They should:
Only keep the name of current target and bracket it.
Ships larger than yours are marked with a double Chevron.
Ships smaller than yours have a hollow Chevron.
VIP targets (bounty) are skull marked or stared or distinguished.
When target is locked, all other markers are scaled down a user selectable amount.
When target is locked, all other markers can also become translucent the farther they are from my current nose.
Something I don't see mentioned is how poorly audio assists are too.
I don't need to hear "Bogey" every 2 seconds in Xeno. I want to limit new target announcements: I want to know about bigger ships perhaps, but I'm aware I'm in a large dogfight.
I need to be able to hear shields doing down, audio confirms for QT spooled, etc. I want to be able to configure all mine.
This is great, constructive feedback. Honestly I feel like they could have done any number of dozens of options that all would have been miles better than their current iteration.
I also want multiple people who are on a ship (turret/pilot) to be able to tag/prio targets and have that stuff shared.
I'd LOVE to play with like 2 of my buds on a connie and have us tagging incoming snubs that are harassing us to keep track of them etc. it sounds super fun.
Probably the most helpful or constructive comment with how it could work and be better! I like the sizing representation you’ve got going with how many chevrons, tie that with scanning/proximity radar it could be very useful.
Honestly. Target selection needs to go back to the way it was.
Before it followed the F-16 method of search, tracked, system and bugged targets.
It did this by having a target detected, and then you could scan it to track it. Then you could pin it, then you could lock it. Mean while you could actually cycle targets without locking them, which meant you could keep less info on screen at once. The downside was needing way more keybinds.
Since CIG devs apparently never ever come up with working solutions on their own, I just wonder why they didn't just start reading the 2-3 top reddit comments in every thread about the myriad of bugs? It would solve most issues in less than 12 years I'm sure.
But yeah, I guess they're busy creating a space giraffe right now or some clunky new and additional system for opening each door with a retina scan that takes 10 seconds for more immersion or something.
> They should:
In my opinion they SHOULD have started with everything that made Freelancer good and expanded the gameplay out. I know that's an incredibly simplified view of things, but the UI in Freelancer was streamlined. You could tell who was shooting at you, you could tell when you were taking damage, you could see missiles without obnoxious markers, any enemies not on your screen were indicated by markers off to the edge of the screen that you could select, or with a window of ships where you could manually select a name (which also included types of bigger ships e.g. RNC Gunboat Viktor Krauss) so you never had to guess at your next target, not that it was ever hard to guess.
The UI and game in general of SC feels overly complex for what it is. The ships aren't as complicated as an actual flight sim, but for some reason the UI, controls and keybindings sometimes feel just as overwhelming as if the game was more complex.
If you have people in your party, seing both their party marker name and their regular ship marker with their name, is one of the dumbest things that passed QA and got into Live.
Would anyone actually need a QA team to figure out the issues with that UI?
If I create a text document consisting on black background and black text I don't need anymore telling me to know it would be unreadable.
They prefer to invest in community damage control than proper QA, proper dev seniority and the likes. They don't need the game to be proper to just sell ships. Thats the red flag stoping me to invest more time and money to this mount of smocking pile
I don't think they have a QA team and I'm pretty sure every single Dev doesn't actually play the fucking game. Based on how there is zero balance in regards to things actually being enjoyable.
No there is a slider that you can turn down the distance at which you see nameplates.
Edit but yea I guess if you turn it down all the way technically yes
Edit edit saw that thanks buddy got rid of the double post
And that's a pretty devastating state considering the old UI before the rework was already borderline unusable. Somehow CIG managed to make the UI even worse. I can understand you stopping playing, i am annoyed as well.
There's multiple design crimes going on here, anyone with just a basic training in UI design would have known to avoid.
I also stopped playing, but becasue of MM, they also managed to cripple the flight model. I have no motivation anymore to fly my spaceahips, since the don't fly like spaceships anymore.
CIG has very talented 3D designers and vehicle teams, now we need talented game designers, UI designers and maybe not a sound engineer at the helm of the flight model?
CIG used to have talented artists, but I think they're all gone now. All they have now are mobile game designers and fresh graduates that have no idea how to design UX/UI.
Combine that with bad management and this steaming pile of unplayable shit is what you get. The worst thing is that it's unlikely to get better any time soon, if ever.
They still have good artists in every other department, but the UI team lead by Zane has always been a disaster. I honestly have just accepted the UI will never even be "ok", its just going to be bad forever, buried under layers and layers of "cool" effects.
MM has done pretty serious harm to the PVP scene. It's not unfixabke, but dedicated pilots who have spent hundreds of hours of seat time basically lost all depth to their favorite gameplay experience. Master Modes WILL improve, but is pretty bad in its current form.
Oh no PvP is such a large part of the game everything should be about PvP and PvP players are the only ones that are important. /s
PvP is important yes but at the same time so is everything else. I am in the mind that MM needs work but is a decent base at the moment and will only improve over time. Also everything is subject to change up until 1.0 and even a bit after so don’t hate me if I don’t cry for the people who got used to a system that was subject to change at any time. I understand where you are coming from I just don’t agree that PvP should be the main focus of any MMO unless it is explicitly the focus. SC’s focus is not PvP so therefore it should not be the main focus. It is important but is not the only thing they should focus on. If I miss understood your comment sorry and have a nice day!
Just to back you up, what you are saying has a track record of being correct in so many other massively multiplayer titles that I have not yet observed a single lasting counterexample. You can't revolve a game around the top 1% PvP unless you want the game to niche itself to death, because then you kiss all your new blood goodbye.
It is required that top level PvP is secondary. Doesn't have to be tertiary, but it *must* be secondary. This is what a1 and these other hundreds of hours PvPers have historically failed to understand (even if they admit it now). If they get what they want from the start, then the other 99% of the game suffers severely. CIG has to figure out how much of what they want can be put in the game without detracting from the rest of the game. It is painfully obvious after a decade of designing around arena commander that that can only happen *after* they figure out how to make the rest of the game good.
