Bob's Big Giant UI QoL Thread

mightybobcnc

The UI needs a lot of QoL love. My biggest irritant with STO (bugs aside, although several are listed below) has always been with the UI and with general QoL issues caused by unnecessary clicking and arbitrary design choices.

• The Exchange could really benefit from a copy/paste of the Doff window's filtering scheme for searching for Doffs by traits/species/etc and Boffs could use that kind of search filtering as well.
  • While we're at it, the quality search filter should be converted into checkboxes so that we can search for multiple qualities at once such as a search that includes Very Rare, Ultra Rare, and Epic only, while ignoring Common, Uncommon, and Rare.
  • And some of the categories need to be re-ordered, e.g. Kit Modules is way down at the bottom but really belongs inside of the Personal Equipment section, and the 4 R&D/Upgrade categories should probably get a parent category called R&D or Crafting, mine launchers should go in ship weapons, and there are countless individual items that don't have a category and must be searched for in the notoriously-broken "All" category
• The Mail window is really lacking in a lot of basic features; even really basic stuff that we've had in mail clients for years like a tab for sent mail, a checkbox to select all messages for mass deletion, visible counters that show your current # of messages and the max # of allowed messages and attachments in your inbox, or filtering by typed key words (e.g. filter to only view exchange sales, exchange returns, messages that contain the word "taco" etcetera.
  • I also severely miss having out of game mail access.
  • And several seasons ago, when attaching items to mail before sending it, the items in your inventory would "dim" or gray out (much the same way that ground gear dims out to show that it can't be equipped when you have your ship status screen open) so you could tell which items were about to be attached, but this broke in some random patch (likely season 6 or 7) and was never fixed.
  • And the character limit on message length is just asinine, as is the restriction of 1 fleet mail per day
• Purchase/transaction windows (e.g. commodities, bartenders) that have a text input field should automatically have a text cursor placed in that field rather than requiring a mouse click, and these windows should respond to keyboard input for Tab, Enter, F, Escape keys.
  • In fact all on-screen prompts should be interactable with the keyboard, be it the Y, N, Enter, Tab, or Escape key, but many of them are not.
  • The limit of 100 commodities is also too low. You should be able to buy a full stack of 250 as a bare minimum and I would prefer if you could buy 500 or 1000 at a time to reduce the number of times you have to re-open the buy window.
• Doff contributions to fleet projects are painfully slow due to the checkbox system. A Select All/None toggle button (like the new Doff window filter toggle) would be useful, and then the player could deselect any they don't want contributed.
  • Further, it would be nice--but harder to code from what I understand of how fleet projects work--if we could contribute higher quality doffs to projects to count as multiple Commons, e.g. say a project requires 9 common doffs; you could donate 9 commons, or 3 Uncommons, or 1 Rare, or any combination of qualities that results in filling up the project without overflowing it.
• Mark and 'special Mark**' conversion into dilithium is painful (figuratively and literally) because it is both 1. time gated, and 2. limited to a paltry 50 marks at a time. It would be better if we had a second project for 1000 marks or a slider that allowed us to specify the number of marks to convert, and then did some simple multiplication to calculate the amount of time it would take for the project to complete. I wouldn't mind having to wait a long time for my conversion to complete if I could just fire and forget once or a small handful of times instead of having to babysit the game for days upon days, manually filling the slider over and over and waiting on the 15-second time gate. In fact I would even accept an inferior conversion rate (like 75%) for bulk conversion.
  • **BNP, Injections, Power Cells, etc.
• Something really needs to be done about the state of the Traits window, trait filtering, and splitting space/ground into their own sections
• On the Recycle tab of the Replicator and the Sell tab of a vendor it would be nice if we could have a couple simple sticky filters like:
  • Reverse order (I hate having the R&D materials show up at the top but some people like it, so a reverse order should please both)
  • Hide R&D materials (Even better :P )
  • Hide Bound equipment (because honestly, most of the time people are going to be vendoring unbound gear and this would also save a few accidental vendorings)
  • Hide commodities
  • And maybe some others like Hide Space Gear, Hide Ground gear, etc.. really maybe it should just be a checkbox party like the Doff UI where you can just go down the list and show/hide different categories of inventory gear.
• High-stakes Dabo. Betting 300 EC at a time is not high stakes. :P
• The C-Store needs Faction filters for the Ships tabs. It's nice that we have tabs for individual ship tiers now, but as a consequence we no longer have Faction tabs which means the Tier 5 tab for example requires a LOT of scrolling.
• It would be nice if Fleet, and Doff projects/assignments could draw directly from the Replicator for commodities (with an explicit confirmation prompt) to save a few steps when filling up sliders and you don't have items in your inventory/bank.
• There should be a Super-Loot setting that automatically picks up loot containers (unless the Inventory is full).
  • Currently we have Auto-Loot that will skip the step of the player having to confirm or deny whether they want to pick up an item inside a loot drop, but this still requires the player to interact with the loot drop itself manually.
  • Speaking of loot, color-coded Take Items buttons would be rad
• This isn't necessarily a UI issue, but being able to subscribe to more than 20 global chat channels would really be appreciated, even if it was only an increase to 30.
• In the Fleet window, on the Roster tab, fleet leadership/officers need to be able to sort members by @handle and join date in the same dropdown as Status, Member Comments, etc.
  • Or a search box in the Roster tab would also work
  • And while we're at it, a lengthier transaction history for the Fleet Bank is really something we need
  • Aannd the Fleet Bank Storage Log needs dates and times when looking at it from a Bank terminal; dates are only available when looking at it from the Fleet overview/news window
• The Ignore window really needs a Comments column so we can remember why we have people on ignore, be they gold spammers, trolls, or just idiots
• Quick Equip needs an on/off toggle in the game settings
  • Or, IMHO more importantly, it needs to respect different key actions, e.g. if I double-click a piece of gear on my ship that means I want it to un-equip, not un-equip and also open the quick-equip UI. If I Ctrl+Click a piece of equipped gear that means I want to link it to chat, not open the quick-equip UI.
• A Delete Outfit button in the tailor
• Color-coding minimap enemies
• Blinking chat tabs as an option
• Fine-grain fleet contribution tracking
• The loading of other player character Bios on the info screen has been unreliable for several years now
• A special storage space for noncombat pets would be welcome.
• A UI with a list of global chat channels would be really helpful
• Here's a big one: The Foundry search UI is in dire need of an overhaul
• An increase to the maximum number of purchasable Fleet Bank tabs would be appreciated
• Doff Reward/Requirement tooltips appear on top of other windows
• Doff UI doesn't show Boff reward info
• Talk to Loot Critter
• Consumables do not equip properly in power tray [video] (and haven't ever since Season 7)
• Consumables do not get added to existing stacks [video]
• And of course, the ever-persistent loadouts and power tray bugs.
• There's wayyy to much clicking involved in the R&D window to craft components in bulk and in the Upgrade window to apply upgrades one at a time.
• perhaps we could get a Contribute All button on Reputation projects to automatically add the required items/xp with a single click. Either that or default each slider to max available rather than 0.

