine now (though still based on Lumberyard, which itself was based on CryEngine)
OMG so true!!!!!!!! If they cant make it adaptive, why cant they just use a white with black border font. The 'lancer is so shiny it can wash out inner thought.
Dude Chill out and Relax! you are so nervous. WE ARE SC, we are cool :) Yes the game is in dire need of a user-friendly UI and thank you for being in the team. Can't wait to see what you guys do ^^ Chill and keep on Rockin
its not that ez staying in front of 400 people. there are still people out there who arent familiar with talking in front of a 1000 eye monster called crowd :D
Excellent panel. Dude I have same issue where the brain pulls you in so many paths away, around, in, out of a subject at hand, it is really hard to keep up, if not excruciating. But the thing is, not a single viewer has a 10th of your knowledge so really, just keep the objective at hand and tam the brain horse. You will find your panel much more enjoyable from get go and some viewers might even connect better and enjoy it more. Excellent imagery for context purpose and explanations, love you guys.
Kudos to the UI guys for doing some really important work. I'd love to hear you guys pushing for UX focus group studies when you get to the Overlay UIs (different groups: fully newb, average user, experienced user) early on in your work to make sure everything is defining in a player friendly view. Not just mobiglass and elevators but the settings menu. Keybindings and controls really need a lot of UX and workflow vision for the complex overlays. Control bindings are critical to player experience and are really arcane right now. It would be great if there were some form of 3D virtual environment for keybinding that could walk a newb through visually what is mapped and what can be mapped. Experienced players could jump to specific views to assign individual functions. This same virtual control representation could even be used for an introduction to play mechanics for completely new users that is continually used going forward to customize their controls. Some similar focus group work would be welcome on MFD hotkey / interaction functionality as well. Not just making them pretty but designing them for quick use via controls and hopefully making them viable for future VR functionality (otherwise I worry that the implemention chosen may not allow for the hoped for future VR function). Putting that part last as it's really the Overlay UI I think is the most benefit.
@Solve Everything I can't wait for this bombshell to rock the world. A living game. VR possible. The ONLY thing I fear is AI.. That'll be the achilles heel of SC. Still anticipating exotic plants and animals, possibly S&R, transporting all of the above, etc. Still, I hope for that "smart AI that remembers that time you abandoned him on that station way back when".
I cannot wait to see the new UI in action, I hope it is intuitive, for example, I don't have to scroll through endless screens, but things are categorized sensibly, and we drill down into the content we want. Also, a search option for extremely long lists to filter out things we don't need faster than a drill-down would be welcomed.
UI has been the main bottleneck of production of new assets for years now. So happy they crafted this block system so any dev can craft their own UI as they make an asset.
It warsn't realy a bottleneck, because it didn't actually limited the production of the rest of the game. It was just more or less the most underdeveloped part
Brilliant panel and what I've seen from Inside the Verse with just how customizeable the interfaces are I can't wait to see what art is going to do for Vanduul interfaces. Great stuff.
So an hour of the panel spent discussing... ELEVATOR BUTTONS Oo and how things work in GREAT detail, I cant thank you enough for that, it's great that you guys share so much detail with us. But, some abstraction would be more prefered I believe, and focused more on what is coming for us in terms of UI. New heads on display, plans to rework mfds maybe, different way of interaction with the system. Wouldnt it be cool if we could use our keyboard when we're using trade consoles or ship MFDs? What I mean by that is lock in the MFD display with the keyboard and be able to tab through parameters and adjust them exactly. When in combat I would much prefer a clear screen or customizable heads on display so I can set up what I - the pilot need. Everyone is different and we all have our drawbacks and strong sides, maybe Im less keen on checking my shields, I would duplicate it, maybe Im not that accurate with the keybindings, being able to set up exact value would be a benefit. Being able to customize our UI in general would be absolutely great. Let US the players decide what we want to see and what we dont. Let us share our set-ups.
What if you put in load in animation when you spawn in UI? Make it look like the screen only turns on when someone is nearby? Smart devices do this all the time and it might let you keep the aggressive LOD!
This is actually what I thought was happening with the delivery kiosks... I figured there was a sensor that was detecting me as I got close and turning on the screen.
Marcel Gemperle that doesn't work because other players might be using the display, so showing a load animation when you are getting closer doesn't make any sense
they need the UI to be the same to everyone doing it this way AND keep the UI the same for everyone would counter the whole use of LOD, you'd need to load the UI triggered by everyone in the vicinity to be sure it looks the same for you and them after all seeing a loading animation while other see the actual content of the ui is the opposite of what they want to do
Always thought thats whats happening with some of the Displays. For example in a ship if you change to third person and then back to first you get the same bootup sequence you get when powering up.
Important UI/UX stuff. However, there needs to be a fundamental shift in the UI's in very specific spaces. The first is color and font selections. The second is these color and font selections being applied to ship HUD interfaces. There are instances where the HUD's and text will get washed out against planetary background colors. Thirdly, scaling of these HUD/Font/Color selections to the ship UI interfaces need be better tailored. They aren't right now. Each ship needs to be specifically tailored to have it's HUD as configurable as possible and make sense. A lot of it doesn't still.
The reason the ground floor is the ground floor and not the 1st floor is because for a large portion of human history multistorey buildings weren't common, neither were floor boards. The ground floor was literally just the earth you'd built on. When we started building multistorey structures we had to make the 1st floor.
One thing i would like to see in the UI is a Pop Up window (movable with holding left click exemple) when u get invited to join a group with clear buttons you can click accept or decline!