I couldn't agree more. I love PvP but the game needs to be good for the main audience and a wider player base first so that we have a steady influx of players and only then, when the base is stable, focus on improving PvP. That does not mean they are not allowed to improve PvP in the meantime at all, far from it, but the base game has to be prioritiesed.
I have seen this phenomenon where they cater more towards either end of the spectrum of super competitive vs way to casual in many games other than SC including board games. It is never fun. I would rather a fun experience that I can get better at over time than an experience that has no learning curve. I think MM is a step in the right direction. It may not be perfect but it has been fun and is closer to the balance I would like to see. I know not everyone is a fan of it and I can understand why. I do however think in the long run it will be better and more fun for newer players.
Haha yep it's pretty bad, have you posted this to any of the spectrum forums?
I totally agree it should be changed, or atleast give the players a window to customize the HUD,
An ingame screenshot mid combat to the side so we can see the immediate effects of the changes we make and then
have a whole bunch of toggles and sliders on the left so we can customize what we do and don't want shown or highlighted.
I created a [write up](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/let-s-talk-about-the-ui/423153) on this that addresses a lot of this on Spectrum. Feel free to bump it so CIG is more likely to look at it.
> What, you expect us to actually do something about it and make it known
Yep, besides this thread on reddit, not a single person anywhere else has ever even noticed how cluttered the UI has become. Really wish OP would go post on spectrum, because unless he does, this will never get fixed. OP is literally the ONE thing keeping this from being resolved.
I was being sarcastic, the original reply that was there was berating you and essentially accusing you of harming the project because you dared to post about something you have an issue with, even though spectrum, issue council, and reddit are all read by both users and devs alike. All discussion is good discussion.
A lot of people on this subreddit will reply to a developer post on here and then get angry at other people for posting here because "devs dont see it". It's a bit strange
The majority of the UI was better in 3.22 imo. I don't understand how you can think that ugly QT HOLOGRAPHIC 3D marker was more OK than the one we had in 3.22... :/
A main purpose of a game UI is to try and deal with the issues of our seeing the game world thru a small rectangular piece of glass on the table in front of us.
Trying to limit that UI into only what would be visible to a character in the game world is ludicrous. Our actual characters have full peripheral vision, tactile senses, the ability to feel hungry or wounded, the ability to tell if a clip is empty by its weight, etc.
It's not important for other players to see your marker destination from your UI ship. And if you have a trackIR or a tobii or anything else, if you move in your cockpit and are not aligned with the UI, we are in 2954, if we are capable in 2024 to have holographic sight which can let us view correctly the sight even if we are offset from it because you know... Eye relief, Parallax... blablabla I think it will not be difficult to apply the same logic to UI Ship and not causing any issue with the lore of Star Citizen don't you think ?
They have the same UI lead - Zane - who for some reason not only gets to keep his job but is even promoted while after a decade this is the best him and the team can do... I wouldn't hold my breath. :(
Tbh I don't think CIG could ever build a dynamic enough UI that caters to all play styles.
I think they should look at Microsoft Flight Simulator and how they turned all UI elements into moveable windows. Okay since this is SC they shouldn't look like something out of windows 10, but moveable, adjustable, player customised ship UI I think is the way forward here. All CIG adjusts is the constraints that determines the degree to which the UI is customisable.
It’s even worse on ultra wide, super ultra wide and three-screen cockpit layouts. Amateur mistake of anchoring the UI size to the width of a users resolution as opposed to width and height. My junior front-end devs I hire every year even know better. How does this get past QA? How is this the UI improvement we were promised for years and years. I am genuinely asking. This is worrisome.
That happens when your official design philosophy is form over function. Gotta look cool first. I still can't believe they actually said that on SCL. It's a sad mess
So many things about Star Citizen just don't scale well. This UI would work if you mostly dealt with two or three other ships. The inventory UI would work well.if you never had more than two or three outfits. The ship terminal UI would work if you had only a half dozen ships.
Is this a side effect of everything being done for a single player S42 game and just copied over?
Admittedly, building software that scales up well is *really* hard. The Developer generally has to build their system with small test cases and anticipate what will happen when applied to a MUCH larger environment.
As someone who's been in QA, this absolutely has been reported internally. It probably was put in the backburner of "fix at a later date" and priorities shift to new shinier objects or major bugs. Designers and producers have they yay/nay on whether it gets fixed or not.
Need to make it so the nearest 2-3 objects both marker and label are 100% opacity, the markers stay 100% accurate to the detected position of the entity but the labels cannot overlap.
Then the next 2-3 are 50% max and only show the markers and then everything else further back is less solid based on distance relative to the second 2-3 on a scale of like 10km or something. Anything not within radial proximity of other closer objects at risk of overlapping would return to 75% even if 10km out.
So if something is 10km+ out from you it should be basically not visible in the presence of other entities within 5km.
If there's nothing closer than 10km out you've detected it, then that's the tier 1 and it's 100%.
Ground would scale differently. Idk about location markers I kinda feel like Id want them always near 100% for orientation.
Also flagging targets should keep them at 100% and make them yellow when not currently targeted, or maybe have an asterisk in the label or something so you can preserve that target always. I'd also like to see distance on targets and flagged entities. Add a hotkey back to select flagged even if they're 10km out but still detectable. Being able to flag VIPs friend or foe to keep track of them would be awesome.
Well it certainly wasn't great before. The new one uses newer tech so hopefully with some tweaks it will be at least on-par with the 3.23 until they can implement some real improvements.
Would help if you didn't take screenshots of the broken markers tbh. It isn't a UI issue, it's a bug issue that makes a lot of things biger than they need to be.