This list could proooooobably use some formatting but after writing the whole thing down I'm too tired to do so. I'll get back to formatting later. :P

I also probably missed some things I'll edit in later.

mandatorian

Add this aswell....
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1345621

About seperating mats from items in the sell windows

jornado

On the topic of the exchange, a few things.

Sorting by rarity still does not work. For instance, selecting VR only will show only VR items, but not ALL matching VR items. Tested with multiple items.

Second, Price per unit Ascending and Descending sort options have their effects reversed.

As to the other UI elements, all the suggestions look good. I would only add that it would be nice for certain windows not to drop framerates into the single digits.

mightybobcnc

Added to OP:

perhaps we could get a Contribute All button on Reputation projects to automatically add the required items/xp with a single click. Either that or default each slider to max available rather than 0.

paxfederatica

Damage/injury repair should have either a HUD control that links directly to it, or at least the ability to keybind directly to it. As it is, it takes 2-3 clicks to get to the repair window and another 2-3 clicks to clear all the windows you opened in the first 2-3 clicks - a big time-waster when you die in the middle of an STF and need to repair quickly before respawning.

captwilhelm

I know this thread is about the QoL improvements for the GUI, not bugs. But anyone that hits the forum of graphical issues will see several threads complaining that the GUI is a fps eater. Its an old bug (like, really, really, really old), affects all cryptic games and severely impacts performance, heavily impacting the gameplay experience. So, I think it affects our QoL (and players of other games) and worth to mention here.