Seems like a very similar implementation to HTML and CSS, just in the game engine... always better to utilize frameworks that work than reinventing the wheel! Super excited to see these beautiful panels in-game!
interface on shop displays is good act. mobiglass and ship interface is hopefully just a placeholder then its ugly and confusing. but the elevator interface give me hope
You better consider adding another 10 years to development for a VR port..... you go to all that effort with amazing graphics and the 'Innter Thought' interaction system only to experience through a monitor! It's begging to be properly appreciated in VR. I did a cheap VorpX mod to SC a few months ago and while it was clunky bugs, experiencing Port Olisar in full size was incredible. Looking NPCs face-to-face, getting INTO the air-lock lift with all the smoke around you, climbing into my Herald. This game is a MILLION times better in VR, make it so.
The broken FOV (&higher res) breaks the UI (lots of them), Holding F fixes some of them as long as you are holding it but breaks the function of the F "interactive menu" key. Check the issue council posts CIG.
I want an in game ship navigation screen, i hate having to seat on the pilot chair pop mobiglass to see navigation, makes no sense. Also i want some MFD to show around the ship the current status of the navigation, are in QT? for how long? to where? from where? like in a commercial airplane.
Dire need of those mfd’s plenty of sci fi out there to draw inspiration from simple and clean ui is what we need.Great work I look forward to hopefully a speedy ramp up now you have the tools.
About the elevator i wish we could use a real world solution that you go type in the floor and it says what elevator to take to go to that floor. It is a great solution.
Change the page arrows from left/right to up/down (more intuitive), and put it in the dead space on the upper right corner in the header. Then you get an extra line for another floor.
I know it's small, but I thought the same thing, and what you point out is a microcosm of everything wrong with CIGs UI team: usefelness takes a back seat to looking cool. They are so bad at making efficient UIs.
@@ADMNtek Ah I see now, thanks. In that case I still say put it in the upper right reading "open" and change the wording to "close" when the doors are open.
@@Daniel-Strain I can't speak for other countries, but in the UK, it's 'standard' for the door-open button to be at the bottom of the floor list, and the it's usually indicated by arrows rather than text. What would be good is if some locations used 'British' style / standards, and some used US, etc.
The UI is looking better and better after every update but with all the new locations to visit there is a growing need for some kind of municipal area GPS. The larger cities are becoming increasingly difficult to explore and find specific locations.
Please add an icon indicator or formatting emphasis (bold, color, etc) on elevator panels for location of ship if spawned on a floor. Similar for team members. If the panels are dynamic, then they could be even more useful don't things like this. And if it doesn't break Car's immersion they could even limit icon/emphasis to the owning player ... ie, other people seeing that player's panel might not see which floor that player's ship is on. Alternative: put the pad/hangar on the mobiglass for ships and City/zone info on a team panel for team members when that is created. This would solve the issue of players spying information like ship locations as in this case it wouldn't be on the panel.
Why would the *elevator* know which floor *your* ship was on? I agree that a helmet-hud element might make sense, but not on the elevator button-panel.
@@123Andersonev That implies the lift knows the identity of every person in the lift, and whether they've requested a ship, etc, as well as a way to disambiguate ships, in the event that two people get in the lift and they both requests e.g. 300is And it wouldn't solve the issue of taking the lift to a friends ship so you can help crew it.
Cannot *wait* to see new, beautiful UI added to Star Citizen. Up until this point (3.7.2), the entire UI in the game has been one of the most dated (and imo ugliest) things in dire need of a revamp and made to the high quality expected of Star Citizen.
I'm afraid that Chris Roberts et al. may be too attached to the "futuristic rule of cool" sci-fi aesthetic, which results in more style than substance :/
to be honest I big change in UI. Right now there are a lot of panels with information tan I barely use it because is not quite friendly since they seem to be far away.
German exactitude being an issue? Say it ain't so! ;) That panel ain't bad though, armoury goes from a seven letter word to a twelve letter word: waffenkammer. Everything else is within reason, even floor to fußboden.
I think they really missed an opportunity to introduce themselves like this: David: “I’m David Gill...” Zane: “And I’m Zane Bien... And we’re...” Both together, “...the UI guys!”
For me personaly is the visor UI in the helmet too shaky when you walk. I mean when you have a helmet that fits you, it shouldent shake that mutch. It' a smal thing but it bothers me for a long time.
I wish they would change the UI feature when inside the ships. That zooming in to turn the ship on or change in-ship settings is honestly really tedious.
We have to manage all these UI but imo they should look better. To me the UI seems more like birth of pc UI.It 2949 most likely we would have holo images and could move it like Jarvis.
dear ui team, the ui is getting better all the time! the best part of the ui is when you take off your helmet and some of it goes away. the worst part of the entire game, is the yellow and orange highlights around everything interactive. ... it's ugly, it's unnecessary, and it breaks all immersion. just remove it! let me try to interact with things, that's how I'll figure out what i can do in the world. letme TRY, don't show me! please. the yellow and orange highlight outlines are the worst part of the entire game. thanks devs! see you in the more immersive verse!
They might be unsightly, but the worst part of the game? The other day I fell out of my ship during quantem, 15 million km away from anything. Then after getting a pick up, about an hour of hitchhiking later trying to land on a 890 jump in orbit around Arc corp, I teleported 700 km away from both ships. Then after quitting and loading in again, and trying to do a mission for once, the ship collides with a wrecked starfarer during quantem... Ans you really think the orange highlights are the WORST part? You can only see them when you hold "F".
It's nice but would be better to fit more than 4 buttons in there. Make LCD higher or put at least 5 buttons in there. There seems to be space left at top and bottom. The company logo could be on the console itself instead of the lcd? I really like how much effort is put into this but with 10-20 hangars this can be annyoing fast by usability and even a 1930ths elevator had more buttons to interact with.