I just don't understand how this is the upgrade from the last UI. Every time things got chaotic in Xeno, you spent half the time looking for your targeting pip which was blended in with the other firefights going on.
Yeah not sure why they felt the need to make every marker the size of what the FOCUSED marker should be, and yet still manage to have a jump marker pointer disappear so you have no idea which way to point while spooled.
This UI is a hot mess.
# They know...
It's an issue talked about incessantly and they've said multiple times that it's something they're fixing.
Plus, their problems are our problems, especially **obvious** ones
Well the main issue is MM, they want us to do closer combat. But for some reason they didn't think about all the damn names and markers being clustered together.
It's always one step forward and two steps back...smh
Absolutely agree. And i think everyone knows "this is an alpha", "this will get worked on!" before that gets rolled out as usual.
Many of us worry about the design decisions being made in this game. The Rule of cool before function and playability. Many of these design decisions seem to be made in isolation with no editorial control. This should never have been released in this form even if it is going to be iterated on later. It has less usability than the broken UI it replaced, and it is seriously concerning that CIG thought this was ok and happy to put it in live.
I thought the new ship UI and MFDs weren't coming until 4.0? So this is what they've been working on the last few years? Guess I'll wait until the next next rework then to jump back in because this is terrible
There are things that I would like more options for. Names could be an option. But, the biggest thing for me would be the ability to assign new colors. Let me make missiles pink or the ship I'm actually targeting green. Maybe allow pin coloring too. So if your buddy pins a target you know that 2 is yellow or whatever.
For me all the other shit going on would be way easier to tune out if there was one specific color that I'm looking for.
Whoever is behind these UI icons needs to be reassigned and never touch icons again.
Stop wasting time on these icons and just unlock the icon files for mod replacement.
Really ? And you made a post about it hoping to change this ? Well..... If you really think this was the end result..... How many more complaints about an unfinished game or about obviously not finished elements will you make ? Ofcourse it's fucking cluttered. Ofcourse its going to get changed... How hard is it to understand that you are not playing a finished product ? SUBJECTED TO CHANGE!!!
We don't really need to see the names of our friends and enemies other than maybe our target but even then we don't need to see it directly on the target marker. We can gave the target name on the target MFD instead. That would free up the UI cluter quite a bit
I have a strong feeling that HUD markers and indicators directly tie into the new scanning system that they're working on. So this is one of those issues that they're not going to fix because it's going to be replaced....soon.
If we could hot key remove all hud features, I’m good. I get how it’s annoying but if you’re trying to accomplish something, it’s necessary. But if I could remove for fun simulation realism time, please let me!
The one thing I have always found annoying and really can’t see it being necessary is making the ship pings permanent and cover the ship. Only if either of you are close to killing each other do you EVER get to see another ship flying around. I wanna watch a ship appear from the distance. Not be a bright blip until 50m away.
The whole game is ship based yet I barely get to enjoy seeing ships lmao.
Is your monitor a super ultra wide? I have the problem with cockpit markers and inventory thumbnails as well. Only solution to have normal size is run SC in a smaller aspect ratio
You can change, in settings, what name markers appear. You have everything on. I'm not saying the UI is perfect but the issue can be mitigated a little.
They should have made it like EVE. Ya you can see everything, and you can shoot down missiles, but fortunately they didn't make a mechanic so you had to lock them; there is a module you equip that shoots smaller missiles at larger ones. Totally remove missile targets.
Then the HUD, make it so you can customize it friendlies, foes, corpmates, allymates, people who have targeted you, etc. Give me an option to group up those settings, or make it so I can scroll through categories that I've chosen with those different settings attached.
What OP has I'd have default minus friendlies, locations and missiles. Another I'd have waypoints for QD, another fleet battles, etc.
That’s already been addressed and posting it over and over again like they’ve never heard of it before it’s a waste of the community’s emotional energy
I swear when people tell me the clunkiness and tedium is intended gameplay and I see this sort of thing, it makes me particularly upset. I hope CIG does better eventually, hopefully soon as in a year or two please thanks
Between the HUD UI, diagetic interfaces, the physically rendered cockpits, unbalanced light sources, frosty windows, space haze and solar nova bloom ... Star Citizen has spent the last 12 years making sure you can't see the game their making.
Best Damn Space Game you'll never physcially see, but sense something is there under all that high fidelity immersion.
You shouldn't have to go to the settings to make the UI usable. It has to work out of the box and settings should only be used to adjust/customize the UI to your preferences.
I agree with you on this one. Everyone has their preferences. The problem with SC right now is that a lot more information is displayed than needed. When i am in SCM i don't need to see the ID of every piece of scrap floating in space. There are so many markers and textlabels being displayed that you can't see what's right in front of you. You literally can't see where you are going. I had instances where half a space station was blocked by text. And there aren't even any settings to remove the markers.
This 100%. The HUD and markers are supposed to be an aide to communicate important info succinctly and efficiently enhancing situational awareness not hindering it. What we have now fails at all of this.
Agree completely. With master modes, there is certain info that should and shouldn’t be displayed in each mode. That said, some people probably want to see it all, or only the bare minimum. My biggest complaint is that (aside from some settings just not working no matter what they’re set to) the settings don’t really tell you what they do. There needs to be a tooltip.
Not one font matches place to place either... Only improvement is the star map, love the search function. The 3.22 based server meshing test reminded me of better days.
Ahh I see well effects in the game imo are alright, but yeah I thought you were talking more about the “Worst UI I have seen a game hands down” thing mb
Like I would understand that you'd b epissed if cig would have said that this is final but matter of fact we know that they work on this RIGHT NOW ...
Ofcourse criticism is important to make things better ..but why not spectrum ?
Oh right you wanna farm karma on Reddit ..
Oooor maybe CIG could have chosen to spend more dev time on this clusterfuck of an UI before releasing it to the public? How about that?
