Matrix Games Forums

What would be the best UI improvement?
Or to put it less kindly:
What's the worst thing about the UI?

I've been looking at some other games like Decisive Campaigns, Valor and Victory, and Flash point, and I guess the standard way it should work is:

1) Left click unit selects the unit
2) Panel opens at the bottom to show you unit info and show you unit actions (like those on the right-click menu)
as well as stuff like 'select all units in hex'
3) left click on a hex to move to that destination (or attack etc)

Is that then a "Good UI"?
Anything else?

Just looking at this to see how much work it would be. Promising nothing I'm afraid!
If I did this, the old drag-drop UI would remain of course - this change would be a game option...

Thanks,
Brian

Ok I will throw in some feedback..

I have no issues with the current UI as it stands, I like it

Once you know some of the more important hotkeys and what info lies behind the buttons and then it's all good. I also own and play the DC games and FP and both also have great UI systems.

Here's some feedback that I hope helps:

1. The old school AWT style of interface just looks very dated. Grognards might not care, but grognards are a very small target group, and getting smaller every year.

2. Don't make me hunt for things. For bridging engineers, I have to right click to pop up the unit dialog, then select deploy bridge. There aren't THAT many actions for a unit. Some sort of context sensitive command button bar would be nice. Or simply show the unit information by default and give people a right click popup menu.

3. In the same vein, there seems to be a lot of different vectors for issuing commands. I can drag and drop units. I have to show the unit dialog to issue some commands. Other commands are hotkey driven. It's too inconsistent.

4. The tooltips for most of the information on the unit dialogs show up and disappear way too quickly. Trivial, but it's jarring.

5. Many of the icons are not particularly intuitive.

I think #s 2 and 3 are the biggest issues. The cognitive load on a new user is too high. In todays world of gaming, where new games are coming out all the time, people are going to try the game for a bit, and if they don't get into it quickly, toss it on the pile and likely never pick it up again.

#1 hurts as there are definitely more and more players who will look at screen shots, say "yeah, no", and skip to the next game. It's harsh, but that's the way of things these days.

Again, hope that helps.

Hi,

AWT? Abstract Window Toolkit? Or do you mean something else? Don't follow you there.

Yes that helps but I was more looking improvement suggestions, like how to make it better, not just what should be better if you see what I mean.
Like would having a click to move (with a display area at the bottom like in those other games) make it better?
Or worse as there'd be more buttons/displays.

Cheers,
Brian

It would be great if we could chose the background colour of the windows and the map. The cold neutral grey is very basic. I want to create a mod for the UI but it seems I cannot add a custom background image to the UI windows. So I'm stuck with the grey, which is very problematic (rather cold color, does not go well with the warm map and the UI color palette I'm going for).

Could you please add:
A pop up box or some way to remind the player that if they use 'road move' they need to allocate the appropriate supplies.

Tom_ wrote: Sun Mar 12, 2023 10:40 am Could you please add:
A pop up box or some way to remind the player that if they use 'road move' they need to allocate the appropriate supplies.

Sure, can have a look at tgat.

I'll have to have a think about the Road Movement thing all right... it's not intuitive that one has to set the move type to road movement and set supply...

JacquesDeLalaing wrote: Sun Dec 04, 2022 11:05 am It would be great if we could chose the background colour of the windows and the map. The cold neutral grey is very basic. I want to create a mod for the UI but it seems I cannot add a custom background image to the UI windows. So I'm stuck with the grey, which is very problematic (rather cold color, does not go well with the warm map and the UI color palette I'm going for).

I presume you mean in the editor? Will do, shouldn't be a problem.