Guys, switch the Voyager skin, it's MUCH better than the default fed one It feels much more like Star Trek to me.
And since you're redoing the UI, why not add the PVP queue button back? It shouldn't be hidden in a drop-down menu. You should also add a shortcut for the reputation menu so its easier for new players to find it. It should be much more obvious since it's such an important part of the game now.
And while you're at it, please do something about the power icons. Add some colour to them or something. When you have 20 on your screen at once all the blueness just becomes one big blur. This is especially confusing when you're in an STF or PVP where you've got to click between abilities quickly.
I'd like to see the ability to change the opacity of who you are targeting while in combat in the HUD. I have moved it from the default location from the top of the screen to just above my tray so I can keep an eye on everything but this new UI change has made it way too blocky.
I'll throw up some pics to compare what I mean after I finish uploading a video.
The only obvious complaint I voice is that the boff power tray now has a backdrop which makes it impractical to 'stack' with other windows since there's a grey 'background'.
hmm. I seem to be having an issue where nothing is showing up in the UIs. Inventory and equipped item all show as blank, as if nothing is there. Same with the Duty Officer Window. I can't see any portraits for my duty officers and rewards aren't visible. Just black boxes. Tried the character creator and I am getting the same effect when I want to select my race. No picture shows up for the various races.
Everything is still there as I can mouse over and get the tooltips but the visuals seem to be gone.
I think the black borders around HUD elements need a rethink. Or have a transparancy slider in the customization options so we can all ourselves decide exactly how much of our environments we don't want to see. If they want to simulate the console the button is on, I'd much prefer seeing that rather use the unnecessarily intrusive borders, there's instead a faint glass/reflection effect (and/or a little bit transparancy) on the buttons themselves. Anything more seamless than console cutouts, really. Same with the character and starbase menus, instead of having a harsh curved border, I'd just have a square background and fade it, probably more so on the left and right than the top and bottom, and leave the shape of it to the UI elements itself.
Everything else I'll just chalk up to the shock for now. Could do without having my bridge officers hail me from the bridge I'm on, and there's a lot of stuff in there (reputation and starbase progress bars chief among them) that just looks a lot better in the original form, but I'm guessing simply isn't finished yet.
So... good start. Just needs the bland polished off.
Also, the alert button now looks a little weird. The Alert text doesn't seem to center right on the >> Arrows <<, or at least it didn't on New Romulus.
Love it thus far! Feels a bit more Star Trek to me.
I'm working under the assumption that we'll be able to customize it a bit more (As stated previously), and I personally like the layouts/feel of everything. Being able to mod some of the colours, a few sizes of screens/buttons and I'll be a very happy camper.
It'd be nice to be able to resize specific elements like your buff/debuff icons. I've always found them a bit small (These seem better), and I know I've had some new players complain to me that they have no idea what is going on for that, just that they see Red or Blue and assume one is good, and the other is bad.
As a side note, love how 'snappy' it all feels. I know thats a slightly different piece than the palettes themselves, but very nice to see!
I've finally come to realise what's been bugging me about the UI.
1) It's somewhat stretched vertically, compared to the old UI (and having a rather wide/low screen, it's just cramped in the new UI - I guess a problem for quite a number of people). And there is generally useless empty space above and below text, buttons.
2) Lack of clear borders to the windows. If several windows are open, it's VERY hard to attribute functions, buttons, to each other.
Would be great if those 2 issues were at least somewhat mitigated. Then I'd have little to complain about.
TOIVA, Toi Vaxx, Toia Vix, Toveg, T'vritha, To Vrax: Bring in the Allegiance class. Toi'Va, Ti'vath, Toivia, Ty'Vris, Tia Vex, Toi'Virth: Add Tier 6 KDF Carrier and Raider. Tae'Va, T'Vaya, To'Var, Tevra, T'Vira, To'Vrak: Give us Asylums for Romulans.
I believe that the new UI has not been tested on low graphics settings. Two things are broken for me: (1) missing icons and (2) transparent windows. I have created the following thread to report these issues and have included screenshots:
The character creation is confusing as hell, I have trouble making sense of it. The old layout at least was very well defined and organised, easy to navigate. The new one is all over the place.
The idea of images to represent the playable races is horrible since most of the aliens in Star Trek look similiar to humans, forcing you to click each individual icon to see what race you're selecting. How am I supposed to tell the difference between a Trill and Joined Trill from these? If you can't tell the difference between two races based on their icons then you shouldn't use icons as a way of doing it.