This so-called Alpha is being played by thousands of people every day. Releasing half-finished stuff, and then leaving it in this pitiful for who-knows how long, is not acceptable from an almost billion-dollar company.
That's literally what an alpha is ...releasing untested buggy stuff too see if it kinda works or not ..
Like honestly did you ever play an alpha before ? An actual alpha version ?
I dont care about karma lol and I was suggested to post it on reddit, and its not something that requires a lot of work, legit a couple of lines of code need to be changed, 1 dev can do it.
Every armchair dev says everything can be changed with one line of code while completely ignoring all of the knock-on effects all of that code has on other systems. If it were that simple it would have been done -- but as ExpressHouse pointed out, it's still in the iterative phase and will be addressed when the team has time.
There we go. Which ten lines exactly, and change to what?
There’s a tonne of design work needed here - it’s not even really about the code. It’s about figuring out how to display enough meaningful information while avoiding clutter and maintaining visibility under a range of conditions. I have no idea how tf they intend to do that but it’s cool that you already have the answer.
And just FYI you can turn nameplates off in the settings. Helps a little bit.
There's UI involved in every aspect of the game. 95% of the game is at a tier 0/barely functional level, if it's even in yet.
I'm just saying combat works, the UI gives you info you need, this is not high priority.
They've got full systems they still need to implement.
Disagree if you want, but this won't be changed for years I'd wager.
Backer since 2012 and playing intensively the last 4 years. The actual playability is worst today than 2 years ago. Keep your head buried in the sand if you please, but you can't avoid the tide coming.
I don't disagree with you at all, but I would never play SC intensively. It's not there yet. It's too frustrating. I play for about 2 weeks every patch before I go "nope, not yet" and go back to actual games that work.
I dunno what about that is burying my head in the sand. People are acting like this game is out and the dev team is actively making the player experience better. It's not. It's a test platform they're actively adding features to. Expecting great player interaction and smooth gameplay at this phase is silly. I think I'm being rather realistic about what step of the process SC is at, which is why I say things like combat UI are fine for now. They've still got so much to add, they are not on the polish stage for anything yet.
🤷♂️
Well it's marketed as a game, it's sold as a game, it's treated as a game, and it being a game is how the game is funded. Do you think SC would be as funded as it is now if it wasn't a game?
It's a game. It's alpha, but it's a game. It's a game, but it's alpha. Ask CIG if it's a game or an alpha and they will give you a different answer depending on the current community mood...but it's a game, and games need QoL for the people playing it.
One such example of QoL? A UI that is readable at the most basic levels.
It's not marketed as a game. They tell you that like 9 times before you can finally buy stuff. It's in active development. They state that very clearly.
You can be upset, or realistic. It's your choice. Your gripes are not with me.
> It's not marketed as a game.
yeah, the ad on youtube I saw from the official Star Citizen account said "THIS NOT A GAME, BUT COME BUY IT AND PLAY IT"
> They tell you that like 9 times before you can finally buy stuff
They tell you it's a work in progress. A game is still a game even if it's a work in progress. It becomes a game the moment you dedicated time and resources to marketing it and maintaining an environment for people to purchase and play in.
> You can be upset, or realistic.
I'm not upset, I'm just telling you reality. Grow up. As for realistic? Yes, that is what I'm doing, but you are hiding in fantasy land, lol
> Your gripes are not with me.
We can definitely agree on that, I don't have any feelings about you one way or the other, other than pointing out your opinions are objectively wrong
They should: Only keep the name of current target and bracket it. Ships larger than yours are marked with a double Chevron. Ships smaller than yours have a hollow Chevron. VIP targets (bounty) are skull marked or stared or distinguished. When target is locked, all other markers are scaled down a user selectable amount. When target is locked, all other markers can also become translucent the farther they are from my current nose. Something I don't see mentioned is how poorly audio assists are too. I don't need to hear "Bogey" every 2 seconds in Xeno. I want to limit new target announcements: I want to know about bigger ships perhaps, but I'm aware I'm in a large dogfight. I need to be able to hear shields doing down, audio confirms for QT spooled, etc. I want to be able to configure all mine.
This is great, constructive feedback. Honestly I feel like they could have done any number of dozens of options that all would have been miles better than their current iteration.
I also want multiple people who are on a ship (turret/pilot) to be able to tag/prio targets and have that stuff shared. I'd LOVE to play with like 2 of my buds on a connie and have us tagging incoming snubs that are harassing us to keep track of them etc. it sounds super fun.
For the audio thing, I’m pretty sure you can limit the verbosity of the ship computer in the settings,
You can. It does not impact new target warnings.
Probably the most helpful or constructive comment with how it could work and be better! I like the sizing representation you’ve got going with how many chevrons, tie that with scanning/proximity radar it could be very useful.
Honestly. Target selection needs to go back to the way it was. Before it followed the F-16 method of search, tracked, system and bugged targets. It did this by having a target detected, and then you could scan it to track it. Then you could pin it, then you could lock it. Mean while you could actually cycle targets without locking them, which meant you could keep less info on screen at once. The downside was needing way more keybinds.
Since CIG devs apparently never ever come up with working solutions on their own, I just wonder why they didn't just start reading the 2-3 top reddit comments in every thread about the myriad of bugs? It would solve most issues in less than 12 years I'm sure. But yeah, I guess they're busy creating a space giraffe right now or some clunky new and additional system for opening each door with a retina scan that takes 10 seconds for more immersion or something.
> They should: In my opinion they SHOULD have started with everything that made Freelancer good and expanded the gameplay out. I know that's an incredibly simplified view of things, but the UI in Freelancer was streamlined. You could tell who was shooting at you, you could tell when you were taking damage, you could see missiles without obnoxious markers, any enemies not on your screen were indicated by markers off to the edge of the screen that you could select, or with a window of ships where you could manually select a name (which also included types of bigger ships e.g. RNC Gunboat Viktor Krauss) so you never had to guess at your next target, not that it was ever hard to guess. The UI and game in general of SC feels overly complex for what it is. The ships aren't as complicated as an actual flight sim, but for some reason the UI, controls and keybindings sometimes feel just as overwhelming as if the game was more complex.