An example of what I'm talking about: I'm in a i5 notebook, with 8GB RAM, Win 8 and Geforce 660M with 2GB of vRAM. Set the two sliders at graphics configurations to minimum and go to Starfleet Academy. With /showfps 1, I register ~20fps (this is in the limiar of when the humans start to be able to discern individual frames, so the game is visibly laggy). Now, I turn off the UI with Alt+F12 or simplying by bringing the main menu with ESC. The fps jumps to ~55-60 :eek:. The same procedure with settings near max makes fps go from ~17fps to ~30fps. Bringing more UI elements, as the inventory, rep screen or doff makes the problem worst. This is also measurable using /fpsgraph 1

seannewboy

I am +1'ing this topic in its entirety.

frtoaster

The biggest thing they could do to improve QoL is to fix the bugs.

Here are some old ones:

Camera zoom keeps resetting every map change.
Camera distance resets on map changes
EPTX (ept-s, ept-w mostly) have longer Cooldown than it should be *see post #5*

There are many other UI bugs that are quite old. Did you know that many text boxes don't update properly unless you click on a blank spot in the window? For example, try editing "Max physics debris objects" in the "Graphics" tab or the withdrawal limits in the fleet bank.

And for the life of me, I can't figure out what's up with the messages of the day in the fleet window. There are two tabs where you can edit the main MotD: the "Overview" tab and the "News" tab. I think one of them takes precedence over the other, but I don't remember which. One of them also seems to automatically capitalize certain words. Each fleet holding has its own MotD, and those also behave strangely. Editing one MotD sometimes makes it appear as though all the others have changed. I'm not sure whether this is a display bug, because sometimes changing maps fixes the problem.

eurialo

I do not know if anyone has wrote about this: the HUD drastically reduce the FPS... Try to deactivate it and look at the great improvement you gain. Unfortunately, several HUD's windows are to much usefull (or simpli necessary) and it's hard to deativate them.

thehatch

The Exchange has always been unreliable. And it's just amazing how the tray fails, the core gameplay UI element.

• Exchange filters: selecting to sort by "Price per unit, ascending order" will actually sort by price per unit in descending order, and vice versa.
• Exchange search functionality: Placeholder functionality would be helpful; also important in this regard: the order of [suffixes] is currently not following a clear rule (i.e. "alphabetically"), especially with deflectors and warp cores. UI consistency is required at all times.
• Exchange filters: Instead of placeholder searches, additional subcategories (i.e. "Pistols", "Dual", "Antiproton", etc.) could be used.
• Tray, ground: Position of certain powers is not remembered reliably, and resets unpredictably on map transition. This is at least true for set bonus powers, such as the Omega remodulator and distortion field. (My remodulator is on "4", my distortion field on "a3". They will switch their positions often and unpredictably after map load.) These powers must remember their position reliably.
• Tray, ground: Reequipping items with associated powers (omega set, tribble, ...) will also reslot the associated power to the tray at the last spot they were slotted to, but only if no other power occupied that slot in the meantime. This is undesired behavior. Powers must remember their position reliably, even after other powers occupy the resp. slot.
• Tray, ground: Equiping a new device will add it's associated power to the tray at any (unpredictable) available spot, and _additionally_ will make the power available in the resp. device slot (green border). If an item's power is already available on the tray by device slot, no second power button is needed.
• Tray, ground: Using up one stack of hypos, thereby emptying the device slot, will unslot that device slot from the tray. Equipping a new stack of hypos (or different hypos) may or may not make it reappear, and it may or may not be in the same position. Device slots must remember their position reliably, even if they are currently empty.
• Tray: Since Anniversary patch, some UI power graphics are no longer aligned and are bigger (or smaller) than what they should be. (Example: The weapon power graphic on the tray is larger than the auto fire box around it.)
• Tray: Powers are unpredictably grayed out and/or have a yellow box around them for no reason after map load. They function normally, however, and will reset to default behavior after being used once. Powers should only be grayed out if they are unavailable. I don't even know what the yellow box means.
• Character sheet: All data regarding space must be available on ground maps and vice versa, exactly as they would appear in the resp. location. This includes item and power tooltips.
• Reputation: Researching any set bonus must be possible by looking at the tooltip or otherwise interact with the rep project that's offering the item.
• UI: When interacting with any chat window during map transition, the chat windows and certain other UI elements change or reset their positions (sometimes). This can be remedied by pressing ESC to bring up the game menu, Rearrange HUD, and ESC.