The quality of the images I hope improves (if you sadly decide to keep them). Some are wearing red uniforms, some are wearing yellow. Some have a starbase or ship window in the background behind the character, some have a plain blue background behind the character. Having them all different like this instead of keeping at least some sort of simularity makes them look cheap and unorganised.
Bring back having the races names displayed as text so you can see what race you click at a glance.
The layout for the character creation screen is just as bad. Just the simply use of scroller windows everywhere is very disappointing. I much would have perfered to have several character creation screens each focusing on a specific part of the character which displays all the options availiable at once on the screen, instead of having as much options crammed into the one screen as you can fit and having to use a scroller window just to be able to see the choices available.
The size you allocate to these choices is also disappointing. Uniform choices taking up 3/4 of the screen while everything else is crammed in around it wherever they have room to fit is not very appealing. Almost every option in this game would have been a lot better with just a number indictating which option you have selected with an arrow to the left and right of it to change it.
The options for face, sex, eyes and hair in the corner of the screen was very nearly overlooked due to the size of the other options in the screen. I almost looked right past the stance and height options as well. For starters it should be "Skin Colour", not "Face"
The LCARS themselves stand out, and not in a good way. The flat boring texture looks incomplete, the default colour scheme is horrible tho I've heard you can change this yourself somewhere, probably a tiny icon in the corner of the screen which was barely visable. It has no sense of depth to it and does not match the rest of the screen well at all. The graphics in STO look absolutely incredible, but now have what looks like a cheap flat cutout UI which a 6 year old could draw covering it up and the two conflict with each other in quality, colour, appearance and depth horribly.
The older character creator was a lot nicer in appearance, easy to navigate and understand, and didn't have so many low quality images that looked identical to each other that the way it actually made the purpose of them useless. I love this game and have always thought the graphics in this game were among the best of any game out there, please don't release the expansion with this as it currently appears.
hmm. I seem to be having an issue where nothing is showing up in the UIs. Inventory and equipped item all show as blank, as if nothing is there. Same with the Duty Officer Window. I can't see any portraits for my duty officers and rewards aren't visible. Just black boxes. Tried the character creator and I am getting the same effect when I want to select my race. No picture shows up for the various races.
Everything is still there as I can mouse over and get the tooltips but the visuals seem to be gone.
I hope they never go live with this new hud/ui its just a mess, I know some people complained about the red/blue hud/ui but its 1000 times better than this new TRIBBLE.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Banshee Bloodthristy Guild - <Lords of The Dead>
LvL 60 CW-Dragon Server
Tell me about it. Unless there are at least some improvements made before launch, I honestly don't believe I could stomach logging in and having to look at that UI every second I'm playing the game. This change is effecting me more than the combat upgrade did in Star Wars Galaxies.
Absolutely love it. Yes, resizing the contact window and increasing the window opacity would be nice, but the rest of the new UI is great. The character customization screen seems really dark for some reason though...
This new UI has one major problem. It was made for LARGE RESOLUTONS, not everyone has a 10000x10000 monitor Cryptic! Jeez, I'm on a 1366x768 and everything is big and bulky.
Buff/Debuff Icons do not work with the new UI and need to be changed.
Item tooltips are TOO BIG:
When I cant see everything it gets annoying. This has persisted forever. The change is so easy! Instead of listing every detail of what a skill does, just list small one sentence summaries, like "Heals the current target", or "Heals multiple targets around the main target" http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/linksword01/screenshot_2013-03-28-23-11-16_zps63322e38.jpg
The bridge officer powers tray now overlaps my ship power tray. There's a big black wasted space on the second line of the boff tray. I don't really like that and would make me switch back to the old UI if it's not changed. I'm playing on my laptop and my screen isn't that large.
The fonts look ok... Unless you remove anti aliasing. If you set AA to 0 it's really ugly (allied names on ground, npc names, and so on). Sorry. :P
I don't like the new window when you select other players characters. And I don't like the character HP and shield status window either. That's just big squares and really looks like a 1996 game.
The chat window looks fine and i like the ability to change the font size (is that new?), but it's less intuitive to change the channel you're typing in, and when you have 10 or so tabs, the buttons to go to the next or previous tab don't work if your tab isn't currently displayed in the chat window (try with a small chat window).
I noticed something very positive in the character creationUI: default themed costumes. This is a great option for new players!
I love the new UI. So much more Trek. I never knew what was so wrong with the old UI.. until now.