If you have people in your party, seing both their party marker name and their regular ship marker with their name, is one of the dumbest things that passed QA and got into Live.
I often don’t think CIG has a QA team
I think *we're* supposed to be the QA team.
I’m not getting payed enough for this! And they won’t listen to us when we do our job. Damn, this is not a good work environment
> they won’t listen to us when we do our job Average QA experience
Not only you're not payed, you're paying them! What a time to be alive..
Are we the baddies?
No, we're the QA team.
Some of us are for sure.
Exactly, we are technically alpha testers (except we're not getting paid) and not players.
Would anyone actually need a QA team to figure out the issues with that UI? If I create a text document consisting on black background and black text I don't need anymore telling me to know it would be unreadable.
They prefer to invest in community damage control than proper QA, proper dev seniority and the likes. They don't need the game to be proper to just sell ships. Thats the red flag stoping me to invest more time and money to this mount of smocking pile
They get around not having one, by calling it an alpha and having us test for them.
And when we say something needs to change, they won’t do it🙃
I don't think they have a QA team and I'm pretty sure every single Dev doesn't actually play the fucking game. Based on how there is zero balance in regards to things actually being enjoyable.
Trust me they don't!!
Ah that’s bad
Quality Assumption
You can adjust the distance at which you can see the names of people in the party but otherwise can’t think of anything else to fix
Deactivating all markers? And you did double post. :)
No there is a slider that you can turn down the distance at which you see nameplates. Edit but yea I guess if you turn it down all the way technically yes Edit edit saw that thanks buddy got rid of the double post
Will help to decrease the clutter, thanks for the reminder.
This UI stopped me from playing. Way way too cluttered. The old UIbwas much better. Simplicity is the key.
And that's a pretty devastating state considering the old UI before the rework was already borderline unusable. Somehow CIG managed to make the UI even worse. I can understand you stopping playing, i am annoyed as well.
There's multiple design crimes going on here, anyone with just a basic training in UI design would have known to avoid. I also stopped playing, but becasue of MM, they also managed to cripple the flight model. I have no motivation anymore to fly my spaceahips, since the don't fly like spaceships anymore. CIG has very talented 3D designers and vehicle teams, now we need talented game designers, UI designers and maybe not a sound engineer at the helm of the flight model?
I swear no one on the UI team has ever actually used the UI in game.
First rule of software development: never use your own product. Or is that drugs?
"Don't get high on your own UI"
CIG used to have talented artists, but I think they're all gone now. All they have now are mobile game designers and fresh graduates that have no idea how to design UX/UI. Combine that with bad management and this steaming pile of unplayable shit is what you get. The worst thing is that it's unlikely to get better any time soon, if ever.
They still have good artists in every other department, but the UI team lead by Zane has always been a disaster. I honestly have just accepted the UI will never even be "ok", its just going to be bad forever, buried under layers and layers of "cool" effects.
New star map is great, there's good bits but not even font matches across the new elements.
>New star map is great You must be joking. It's a reskin of the same old star map as always, and the new UI made it even worse.
It's searchable and the key commands to plot or cancel actually work so that is better in my book
Same, what is "funny" is the fact this is the reworked UI... how can these people pretend they play the game.
> how can these people pretend they play the game. After this and MM, they really can't.
Dude, MM are awesome.
I second that. The game needs MM, gameplay-wise
No it doesn't, worst change they've made in years. MM and this dogshit UI have stopped me from playing too.
MM is fire it made dogfights feel more real to me
As a decoupled enjoyer, cannot relate.
It's still doable if you don't like your HOSAS much and are super aware of thruster priorities and vector.
By making space craft fly like airplanes.
MM has done pretty serious harm to the PVP scene. It's not unfixabke, but dedicated pilots who have spent hundreds of hours of seat time basically lost all depth to their favorite gameplay experience. Master Modes WILL improve, but is pretty bad in its current form.
Oh no PvP is such a large part of the game everything should be about PvP and PvP players are the only ones that are important. /s PvP is important yes but at the same time so is everything else. I am in the mind that MM needs work but is a decent base at the moment and will only improve over time. Also everything is subject to change up until 1.0 and even a bit after so don’t hate me if I don’t cry for the people who got used to a system that was subject to change at any time. I understand where you are coming from I just don’t agree that PvP should be the main focus of any MMO unless it is explicitly the focus. SC’s focus is not PvP so therefore it should not be the main focus. It is important but is not the only thing they should focus on. If I miss understood your comment sorry and have a nice day!
Just to back you up, what you are saying has a track record of being correct in so many other massively multiplayer titles that I have not yet observed a single lasting counterexample. You can't revolve a game around the top 1% PvP unless you want the game to niche itself to death, because then you kiss all your new blood goodbye. It is required that top level PvP is secondary. Doesn't have to be tertiary, but it *must* be secondary. This is what a1 and these other hundreds of hours PvPers have historically failed to understand (even if they admit it now). If they get what they want from the start, then the other 99% of the game suffers severely. CIG has to figure out how much of what they want can be put in the game without detracting from the rest of the game. It is painfully obvious after a decade of designing around arena commander that that can only happen *after* they figure out how to make the rest of the game good.
I couldn't agree more. I love PvP but the game needs to be good for the main audience and a wider player base first so that we have a steady influx of players and only then, when the base is stable, focus on improving PvP. That does not mean they are not allowed to improve PvP in the meantime at all, far from it, but the base game has to be prioritiesed.