There is so much more! I am trying to remember all the annoyances.

thehatch

A few more things:

• Tailor has no revert/undo functionality.
• Inventory:
  • Sort button has no revert/undo functionality.
  • Sorting in general uses a strange sorting function. It may be best to include a toggle in the options to "allow sorting".
  • Custom inventory organization: Allow to organize inventory by custom functionality to define tabs, sub tabs, or spans that hold certain items (by custom category, rarity, level, and similar filters) in a custom sort order (matching picked up items will go into that tab, sub-tab or span instead of the first free inventory spot). Those tabs, sub-tabs, or spans could be custom named, collapse/expandable, and "flashing" on pickup of a matching item. Any custom settings must be exportable/importable for other characters by any means. This could introduce pockets or backpacks.
  • An option to "show empty inventory slots" along with a numeric indicator and a "drop zone" in the inventory window for new items could be useful.
• R&D: There should be a note before spending Dilithium (i.e. to complete a started project).

oddboyout

A very minor UI note:

In the Character window, the Traits and Specialization tabs should be flipped, making Traits the third tab. The Specialization tab is only used by the player character while the Traits tab is used by BOffs as well.

lastavailabename

it keeps un-slotting my bridge officers since this season. Up to now I ignored it - believing they will come up with fixes. Nope. No fix. This is really starting to annoy me: Almost EVERYTIME I have to reasign the bridge officer stations. It has come to the point, where I am very close to taking an extended hiatus from the game.

warpangel

• Allow the second ability tray to be placed in a horizontal position like the first one, for more flexible placement on large screens.
• A mechanic for copying ability tray layouts between ships or otherwise saving a layout to be loaded on another ship so we don't have to reconfigure everything every time we buy a new ship.
• Tabs in the exchange window for sales reports and returned items, so they don't need to be spammed into our mailboxes anymore.
• Buttons for duty officer assignments that allow player to auto-select the best doffs for success or critical. The game currently uses both, depending on assignment, but we have no control over which one is used and have to switch them all manually one-by-one if its wrong.
• Sort the in-progress duty-officer assignments list by time remaining, like they were before the doff UI revamp.
• Sort the completed duty officer assignments list by completion time, like they were before the doff UI revamp.
• Show the cooldown (if any) of a duty officer assignment in the "assignment log" tab. Make sure assignments stay in the log at least until the cooldown is over. Provide an option to sort the list by completion time or remaining cooldown.
• If a duty officer assignment is available but can't be taken because it's on cooldown, show it in the available assignments list greyed out, with the cooldown timer visible, instead of hiding it completely.
• A tab in the missions window that tracks cooldowns for things that are otherwise untrackable, like the daily rep mark boxes and event special rewards (crystal shard, etc).

plaztikman64

lastavailabename wrote: »

it keeps un-slotting my bridge officers since this season. Up to now I ignored it - believing they will come up with fixes. Nope. No fix. This is really starting to annoy me: Almost EVERYTIME I have to reasign the bridge officer stations. It has come to the point, where I am very close to taking an extended hiatus from the game.

Yeah... it's so damn frustrating... and best right after joining an STF and then see the empty tray bar...gharrrr

eradicator84

Buying doffs from fleet vendor is 1 at a time, would be nice to buy a stack with the sliding scale selector for the amount.
Also unpacking stacks of boxed fleet doffs is one at a time. should be a right click option on doff box stack to "unpack all" (or as many as will fit into your roster)

amezuki

Suggestion: modal windows need to die as a design element, especially considering how many essential windows in STO seem to share the same modality that renders them unable to be open at the same time.

In particular it is incredibly frustrating that the Replicator window shares modality with any Assignment windows that require interaction to open (e.g. Department Heads, Cluster Assignments). What this means in practice is that it is very common to, say, query a DH or Cluster for assignments, find that there's a particular commodity you need, open the Replicator dialog--and find that your assignment window has been dismissed. Which means that if you need a reminder of exactly how many of what you need to replicate as you're scrolling through, you can't just glance back at the other window--you have to completely close the Replicator window first, then re-open the assignment, then close that and go back to the Replicator. It's a huge amount of pointless wasted effort, and there's no good reason that these two windows need to share modality.

It's equally frustrating that opening a modal window immediately switches your throttle to all stop--it makes it impractical and annoying to check your DHs for assignments while you're on a long autopilot through sector space.

So can we please just kill off the stale dinosaur that is modal windows entirely? They're embarrassingly 90's and there is no good reason to use them unless it is essential to prevent a user from doing anything else before they close that window.