To the people complaining about overlap.. rearrange your UI. Some items, like the BO tray, can be resized (not a new feature). Just drag the edges. I had some minor issues when I first logged in. I had them fixed within 30 seconds. It's not that hard guys. If you have further issues, you know you can resize the UI (Basic tab in options). I scaled my down to 90% a long time ago.
My only issue with it whatsoever? The contact/talking UI in space. People not on the ship show up on the viewscreen, that's awesome. So do my BOs though.. that's not. For them, instead of the screen, put an out of focus close up of a bridge in the background, like a console or a MSD. This was done numerous times in the shows when showing another Starfleet Captain because building an entire extra bridge set wasn't an option.
♪ I'm going around not in circles but in spirographs.
It's pretty much this hard to keep just one timeline intact. ♪
The new UI has some very good elements to it but as others have said is too big and bulky on what the majority of the STO population obviously uses which is laptop screen resouloution, it will suit Windows 8 however (Windows 8 UI is horrible absoultly everyone I have talked to hates it and that is never going to change), the power level and ship ididcators are awesome other than the bulklyness but everything else is much better the way it was in its current state, icons should be small not large and I personally hate the simpilicty of the Microsoft Office 2012 design which this UI is following, Office 2010 is 10 times better, and I am part of the younger generation who likes new stuff and we all hate this, well a lot like the iphone etc but I don't and that is besides the point a lot of people who play this game are 20+ since its Star Trek.
Guys. Resize your UI. Options. Basic Tab. You're welcome.
(That said I notice no real difference in size between the old and new UIs. If anything the new UI seems smaller.)
That solves 0% of my problem and creates further problems... It basically scales down the UI not eleminates wasted space and will cause icons to blur if set low and pixelise if set high.
Well basically I can't stand the new UI as it is and will quit the game once Season 8 comes out because obviously a game company is not going to allow an "old" UI to still exist once they have a new one, because it just dosen't happen for some weird reason. There is probably something like a 1% chance that cryptic will supply that simple option which will satisfy a lot of other players not just me. And I feel a little bad also because someone has obviously put a lot of work in to this new UI but as I said I can't stand it...
I'd love to see a screenshot cause I have no idea how this UI can be anything but an upgrade. It's the same size as the old one, in some cases, a bit smaller. The only thing radically different in configuration is the dialogue box.
The problems you are running into may well be a bug, but it would be impossible for them to tell without screenshots to demonstrate the issue.
Let's focus on solving issues instead of crying doom and saying we're going to quit, hm?
♪ I'm going around not in circles but in spirographs.
It's pretty much this hard to keep just one timeline intact. ♪
This took close to four months to develop? Well it's less worse than the original but pretty obvious very little effort has gone into actually improving the UI as opposed to shoving some demented version of LCARS down our throats...
A world to defend
A city to protect
innocents to save
"Why?" They ask "they hate you"
We're heroes it's what we do.
*patiently waiting on Paragon City*
Big Huge nothingness, I know its a bit extreme to quit a game over but still, maybe its just the general mood I am in or something. But a UI is a huge part of a game, it can change the enitire experience, I would prefer Windows 95 over this and I have pretty much never used it so its nothing to do with familearity.
The yellow text of the loading screen is horrible, I don't have much of a problem with most of the login screen or the windows and love some aspects of them, but just the minimap icons and interact icons are huge they make the game look horrible and the fact that the tray has huge gaps and weird borders and the icons are still of the old scheme. And the assets tab of the inventory has the white transparent top left corner image to make it look glossy but dosen't blend properly and looks like it is above the entire assets tab instead of underneath it, which is intended?
Comments
And since you're redoing the UI, why not add the PVP queue button back? It shouldn't be hidden in a drop-down menu. You should also add a shortcut for the reputation menu so its easier for new players to find it. It should be much more obvious since it's such an important part of the game now.
And while you're at it, please do something about the power icons. Add some colour to them or something. When you have 20 on your screen at once all the blueness just becomes one big blur. This is especially confusing when you're in an STF or PVP where you've got to click between abilities quickly.
I'll throw up some pics to compare what I mean after I finish uploading a video.
Commanding Officer: Captain Pyotr Ramonovich Amosov
Dedication Plaque: "Nil Intentatum Reliquit"
Everything is still there as I can mouse over and get the tooltips but the visuals seem to be gone.
Everything else I'll just chalk up to the shock for now. Could do without having my bridge officers hail me from the bridge I'm on, and there's a lot of stuff in there (reputation and starbase progress bars chief among them) that just looks a lot better in the original form, but I'm guessing simply isn't finished yet.
So... good start. Just needs the bland polished off.