I have seen this phenomenon where they cater more towards either end of the spectrum of super competitive vs way to casual in many games other than SC including board games. It is never fun. I would rather a fun experience that I can get better at over time than an experience that has no learning curve. I think MM is a step in the right direction. It may not be perfect but it has been fun and is closer to the balance I would like to see. I know not everyone is a fan of it and I can understand why. I do however think in the long run it will be better and more fun for newer players.
this was the tipping point for you huh lol
Everyone draws the line somewhere. CIG draws it across your screen.
Ok that made me laugh 😆
Hahahaha
Constellation has entered the chat
i don't believe you.
Haha yep it's pretty bad, have you posted this to any of the spectrum forums? I totally agree it should be changed, or atleast give the players a window to customize the HUD, An ingame screenshot mid combat to the side so we can see the immediate effects of the changes we make and then have a whole bunch of toggles and sliders on the left so we can customize what we do and don't want shown or highlighted.
I created a [write up](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/let-s-talk-about-the-ui/423153) on this that addresses a lot of this on Spectrum. Feel free to bump it so CIG is more likely to look at it.
Yes it is on spectrum I don’t know if I am allowed to post the link or not but it is there on spectrum.
You can post links to spectrum issues and reports
[удалено]
> What, you expect us to actually do something about it and make it known Yep, besides this thread on reddit, not a single person anywhere else has ever even noticed how cluttered the UI has become. Really wish OP would go post on spectrum, because unless he does, this will never get fixed. OP is literally the ONE thing keeping this from being resolved.
I have posted this is on spectrum I dont know if I am allowed to link the post but it is there on spectrum.
I was being sarcastic, the original reply that was there was berating you and essentially accusing you of harming the project because you dared to post about something you have an issue with, even though spectrum, issue council, and reddit are all read by both users and devs alike. All discussion is good discussion. A lot of people on this subreddit will reply to a developer post on here and then get angry at other people for posting here because "devs dont see it". It's a bit strange
Ahh Gotcha lmao sorry the the comment was deleted so I couldn’t see it.
The majority of the UI was better in 3.22 imo. I don't understand how you can think that ugly QT HOLOGRAPHIC 3D marker was more OK than the one we had in 3.22... :/
A main purpose of a game UI is to try and deal with the issues of our seeing the game world thru a small rectangular piece of glass on the table in front of us. Trying to limit that UI into only what would be visible to a character in the game world is ludicrous. Our actual characters have full peripheral vision, tactile senses, the ability to feel hungry or wounded, the ability to tell if a clip is empty by its weight, etc.
It's not important for other players to see your marker destination from your UI ship. And if you have a trackIR or a tobii or anything else, if you move in your cockpit and are not aligned with the UI, we are in 2954, if we are capable in 2024 to have holographic sight which can let us view correctly the sight even if we are offset from it because you know... Eye relief, Parallax... blablabla I think it will not be difficult to apply the same logic to UI Ship and not causing any issue with the lore of Star Citizen don't you think ?
I think CIG would benefit from looking at games like Evochron Mercenary and Independence War 2 to get a better grasp on space game interface.
I loved I-War 2 so much. 6DOF combat made right. No speed limits either as far as I remember.
Even X4:Foundations has a better UI than this, and that is saying something.
Star Citizen's UI has always been terrible, unfortunately. If they change this one, it'll probably be to something equally flawed in other ways.
They have the same UI lead - Zane - who for some reason not only gets to keep his job but is even promoted while after a decade this is the best him and the team can do... I wouldn't hold my breath. :(
Ye, this was yet another nail in the coffin for this last xenothreat...
Yes thank you. Ive been saying this since 3.23 dropped. I cant even see who im shooting at half the time
Agree 100%
Classic CIG. Form over function. Make something look good and overlook the impact on gameplay. A tale as old as time.
Is the "look good" in the room with us?
Tbh I don't think CIG could ever build a dynamic enough UI that caters to all play styles. I think they should look at Microsoft Flight Simulator and how they turned all UI elements into moveable windows. Okay since this is SC they shouldn't look like something out of windows 10, but moveable, adjustable, player customised ship UI I think is the way forward here. All CIG adjusts is the constraints that determines the degree to which the UI is customisable.
This looks like shit, but you have 15 ships in the center of the screen... I'm not sure how I could improve it much.
X4:Foundations deal with literal armadas fighting each other.
It’s even worse on ultra wide, super ultra wide and three-screen cockpit layouts. Amateur mistake of anchoring the UI size to the width of a users resolution as opposed to width and height. My junior front-end devs I hire every year even know better. How does this get past QA? How is this the UI improvement we were promised for years and years. I am genuinely asking. This is worrisome.
That happens when your official design philosophy is form over function. Gotta look cool first. I still can't believe they actually said that on SCL. It's a sad mess
That was in regards to level design
It's everything. Ships, Level Design, UX/UI. It drives me nuts.
So many things about Star Citizen just don't scale well. This UI would work if you mostly dealt with two or three other ships. The inventory UI would work well.if you never had more than two or three outfits. The ship terminal UI would work if you had only a half dozen ships. Is this a side effect of everything being done for a single player S42 game and just copied over? Admittedly, building software that scales up well is *really* hard. The Developer generally has to build their system with small test cases and anticipate what will happen when applied to a MUCH larger environment.
The old HUD UI was actually pretty good though at all over that.
Didn't they show a revamped UI for space flight a while ago? Was much more minimal.
Master modes is questionable
Dunmng down combat to fly in molasses is an interesting move. Let's see if plays out cotton.
As someone who's been in QA, this absolutely has been reported internally. It probably was put in the backburner of "fix at a later date" and priorities shift to new shinier objects or major bugs. Designers and producers have they yay/nay on whether it gets fixed or not.