For branding I think it depends on what is less resource intensive and more efficient production wise. In this case, with the update to UI branding is trivial whereas putting the branding on the elevator panel itself takes more time and graphics resources when playing. The other aspect is usability for players. In real life we have much more refined control so having 10 rows of 30 buttons is easy to select. In the game if they did the same they would have trouble because the buttons have to be selected from character line of sight. This means in game buttons have to be at least a certain size or distance from each other for players to select them.
I couldn’t get threw it either. Still not sure what they are doing about text being washed out by planets. 6 years and the UI is garbage still? How does he have a job. Prolly why he is so nervous.
I wish they would get rid of the curved UI on the helmet hud which makes icons / text look skewed. Even in the current year of 2019, we have something called augmented reality that can create a nice flat looking UI...so why in the future would anyone want their UI to wrap around the glass of the helmet.
They need to change everything we have now, starting to make it more accesible to navigate. the point that I have to switch in a zoom-view to the ship panels and modify ship system information with my mouse isn't very functional. I found Elite Dangerous a boring game, however its ui was both accessible and cool.
Don't want to sound rude, but this is somehow the most boring presentation on the subject i actually interested in. Speaking about UI without screenshots? With text only slides mostly?
It's would be awesome if that streamed data from the "Game" is made available through a websocket, REST, GraphQL whatever so hobbists can build truly interactive external game panels and physical simulators. The flight sim community is really spoiled in that respect. I'm sure there's data that could be used to cheat and that would have to determined and accounted for. But certainly whether or not my landing gear is up or down is okay. Am I in QD, and how far away am I. We could visualize that data however we wanted. Given the tools to accomplish it have a reasonable learning curve. Stream that info or let us query an API hosted by the running game. With a known port or mDNS. Then watch as the community invents the most badass control panels imaginable.
Your proposal opens up to potential cheaters though... The said previously the intended to release a API for interfacing with MFDs but it will be right before release, because these things require a completed system
So, what counts as UI? Pretty much anything that is broken at the moment is UI. It would suck to know that absolutely everything my team did is either malfunctioning, not working at all or just poorly designed.
Which was the whole point of this talk and presentation... They even said they know it's broken and bad. But this is what they have done to fight the problem head on. I for one was very glad to see so much work and effort put into speeding up the process and getting us better UI across the whole game
@@MSGTMad I understand that. However, UI has always been bad in SC. Some items broke after newer releases, yes, but many have always been bad from the very start. The QD circle (not the fact that it's misaligned, but the design language as a whole) is an example of the poor choices that they've made - less than 10% of it actually conveys any relevant information and the rest just obstructs the view needlessly. Mission markers covers ships you're trying to shoot at. The HUD is cluttered with pointless icons that are more distracting than helpful. The very essence of their design choices has been bad from the start, which means the philosophy of the team needs to change almost entirely. When you compare that to the progress other teams are making - ship design, level design, mission design, weapons, weather, optimizations, etc., it's embarrassing that the UI team doesn't seem to get anything right, ever. Even things that they might think are super cool just end up being bad and cringy, to put it lightly. I would put SC's UI on the same level of questionable design choices that Ubisoft has.
@@Zormac While I understand that I guess I just dont understand your reasoning. Yes SC UI has been bad and needs some love, this whole video was dedicated to that fact though... you seem to be stuck on the past and incapable of looking at the future and how they are fixing those issues. The UI has been bad because it all had to be made by hand in Flash.... like he said too, UI touches almost every aspect of Star Citizen. So almost every developer would have to borrow some of UI guys time to fix a bug, change a feature, or build a new bespoke UI for that ship/system. That created a massive bottleneck which led us here. All those other teams making progress was being slowed down waiting for UI guys. So instead of them playing catch up forever. They took some time and devoted it to building this new UI building block system and tech. Now they are empowering the actual designers/developers to make the UI the way they want/need with minimal support from the actual UI team
@@MSGTMad I guess what I'm trying to get at is that CIG failed at giving UI the proper importance. Absolutely everything we do in SC is through UI, be it interfacing with consoles and ships or just receiving status updates, but their team, as you said it, kept being borrowed by other teams to fix bugs. A tool that important needed way more love from the start. As a consequence, they now have to empower other teams to work on their own UI because the dedicated team can't keep up with it. While this might look interesting at first, it's just a cheap patch job that only delays progress because the other teams now have to dedicate a percentage of their time to do something another team was responsible for. Instead, CIG should make the UI team stronger and create a more robust system that allows them to keep up with the rest of the game. This presentation was almost completely pointless. They spent nearly 80% of it just describing how their work is done, and absolutely nothing they showed is groundbreaking (or even interesting, for that matter), as it's just the very basic structure of how information and UI should work in the first place.
@@Zormac When developing a game, the UI just has to work. Until you know everything that the UI has to do (coming to the end of Alpha) you don't do any major work on the UI, otherwise it will just be work you have to re-do anyway. At least that is a simplification of the usual philosophy. Honestly I think they picked the right time to start working on this system.
You only seem to be dealing with things that are a nuisance at best. When the ship's HUD can be (in Game) a matter of life and death if the HUD is washed out. I wish you would focus on things that are critical and not the Esthetic.
Just please for the love of betsy, use another colour for ship instruments than blue, in my aurora there are times when due to the lighting such as on an ice moon or dim world you can barely read a thing.