Also, the alert button now looks a little weird. The Alert text doesn't seem to center right on the >> Arrows <<, or at least it didn't on New Romulus.
Gorn UI
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v198/rcp90/GornUI_zpsdb800762.jpg
Orion UI
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v198/rcp90/OrionUI_zpscb6e00ee.jpg
Romulan UI [as if anyone didn't already see it...]
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v198/rcp90/RomulanUI_zps19b736e4.jpg
Reman UI
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v198/rcp90/RemanUI_zpsa2ba3e73.jpg
Minus is a great site for images, doesn't resize or alter the image quality.
I'm working under the assumption that we'll be able to customize it a bit more (As stated previously), and I personally like the layouts/feel of everything. Being able to mod some of the colours, a few sizes of screens/buttons and I'll be a very happy camper.
It'd be nice to be able to resize specific elements like your buff/debuff icons. I've always found them a bit small (These seem better), and I know I've had some new players complain to me that they have no idea what is going on for that, just that they see Red or Blue and assume one is good, and the other is bad.
As a side note, love how 'snappy' it all feels. I know thats a slightly different piece than the palettes themselves, but very nice to see!
1) It's somewhat stretched vertically, compared to the old UI (and having a rather wide/low screen, it's just cramped in the new UI - I guess a problem for quite a number of people). And there is generally useless empty space above and below text, buttons.
2) Lack of clear borders to the windows. If several windows are open, it's VERY hard to attribute functions, buttons, to each other.
Would be great if those 2 issues were at least somewhat mitigated. Then I'd have little to complain about.
Toi'Va, Ti'vath, Toivia, Ty'Vris, Tia Vex, Toi'Virth: Add Tier 6 KDF Carrier and Raider.
Tae'Va, T'Vaya, To'Var, Tevra, T'Vira, To'Vrak: Give us Asylums for Romulans.
Don't make ARC mandatory! Keep it optional only!
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=599101
The idea of images to represent the playable races is horrible since most of the aliens in Star Trek look similiar to humans, forcing you to click each individual icon to see what race you're selecting. How am I supposed to tell the difference between a Trill and Joined Trill from these? If you can't tell the difference between two races based on their icons then you shouldn't use icons as a way of doing it.
The quality of the images I hope improves (if you sadly decide to keep them). Some are wearing red uniforms, some are wearing yellow. Some have a starbase or ship window in the background behind the character, some have a plain blue background behind the character. Having them all different like this instead of keeping at least some sort of simularity makes them look cheap and unorganised.
Bring back having the races names displayed as text so you can see what race you click at a glance.
The layout for the character creation screen is just as bad. Just the simply use of scroller windows everywhere is very disappointing. I much would have perfered to have several character creation screens each focusing on a specific part of the character which displays all the options availiable at once on the screen, instead of having as much options crammed into the one screen as you can fit and having to use a scroller window just to be able to see the choices available.
The size you allocate to these choices is also disappointing. Uniform choices taking up 3/4 of the screen while everything else is crammed in around it wherever they have room to fit is not very appealing. Almost every option in this game would have been a lot better with just a number indictating which option you have selected with an arrow to the left and right of it to change it.
The options for face, sex, eyes and hair in the corner of the screen was very nearly overlooked due to the size of the other options in the screen. I almost looked right past the stance and height options as well. For starters it should be "Skin Colour", not "Face"
The LCARS themselves stand out, and not in a good way. The flat boring texture looks incomplete, the default colour scheme is horrible tho I've heard you can change this yourself somewhere, probably a tiny icon in the corner of the screen which was barely visable. It has no sense of depth to it and does not match the rest of the screen well at all. The graphics in STO look absolutely incredible, but now have what looks like a cheap flat cutout UI which a 6 year old could draw covering it up and the two conflict with each other in quality, colour, appearance and depth horribly.
The older character creator was a lot nicer in appearance, easy to navigate and understand, and didn't have so many low quality images that looked identical to each other that the way it actually made the purpose of them useless. I love this game and have always thought the graphics in this game were among the best of any game out there, please don't release the expansion with this as it currently appears.
I have reported the missing-icons issue here:
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=599101
Banshee
Bloodthristy
Guild - <Lords of The Dead>
LvL 60 CW-Dragon Server
Buff/Debuff Icons do not work with the new UI and need to be changed.