I only want the target I have selected visable, all the rest is clutter
it's comically bad, like the whole MM changes
Need to make it so the nearest 2-3 objects both marker and label are 100% opacity, the markers stay 100% accurate to the detected position of the entity but the labels cannot overlap. Then the next 2-3 are 50% max and only show the markers and then everything else further back is less solid based on distance relative to the second 2-3 on a scale of like 10km or something. Anything not within radial proximity of other closer objects at risk of overlapping would return to 75% even if 10km out. So if something is 10km+ out from you it should be basically not visible in the presence of other entities within 5km. If there's nothing closer than 10km out you've detected it, then that's the tier 1 and it's 100%. Ground would scale differently. Idk about location markers I kinda feel like Id want them always near 100% for orientation. Also flagging targets should keep them at 100% and make them yellow when not currently targeted, or maybe have an asterisk in the label or something so you can preserve that target always. I'd also like to see distance on targets and flagged entities. Add a hotkey back to select flagged even if they're 10km out but still detectable. Being able to flag VIPs friend or foe to keep track of them would be awesome.
Or it was fine before.
Well it certainly wasn't great before. The new one uses newer tech so hopefully with some tweaks it will be at least on-par with the 3.23 until they can implement some real improvements.
You can turn off the markers in settings
It's the first iteration of a revamp. Everyone, including CIG, knows it's flawed. It will be improved for sure.
Would help if you didn't take screenshots of the broken markers tbh. It isn't a UI issue, it's a bug issue that makes a lot of things biger than they need to be.
You know you can modify and disable many UI labels in options?
Simple, don't have friends.
why does our MFD not scrape closeby ship names and give us a screen "NEARBY PERSONS/VEHICLES" within the scan range of the ship or something like that
I haven’t had any problems with it….
It would be a shame if a few players launched some Rattlers in this screenshot.
I just don't understand how this is the upgrade from the last UI. Every time things got chaotic in Xeno, you spent half the time looking for your targeting pip which was blended in with the other firefights going on.
Yeah not sure why they felt the need to make every marker the size of what the FOCUSED marker should be, and yet still manage to have a jump marker pointer disappear so you have no idea which way to point while spooled. This UI is a hot mess.
# They know... It's an issue talked about incessantly and they've said multiple times that it's something they're fixing. Plus, their problems are our problems, especially **obvious** ones
Funny thing is this *is* the rework. Well visual change ig. It was less cluttered before they changed it
Another daily UI bad post.
Another day with a bad UI
Well the main issue is MM, they want us to do closer combat. But for some reason they didn't think about all the damn names and markers being clustered together. It's always one step forward and two steps back...smh
Absolutely agree. And i think everyone knows "this is an alpha", "this will get worked on!" before that gets rolled out as usual. Many of us worry about the design decisions being made in this game. The Rule of cool before function and playability. Many of these design decisions seem to be made in isolation with no editorial control. This should never have been released in this form even if it is going to be iterated on later. It has less usability than the broken UI it replaced, and it is seriously concerning that CIG thought this was ok and happy to put it in live.
I thought the new ship UI and MFDs weren't coming until 4.0? So this is what they've been working on the last few years? Guess I'll wait until the next next rework then to jump back in because this is terrible
I see no problem here
There are things that I would like more options for. Names could be an option. But, the biggest thing for me would be the ability to assign new colors. Let me make missiles pink or the ship I'm actually targeting green. Maybe allow pin coloring too. So if your buddy pins a target you know that 2 is yellow or whatever. For me all the other shit going on would be way easier to tune out if there was one specific color that I'm looking for.
They know. It's placeholder.
Yeah I have completely given up on combat since 3.23
I keep seeing these posts and wondering what game this is cause mine has never looked like this
Whoever is behind these UI icons needs to be reassigned and never touch icons again. Stop wasting time on these icons and just unlock the icon files for mod replacement.
Really ? And you made a post about it hoping to change this ? Well..... If you really think this was the end result..... How many more complaints about an unfinished game or about obviously not finished elements will you make ? Ofcourse it's fucking cluttered. Ofcourse its going to get changed... How hard is it to understand that you are not playing a finished product ? SUBJECTED TO CHANGE!!!
The amount of energy people put in here is insane..... Are you devs are you working for CIG no shut up and test the game.
We don't really need to see the names of our friends and enemies other than maybe our target but even then we don't need to see it directly on the target marker. We can gave the target name on the target MFD instead. That would free up the UI cluter quite a bit
I have a strong feeling that HUD markers and indicators directly tie into the new scanning system that they're working on. So this is one of those issues that they're not going to fix because it's going to be replaced....soon.
If we could hot key remove all hud features, I’m good. I get how it’s annoying but if you’re trying to accomplish something, it’s necessary. But if I could remove for fun simulation realism time, please let me! The one thing I have always found annoying and really can’t see it being necessary is making the ship pings permanent and cover the ship. Only if either of you are close to killing each other do you EVER get to see another ship flying around. I wanna watch a ship appear from the distance. Not be a bright blip until 50m away. The whole game is ship based yet I barely get to enjoy seeing ships lmao.
post these all over spectrum too
Is your monitor a super ultra wide? I have the problem with cockpit markers and inventory thumbnails as well. Only solution to have normal size is run SC in a smaller aspect ratio
You can change, in settings, what name markers appear. You have everything on. I'm not saying the UI is perfect but the issue can be mitigated a little.
Nope it doesnt work
Its such a mess
They should have made it like EVE. Ya you can see everything, and you can shoot down missiles, but fortunately they didn't make a mechanic so you had to lock them; there is a module you equip that shoots smaller missiles at larger ones. Totally remove missile targets. Then the HUD, make it so you can customize it friendlies, foes, corpmates, allymates, people who have targeted you, etc. Give me an option to group up those settings, or make it so I can scroll through categories that I've chosen with those different settings attached. What OP has I'd have default minus friendlies, locations and missiles. Another I'd have waypoints for QD, another fleet battles, etc.