Command wheels are terrible for immersion. Blocking up the whole screen with a command wheel is fine for consoles, but computers have keyboards with function keys that can be used to quickly navigate menus and call quick actions with just a couple key presses. Normal command selection quickly becomes muscle memory, f2, f1, done. Nothing ever blocks up the screen. Further, muscle memory doesn't work with mouse + keyboard and command wheels. It never fails that when I think I've selected the wheel section I want, the wheel selector walks backward or forward away from what I'm trying to select. Arma 3, a PC game, uses function key menus in the ui to issue commands to teammates or affect actions in the world. It's quick easy, and precise. Ghost Recon Wildlands, a similar game (but ported from consoles), uses a command wheel. It's obtrusive, imprecise, and a hindrance in pvp and pve gameplay. "I'm a PG game." -CR (narrating SC advert) Great, so we can have precise PC keyboard function key menus instead of wonky game console command wheel menus. That's good to know!
To be fair, the UI is one of the buggiest pieces in SC. The starmap turned a lot of people away from the game, at least for the time being, the armor, ship equipment stuff is a mess (in the menu and over mobi glass in the game) with jumping riders not saving stuff etc. On the other hand, with Microtech in the game I really hope they consider multiple different mobi glass UIs.
I'd have used a "statue" female model and then used different kinds of clothing and undergarments to represent the UI... because UI interfaces with small to large portions of the game but no UI interfaces with 100% of the game at any time.
It was a nice talk and extremely important for SC! I had the pleasure of talking to Todd Pappy (such a great down to earth guy!) on the airport in Manchester and he said the new UI tools are extremely helpful because up until now the relatively small UI team has been putting out one fire after the other.
I was a bit surprised to hear this decoupling of interface is not standard practice in game development. In industrial automation and web development this is standard practice.
Still, these guys did an awesome job! And this is also why dev tools and tech are everything. Better focus on that instead of quick short term fixes.
Todd Papy is a great guy. I spoke with David Jaffe about him on one of his streams and he spoke very highly of Papy. In case you don't know who Jaffe is, he is the creator of God of War and they worked together at Sony Santa Monica.
Stuff like Unreal 4 has a great setup for UI, but in Unity and Cryengine doing UI has traditionally been pain and agony.
@@Darkcerve the USE prompt being super hard coded into the engine, it took them like 5 years to get it out lol
Many games don't couple UI because most games are more specific in focus than SC. SC needed a flexible and easy to use system that can be used for multiple different types of applications and in various styles that would be easy to use and maintain... Most games you don't need that much flexibility for the same system.
@@vorpalrobot To be fair, they didn't just have to take it out, they had to replace it with a better interaction system as well. was a piece of UI but the underlying interaction functionality is really what caused the pain, not a bitmap.
Big thumbs up to david and zane for this cool presentation
Just wanted to say thank you to all the UI staff and designers. You guys make a critical part of the game world alive, without you the game would not work and we would not be pushing new ideas into game development. You guys are awesome and deserve every praise you get!
I can not wait until they change the elevator panels.
Scale: 8 colors to every armor, 8 diferents armors, 64 ítems in a looong Mouse wheel trip.
Dani Estu yeah they majorly need to redo shop UI
that isn't strictly UI, that'd much more fall into the backend where they need to group armor variants together so you can just click on 1 type of armor and then select blue or red or whatever other color.
@@faurana It's UI.
They just need to have a UI tab under the OPTIONS menu. Give us traditional color grid for all UI elements. This would solve color blind issues and allow full customization
Yea it would probably make sense to show the types of Armour first on a list, then show the colour last at the payment screen...
Incredible. A UI framework inside a game engine, this is the Lumberyard Presentation Foundation.
it's still CryEngine though :D
@@Imortist They've modified the engine so much that it's arguably a "different" engine now (though still based on Lumberyard, which itself was based on CryEngine)
If we can finally heads up text that I can actually read against all background colors that will be a big step in my opinion.
OMG so true!!!!!!!! If they cant make it adaptive, why cant they just use a white with black border font. The 'lancer is so shiny it can wash out inner thought.
Yeah I always wondered why its even a thing
oh no this first dude sounds so nervous on stage
you can do it dude I believe in you
Dude Chill out and Relax! you are so nervous. WE ARE SC, we are cool :) Yes the game is in dire need of a user-friendly UI and thank you for being in the team. Can't wait to see what you guys do ^^ Chill and keep on Rockin
Who are u to speak for all. And who are u to judge in the first place?
I know you aren't trying to be mean, but for some of us, public speaking is on par with being robbed at gun point. :)
its not that ez staying in front of 400 people. there are still people out there who arent familiar with talking in front of a 1000 eye monster called crowd :D
poor fella, seems to know what he's talking about tho
Have really been enjoying all these talks!
Excellent panel.
Dude I have same issue where the brain pulls you in so many paths away, around, in, out of a subject at hand, it is really hard to keep up, if not excruciating. But the thing is, not a single viewer has a 10th of your knowledge so really, just keep the objective at hand and tam the brain horse. You will find your panel much more enjoyable from get go and some viewers might even connect better and enjoy it more.
Excellent imagery for context purpose and explanations, love you guys.
Kudos to the UI guys for doing some really important work. I'd love to hear you guys pushing for UX focus group studies when you get to the Overlay UIs (different groups: fully newb, average user, experienced user) early on in your work to make sure everything is defining in a player friendly view.
Not just mobiglass and elevators but the settings menu. Keybindings and controls really need a lot of UX and workflow vision for the complex overlays. Control bindings are critical to player experience and are really arcane right now.