Blocky Graphics (Hard to see, read description)
I found quite a few of these while I was on tribble. The ones in question here can be seen next to the indicator for Brea.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/linksword01/screenshot_2013-03-28-23-23-18_zps18408e42.jpg
The new Dialog Window:
I can understand Obisek, or Sela, but why does my own bridge crew use the viewscreen!? They are on the bridge with me! Come on Cryptic, this is just horrible.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/linksword01/screenshot_2013-03-28-23-21-16_zpsbd605bf0.jpg
Sela's Scimitar has muddy textures:
Look at the pics.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/linksword01/screenshot_2013-03-28-23-16-10_zps5937af8f.jpg
---
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/linksword01/screenshot_2013-03-28-23-13-55_zps7bd70948.jpg
Animated Ship and Character displays in the status window:
No. Just NO. These kinds of decisions are how you move the game away from low end PCs.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/linksword01/screenshot_2013-03-28-23-11-24_zps9df1fd17.jpg
---
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/linksword01/screenshot_2013-03-28-23-11-07_zpscb276f23.jpg
Item tooltips are TOO BIG:
When I cant see everything it gets annoying. This has persisted forever. The change is so easy! Instead of listing every detail of what a skill does, just list small one sentence summaries, like "Heals the current target", or "Heals multiple targets around the main target"
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/linksword01/screenshot_2013-03-28-23-11-16_zps63322e38.jpg
Missing Textures:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v315/linksword01/screenshot_2013-03-28-23-10-46_zpsc6f27acf.jpg
Hopefully these problems will be fixed.
The fonts look ok... Unless you remove anti aliasing. If you set AA to 0 it's really ugly (allied names on ground, npc names, and so on). Sorry. :P
I don't like the new window when you select other players characters. And I don't like the character HP and shield status window either. That's just big squares and really looks like a 1996 game.
The chat window looks fine and i like the ability to change the font size (is that new?), but it's less intuitive to change the channel you're typing in, and when you have 10 or so tabs, the buttons to go to the next or previous tab don't work if your tab isn't currently displayed in the chat window (try with a small chat window).
I noticed something very positive in the character creationUI: default themed costumes. This is a great option for new players!
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.
To the people complaining about overlap.. rearrange your UI. Some items, like the BO tray, can be resized (not a new feature). Just drag the edges. I had some minor issues when I first logged in. I had them fixed within 30 seconds. It's not that hard guys. If you have further issues, you know you can resize the UI (Basic tab in options). I scaled my down to 90% a long time ago.
My only issue with it whatsoever? The contact/talking UI in space. People not on the ship show up on the viewscreen, that's awesome. So do my BOs though.. that's not. For them, instead of the screen, put an out of focus close up of a bridge in the background, like a console or a MSD. This was done numerous times in the shows when showing another Starfleet Captain because building an entire extra bridge set wasn't an option.
It's pretty much this hard to keep just one timeline intact. ♪
I have to agree its very more trek now I love it
system Lord Baal is dead
(That said I notice no real difference in size between the old and new UIs. If anything the new UI seems smaller.)
It's pretty much this hard to keep just one timeline intact. ♪
That solves 0% of my problem and creates further problems... It basically scales down the UI not eleminates wasted space and will cause icons to blur if set low and pixelise if set high.
Well basically I can't stand the new UI as it is and will quit the game once Season 8 comes out because obviously a game company is not going to allow an "old" UI to still exist once they have a new one, because it just dosen't happen for some weird reason. There is probably something like a 1% chance that cryptic will supply that simple option which will satisfy a lot of other players not just me. And I feel a little bad also because someone has obviously put a lot of work in to this new UI but as I said I can't stand it...
The problems you are running into may well be a bug, but it would be impossible for them to tell without screenshots to demonstrate the issue.
Let's focus on solving issues instead of crying doom and saying we're going to quit, hm?
It's pretty much this hard to keep just one timeline intact. ♪
A city to protect
innocents to save
"Why?" They ask "they hate you"
We're heroes it's what we do.
*patiently waiting on Paragon City*
Big Huge nothingness, I know its a bit extreme to quit a game over but still, maybe its just the general mood I am in or something. But a UI is a huge part of a game, it can change the enitire experience, I would prefer Windows 95 over this and I have pretty much never used it so its nothing to do with familearity.
The yellow text of the loading screen is horrible, I don't have much of a problem with most of the login screen or the windows and love some aspects of them, but just the minimap icons and interact icons are huge they make the game look horrible and the fact that the tray has huge gaps and weird borders and the icons are still of the old scheme. And the assets tab of the inventory has the white transparent top left corner image to make it look glossy but dosen't blend properly and looks like it is above the entire assets tab instead of underneath it, which is intended?