It would be great if there were some form of 3D virtual environment for keybinding that could walk a newb through visually what is mapped and what can be mapped. Experienced players could jump to specific views to assign individual functions. This same virtual control representation could even be used for an introduction to play mechanics for completely new users that is continually used going forward to customize their controls.
Some similar focus group work would be welcome on MFD hotkey / interaction functionality as well. Not just making them pretty but designing them for quick use via controls and hopefully making them viable for future VR functionality (otherwise I worry that the implemention chosen may not allow for the hoped for future VR function). Putting that part last as it's really the Overlay UI I think is the most benefit.
@Solve Everything I can't wait for this bombshell to rock the world. A living game. VR possible. The ONLY thing I fear is AI.. That'll be the achilles heel of SC. Still anticipating exotic plants and animals, possibly S&R, transporting all of the above, etc. Still, I hope for that "smart AI that remembers that time you abandoned him on that station way back when".
I cannot wait to see the new UI in action, I hope it is intuitive, for example, I don't have to scroll through endless screens, but things are categorized sensibly, and we drill down into the content we want. Also, a search option for extremely long lists to filter out things we don't need faster than a drill-down would be welcomed.
close door button that actually closes the doors, i give you the future!!
UI has been the main bottleneck of production of new assets for years now.
So happy they crafted this block system so any dev can craft their own UI as they make an asset.
It warsn't realy a bottleneck, because it didn't actually limited the production of the rest of the game. It was just more or less the most underdeveloped part
Brilliant panel and what I've seen from Inside the Verse with just how customizeable the interfaces are I can't wait to see what art is going to do for Vanduul interfaces. Great stuff.
So an hour of the panel spent discussing... ELEVATOR BUTTONS Oo and how things work in GREAT detail, I cant thank you enough for that, it's great that you guys share so much detail with us. But, some abstraction would be more prefered I believe, and focused more on what is coming for us in terms of UI. New heads on display, plans to rework mfds maybe, different way of interaction with the system.
Wouldnt it be cool if we could use our keyboard when we're using trade consoles or ship MFDs? What I mean by that is lock in the MFD display with the keyboard and be able to tab through parameters and adjust them exactly. When in combat I would much prefer a clear screen or customizable heads on display so I can set up what I - the pilot need. Everyone is different and we all have our drawbacks and strong sides, maybe Im less keen on checking my shields, I would duplicate it, maybe Im not that accurate with the keybindings, being able to set up exact value would be a benefit. Being able to customize our UI in general would be absolutely great. Let US the players decide what we want to see and what we dont. Let us share our set-ups.
add a mechanical vehicle options tho... not only a bunch of monitors... I WANT MY RED BUTTONS!
What if you put in load in animation when you spawn in UI? Make it look like the screen only turns on when someone is nearby? Smart devices do this all the time and it might let you keep the aggressive LOD!
This is actually what I thought was happening with the delivery kiosks... I figured there was a sensor that was detecting me as I got close and turning on the screen.
Marcel Gemperle that doesn't work because other players might be using the display, so showing a load animation when you are getting closer doesn't make any sense
they need the UI to be the same to everyone
doing it this way AND keep the UI the same for everyone would counter the whole use of LOD, you'd need to load the UI triggered by everyone in the vicinity to be sure it looks the same for you and them
after all seeing a loading animation while other see the actual content of the ui is the opposite of what they want to do
Always thought thats whats happening with some of the Displays. For example in a ship if you change to third person and then back to first you get the same bootup sequence you get when powering up.
@@DerPolygonianer The interface refreshing when you switch from 3rd to 1st person is a known bug so should get fixed eventully.
Important UI/UX stuff. However, there needs to be a fundamental shift in the UI's in very specific spaces. The first is color and font selections. The second is these color and font selections being applied to ship HUD interfaces. There are instances where the HUD's and text will get washed out against planetary background colors. Thirdly, scaling of these HUD/Font/Color selections to the ship UI interfaces need be better tailored. They aren't right now. Each ship needs to be specifically tailored to have it's HUD as configurable as possible and make sense. A lot of it doesn't still.
The reason the ground floor is the ground floor and not the 1st floor is because for a large portion of human history multistorey buildings weren't common, neither were floor boards. The ground floor was literally just the earth you'd built on. When we started building multistorey structures we had to make the 1st floor.
Please include a HUD element or persistent notification shwing you where your ship has spawned. E.G: The specific hangar/pad number.
Thats on the terminal right? It's a Sim after all.
I'll just settle for the rest stop pads being labeled so I don't have to check the ASOP for where I'm parked when visiting them.
@Patridge its definitely a bug. It happens at Lorville on Hurston yea? I know it shows you your pad # in the ASOP terminal at PortO, ArcCorp and ect.
David Bone Gill. What a badass name. Sounds like some kind of fight name.
lol was thinking the same thing ^,.,^
That was a great talk. Thank you the UI team!
Absolutely Great Stuff!!!I Can't wait for 3.8 to use this UI!!
I'm just missing an elevator button. - ( MY SHIP DECK ) - I'am sure the mighty Space Station Computer knows my Ship DECK or? ^^
One thing i would like to see in the UI is a Pop Up window (movable with holding left click exemple) when u get invited to join a group with clear buttons you can click accept or decline!
I think you are asking too much...
21:00 Im guessing this is the new UI for no fly zones
Seems like it.
nope no more no fly zone! he is talking about check points for racing
This should have been on the main stage. (sorry, had to be done! ;P )
Seems like a very similar implementation to HTML and CSS, just in the game engine... always better to utilize frameworks that work than reinventing the wheel!
Super excited to see these beautiful panels in-game!
They make it sound like they still work on the UI. ^^
As a frontend web developer I can totally feel your pains and challenges!
Thanks for sharing your strategies!
3:40 "What are the challenges with UI". Adding drop shadows to simple text apparently must be super hard XD
I noticed last night the elevator UI was really cool on the Mantis like on the phoenix. Nice work many improvements lately
Keen to start having bilingual Banu/Common or Xi'an/Common displays
8:30 - Anvil Carrack - 456 SCU
I did think 1000 was a suspiciously round number (and very optimistic considering the Caterpillar has 576).
Sounds 55 years old.
Looks 25.
Nice reference to Jim carry's movie XD
There was also a song "me myself and I".
interface on shop displays is good
act. mobiglass and ship interface is hopefully just a placeholder then its ugly and confusing. but the elevator interface give me hope
You better consider adding another 10 years to development for a VR port..... you go to all that effort with amazing graphics and the 'Innter Thought' interaction system only to experience through a monitor! It's begging to be properly appreciated in VR. I did a cheap VorpX mod to SC a few months ago and while it was clunky bugs, experiencing Port Olisar in full size was incredible. Looking NPCs face-to-face, getting INTO the air-lock lift with all the smoke around you, climbing into my Herald. This game is a MILLION times better in VR, make it so.
The broken FOV (&higher res) breaks the UI (lots of them), Holding F fixes some of them as long as you are holding it but breaks the function of the F "interactive menu" key. Check the issue council posts CIG.
Also concider spliting up the Universe Map & Planet maps on the mobiglass. To allow for waypoints on planets.
I want an in game ship navigation screen, i hate having to seat on the pilot chair pop mobiglass to see navigation, makes no sense. Also i want some MFD to show around the ship the current status of the navigation, are in QT? for how long? to where? from where? like in a commercial airplane.
❤
Dire need of those mfd’s plenty of sci fi out there to draw inspiration from simple and clean ui is what we need.Great work I look forward to hopefully a speedy ramp up now you have the tools.
About the elevator i wish we could use a real world solution that you go type in the floor and it says what elevator to take to go to that floor. It is a great solution.
Change the page arrows from left/right to up/down (more intuitive), and put it in the dead space on the upper right corner in the header. Then you get an extra line for another floor.
I know it's small, but I thought the same thing, and what you point out is a microcosm of everything wrong with CIGs UI team: usefelness takes a back seat to looking cool. They are so bad at making efficient UIs.
that isn't a up down button. it is the open door button.
@@ADMNtek Ah I see now, thanks. In that case I still say put it in the upper right reading "open" and change the wording to "close" when the doors are open.
@@Daniel-Strain I can't speak for other countries, but in the UK, it's 'standard' for the door-open button to be at the bottom of the floor list, and the it's usually indicated by arrows rather than text.
What would be good is if some locations used 'British' style / standards, and some used US, etc.
@@logicalChimp Oh interesting.
I was really wondering if they had or were working on something like Unreal Engine's UMG. Sounds similar. Very exciting. :)
We need a way to color armor ourselves. That way CIG just create the armor in one color and we do the rest. Mix and match any armor.
The UI is looking better and better after every update but with all the new locations to visit there is a growing need for some kind of municipal area GPS. The larger cities are becoming increasingly difficult to explore and find specific locations.
Very Good! :D
Please add an icon indicator or formatting emphasis (bold, color, etc) on elevator panels for location of ship if spawned on a floor. Similar for team members.
If the panels are dynamic, then they could be even more useful don't things like this. And if it doesn't break Car's immersion they could even limit icon/emphasis to the owning player ... ie, other people seeing that player's panel might not see which floor that player's ship is on.
Alternative: put the pad/hangar on the mobiglass for ships and City/zone info on a team panel for team members when that is created. This would solve the issue of players spying information like ship locations as in this case it wouldn't be on the panel.
Not on the elevator panels. You'll see every ship on every pad. Lol
Cool !
I applaud your staff for being pretty reasonable at speaking to crowds.
Is this coming in 3.8? I hope so.
elevator UI should have an active ship spawn indicator so that you know what floor/hangar you have ship spawned into
Why would the *elevator* know which floor *your* ship was on?
I agree that a helmet-hud element might make sense, but not on the elevator button-panel.
@@logicalChimp Its 2949 of course the elevator knows what floor your ship is on, in 2019 you can park your car with a cellphone app for pete's sake
@@123Andersonev That implies the lift knows the identity of every person in the lift, and whether they've requested a ship, etc, as well as a way to disambiguate ships, in the event that two people get in the lift and they both requests e.g. 300is
And it wouldn't solve the issue of taking the lift to a friends ship so you can help crew it.
@@logicalChimp of course it does as the lift UI is only relevant to the person using it
Cannot *wait* to see new, beautiful UI added to Star Citizen.
Up until this point (3.7.2), the entire UI in the game has been one of the most dated (and imo ugliest) things in dire need of a revamp and made to the high quality expected of Star Citizen.
I'm afraid that Chris Roberts et al. may be too attached to the "futuristic rule of cool" sci-fi aesthetic, which results in more style than substance :/
finally! good deal.
6:49 I christen you, "Brain plants". :D
very interesting stuff.
to be honest I big change in UI. Right now there are a lot of panels with information tan I barely use it because is not quite friendly since they seem to be far away.
Hold F and zoom in with the scroll wheel.
It would be great if the hangar elevators tell you where your ship is too
Yea, either hangar elevator or mG
Yes! I always forget which one it is.
is this new ui coming to 3.8?
Microtec yes, not sure if all panels will be updated.
hoping for UI fixes for the ships and combat UI (cause a lot of features were removed from it awhile back) but I guess elevators are nice
German exactitude being an issue? Say it ain't so! ;) That panel ain't bad though, armoury goes from a seven letter word to a twelve letter word: waffenkammer. Everything else is within reason, even floor to fußboden.
I think they really missed an opportunity to introduce themselves like this:
David: “I’m David Gill...”
Zane: “And I’m Zane Bien... And we’re...”
Both together, “...the UI guys!”
dungeon dudes?
For me personaly is the visor UI in the helmet too shaky when you walk.
I mean when you have a helmet that fits you, it shouldent shake that mutch.
It' a smal thing but it bothers me for a long time.
You can either toggle that option or maybe adjust the amount I don't remember, but there is a preference setting for it
@@vorpalrobot O nice
Thank you, i will search for it.
Amazing work but I would love to see gamepad navigation please....
When will this new UI system be applied to all door, elevators, panels, and ships in-game?
When will the Gladius ship HUD be applied to all ships?
Soon™
That would explain why the UI keeps bugging and not tracking properly to the player/ship and multiple misalignment issues, man you guys have it tough.
20:21 maybe an RSI will be more suttle
Suttle? thats an interesting way to spell *STRUTS*
I wish they would change the UI feature when inside the ships. That zooming in to turn the ship on or change in-ship settings is honestly really tedious.
there's a bunch of keyboard shortcuts for that. they really help. but yeah, could be way better.
NICE!
We have to manage all these UI but imo they should look better. To me the UI seems more like birth of pc UI.It 2949 most likely we would have holo images and could move it like Jarvis.
Really? Nothing on ship UI? You thought maybe they would address on how they plan on fixing ship UI
dear ui team, the ui is getting better all the time! the best part of the ui is when you take off your helmet and some of it goes away. the worst part of the entire game, is the yellow and orange highlights around everything interactive. ... it's ugly, it's unnecessary, and it breaks all immersion. just remove it! let me try to interact with things, that's how I'll figure out what i can do in the world. letme TRY, don't show me! please. the yellow and orange highlight outlines are the worst part of the entire game. thanks devs! see you in the more immersive verse!
They might be unsightly, but the worst part of the game?
The other day I fell out of my ship during quantem, 15 million km away from anything. Then after getting a pick up, about an hour of hitchhiking later trying to land on a 890 jump in orbit around Arc corp, I teleported 700 km away from both ships. Then after quitting and loading in again, and trying to do a mission for once, the ship collides with a wrecked starfarer during quantem...
Ans you really think the orange highlights are the WORST part? You can only see them when you hold "F".
40:00 - That's the best thing ever... 'Armoury' is spelt correctly!
EDIT: 42:50 - I spoke too soon... That's going to be really annoying.
It's nice but would be better to fit more than 4 buttons in there. Make LCD higher or put at least 5 buttons in there. There seems to be space left at top and bottom. The company logo could be on the console itself instead of the lcd? I really like how much effort is put into this but with 10-20 hangars this can be annyoing fast by usability and even a 1930ths elevator had more buttons to interact with.
For branding I think it depends on what is less resource intensive and more efficient production wise. In this case, with the update to UI branding is trivial whereas putting the branding on the elevator panel itself takes more time and graphics resources when playing.
The other aspect is usability for players. In real life we have much more refined control so having 10 rows of 30 buttons is easy to select. In the game if they did the same they would have trouble because the buttons have to be selected from character line of sight. This means in game buttons have to be at least a certain size or distance from each other for players to select them.
Panel gasm
I can hear the wet sounds from his mouth. Way to much mic sensitivity
I want to see this talk but I just can’t stand it. Had to stop after a few minutes. Gotta watch it on a device with less audio quality I guess.
I couldn’t get threw it either. Still not sure what they are doing about text being washed out by planets. 6 years and the UI is garbage still? How does he have a job. Prolly why he is so nervous.
I wish they would get rid of the curved UI on the helmet hud which makes icons / text look skewed. Even in the current year of 2019, we have something called augmented reality that can create a nice flat looking UI...so why in the future would anyone want their UI to wrap around the glass of the helmet.
Halacron I think it needs to wrap better. Flat UI is ugly and ruins immersion.
They need to change everything we have now, starting to make it more accesible to navigate. the point that I have to switch in a zoom-view to the ship panels and modify ship system information with my mouse isn't very functional. I found Elite Dangerous a boring game, however its ui was both accessible and cool.
Don't want to sound rude, but this is somehow the most boring presentation on the subject i actually interested in.
Speaking about UI without screenshots? With text only slides mostly?
Интересно.
gonna have to watch this when someone makes a recap, the spit sounds clicking when he talks drove me through the wall
It's would be awesome if that streamed data from the "Game" is made available through a websocket, REST, GraphQL whatever so hobbists can build truly interactive external game panels and physical simulators.
The flight sim community is really spoiled in that respect.
I'm sure there's data that could be used to cheat and that would have to determined and accounted for.
But certainly whether or not my landing gear is up or down is okay. Am I in QD, and how far away am I. We could visualize that data however we wanted. Given the tools to accomplish it have a reasonable learning curve.
Stream that info or let us query an API hosted by the running game. With a known port or mDNS.
Then watch as the community invents the most badass control panels imaginable.
Your proposal opens up to potential cheaters though... The said previously the intended to release a API for interfacing with MFDs but it will be right before release, because these things require a completed system
So, what counts as UI? Pretty much anything that is broken at the moment is UI.
It would suck to know that absolutely everything my team did is either malfunctioning, not working at all or just poorly designed.
Which was the whole point of this talk and presentation... They even said they know it's broken and bad. But this is what they have done to fight the problem head on. I for one was very glad to see so much work and effort put into speeding up the process and getting us better UI across the whole game
@@MSGTMad I understand that. However, UI has always been bad in SC. Some items broke after newer releases, yes, but many have always been bad from the very start. The QD circle (not the fact that it's misaligned, but the design language as a whole) is an example of the poor choices that they've made - less than 10% of it actually conveys any relevant information and the rest just obstructs the view needlessly. Mission markers covers ships you're trying to shoot at. The HUD is cluttered with pointless icons that are more distracting than helpful. The very essence of their design choices has been bad from the start, which means the philosophy of the team needs to change almost entirely.
When you compare that to the progress other teams are making - ship design, level design, mission design, weapons, weather, optimizations, etc., it's embarrassing that the UI team doesn't seem to get anything right, ever. Even things that they might think are super cool just end up being bad and cringy, to put it lightly. I would put SC's UI on the same level of questionable design choices that Ubisoft has.
@@Zormac While I understand that I guess I just dont understand your reasoning. Yes SC UI has been bad and needs some love, this whole video was dedicated to that fact though... you seem to be stuck on the past and incapable of looking at the future and how they are fixing those issues. The UI has been bad because it all had to be made by hand in Flash.... like he said too, UI touches almost every aspect of Star Citizen. So almost every developer would have to borrow some of UI guys time to fix a bug, change a feature, or build a new bespoke UI for that ship/system. That created a massive bottleneck which led us here. All those other teams making progress was being slowed down waiting for UI guys. So instead of them playing catch up forever. They took some time and devoted it to building this new UI building block system and tech. Now they are empowering the actual designers/developers to make the UI the way they want/need with minimal support from the actual UI team
@@MSGTMad I guess what I'm trying to get at is that CIG failed at giving UI the proper importance. Absolutely everything we do in SC is through UI, be it interfacing with consoles and ships or just receiving status updates, but their team, as you said it, kept being borrowed by other teams to fix bugs. A tool that important needed way more love from the start. As a consequence, they now have to empower other teams to work on their own UI because the dedicated team can't keep up with it. While this might look interesting at first, it's just a cheap patch job that only delays progress because the other teams now have to dedicate a percentage of their time to do something another team was responsible for. Instead, CIG should make the UI team stronger and create a more robust system that allows them to keep up with the rest of the game.
This presentation was almost completely pointless. They spent nearly 80% of it just describing how their work is done, and absolutely nothing they showed is groundbreaking (or even interesting, for that matter), as it's just the very basic structure of how information and UI should work in the first place.
@@Zormac When developing a game, the UI just has to work. Until you know everything that the UI has to do (coming to the end of Alpha) you don't do any major work on the UI, otherwise it will just be work you have to re-do anyway. At least that is a simplification of the usual philosophy. Honestly I think they picked the right time to start working on this system.
"Boring" but ubiquitous.
You only seem to be dealing with things that are a nuisance at best. When the ship's HUD can be (in Game) a matter of life and death if the HUD is washed out. I wish you would focus on things that are critical and not the Esthetic.
Wait wut? ppl start their first floor with 0?
yeah, in italy is called "Piano terra" (Ground floor) and is the 0.
i think is an american thing call the 0 floor 1st floor;
Onestly i do not remeber other states which do it
@@fabiomonticone9786 We call it 1. floor in Norway
Yeah, the first floor is the one above the ground floor. Just like how programmers always start counting from 0.
@@ollierkul uhu nice :D
U and I ?
Just please for the love of betsy, use another colour for ship instruments than blue, in my aurora there are times when due to the lighting such as on an ice moon or dim world you can barely read a thing.
Shaders bro, Chris mentioned it in the beginning demo
@@Shryquill kk, ty :o)
someone give the man a spliff, dude so nervous i couldn't understand what he's explaining. still big thank you for the work on the new UI o7
Command wheels are terrible for immersion.
Blocking up the whole screen with a command wheel is fine for consoles, but computers have keyboards with function keys that can be used to quickly navigate menus and call quick actions with just a couple key presses.
Normal command selection quickly becomes muscle memory, f2, f1, done. Nothing ever blocks up the screen.
Further, muscle memory doesn't work with mouse + keyboard and command wheels. It never fails that when I think I've selected the wheel section I want, the wheel selector walks backward or forward away from what I'm trying to select.
Arma 3, a PC game, uses function key menus in the ui to issue commands to teammates or affect actions in the world. It's quick easy, and precise.
Ghost Recon Wildlands, a similar game (but ported from consoles), uses a command wheel. It's obtrusive, imprecise, and a hindrance in pvp and pve gameplay.
"I'm a PG game."
-CR (narrating SC advert)
Great, so we can have precise PC keyboard function key menus instead of wonky game console command wheel menus. That's good to know!
To be fair, the UI is one of the buggiest pieces in SC. The starmap turned a lot of people away from the game, at least for the time being, the armor, ship equipment stuff is a mess (in the menu and over mobi glass in the game) with jumping riders not saving stuff etc.
On the other hand, with Microtech in the game I really hope they consider multiple different mobi glass UIs.
They've only just started using this new system (first used in 3.7, I think) - all work previously was done using the old tools / systems...
Ayee
this was incredibly boring. why wasnt this fundamental thing done from the beginning. but no they started doing everything in flash??
I'd have used a "statue" female model and then used different kinds of clothing and undergarments to represent the UI... because UI interfaces with small to large portions of the game but no UI interfaces with 100% of the game at any time.
Every game in the world has a descent UI..... SC you cant even read text on your HUD XD
😮😮😮
4th