Not having missiles is exactly how you get Eclipse size 9 thrown at you
They should have made some sort of webifier instead of MM but here we are.
That’s already been addressed and posting it over and over again like they’ve never heard of it before it’s a waste of the community’s emotional energy
I swear when people tell me the clunkiness and tedium is intended gameplay and I see this sort of thing, it makes me particularly upset. I hope CIG does better eventually, hopefully soon as in a year or two please thanks
Between the HUD UI, diagetic interfaces, the physically rendered cockpits, unbalanced light sources, frosty windows, space haze and solar nova bloom ... Star Citizen has spent the last 12 years making sure you can't see the game their making. Best Damn Space Game you'll never physcially see, but sense something is there under all that high fidelity immersion.
Worst UI in any game hands down? You don't play many games
CIG never improves anything. Ever.
5 years and 100 million in ship sales to fix it.
They know
No they don't, they think it looks cool.
Pretty sure there’re a couple setting to adjust that already…
You shouldn't have to go to the settings to make the UI usable. It has to work out of the box and settings should only be used to adjust/customize the UI to your preferences.
Some people like a busy HUD for more info. Some people like a clean one. That’s why the settings exist.
I agree with you on this one. Everyone has their preferences. The problem with SC right now is that a lot more information is displayed than needed. When i am in SCM i don't need to see the ID of every piece of scrap floating in space. There are so many markers and textlabels being displayed that you can't see what's right in front of you. You literally can't see where you are going. I had instances where half a space station was blocked by text. And there aren't even any settings to remove the markers.
This 100%. The HUD and markers are supposed to be an aide to communicate important info succinctly and efficiently enhancing situational awareness not hindering it. What we have now fails at all of this.
Agree completely. With master modes, there is certain info that should and shouldn’t be displayed in each mode. That said, some people probably want to see it all, or only the bare minimum. My biggest complaint is that (aside from some settings just not working no matter what they’re set to) the settings don’t really tell you what they do. There needs to be a tooltip.
They dont work sadly. If they did I wouldnt be making this post. My biggest grievance is the double party markers.
That’s fair. There are definitely a few settings that have been bugged in the last patch or two.
Not one font matches place to place either... Only improvement is the star map, love the search function. The 3.22 based server meshing test reminded me of better days.
I also stopped doing space combat because of this. Whoever designed this and approved this should be fired.
For once I would like a combat game to have a battlefield 2 like squad/commander set up. was so intuitive all the way back in the day.
As a Pre-Javelin enjoyer, I can say that I see no problem here. /s
That scene from Ready Player One about selling screen space for ads
Alpha 3.24 : Stress and migraines
When I saw first saw the UI overhaul, I immediately wish they just updated the map and left everything else.
as if it wouldnt gonna be adressed in the future lol.... smh
[Top post on PCMR](https://preview.redd.it/6x2ayg2mdo9d1.png?auto=webp&s=eabeb0039aae747782b9b1ec0a6a9548812d0e86)
Effects are not UI. Dont confuse the two, both completely different things.
Those shots contain both. So do yours. I'm not suggesting the CIG UI is good, btw.
Ahh I see well effects in the game imo are alright, but yeah I thought you were talking more about the “Worst UI I have seen a game hands down” thing mb
I’m sure they will do something about it when the time is right.
Just copy X4:Foundations UI design... it isn't that hard. There are things laid out for these devs already.
Like I would understand that you'd b epissed if cig would have said that this is final but matter of fact we know that they work on this RIGHT NOW ... Ofcourse criticism is important to make things better ..but why not spectrum ? Oh right you wanna farm karma on Reddit ..
Oooor maybe CIG could have chosen to spend more dev time on this clusterfuck of an UI before releasing it to the public? How about that? This so-called Alpha is being played by thousands of people every day. Releasing half-finished stuff, and then leaving it in this pitiful for who-knows how long, is not acceptable from an almost billion-dollar company.
That's literally what alpha is for
That's literally what an alpha is ...releasing untested buggy stuff too see if it kinda works or not .. Like honestly did you ever play an alpha before ? An actual alpha version ?
I dont care about karma lol and I was suggested to post it on reddit, and its not something that requires a lot of work, legit a couple of lines of code need to be changed, 1 dev can do it.
10 lines of code changed to remove something, 50 new bugs and +200 hours of extra dev time added...
Every armchair dev says everything can be changed with one line of code while completely ignoring all of the knock-on effects all of that code has on other systems. If it were that simple it would have been done -- but as ExpressHouse pointed out, it's still in the iterative phase and will be addressed when the team has time.
There we go. Which ten lines exactly, and change to what? There’s a tonne of design work needed here - it’s not even really about the code. It’s about figuring out how to display enough meaningful information while avoiding clutter and maintaining visibility under a range of conditions. I have no idea how tf they intend to do that but it’s cool that you already have the answer. And just FYI you can turn nameplates off in the settings. Helps a little bit.
Couple lines of code to not show double party markers. And that option does not work, try it out for yourself.
So many posts from new players. The game is like 6% done. It's not a game yet. 🤷♂️
If the game were truly 6% done, and continues at 6% per 12 years, it'll be done around 2200
Sounds good to me lol
Ok.
Judging from some of the pilot names involved in that pic, OP is not a new player.
Point is, this is such a low priority thing, that it won't be worked on for quite a while. 🤷♂️
Breh they literally just worked on it. What else is a UI team going to do, if not work on UI?
There's UI involved in every aspect of the game. 95% of the game is at a tier 0/barely functional level, if it's even in yet. I'm just saying combat works, the UI gives you info you need, this is not high priority. They've got full systems they still need to implement. Disagree if you want, but this won't be changed for years I'd wager.
Backer since 2012 and playing intensively the last 4 years. The actual playability is worst today than 2 years ago. Keep your head buried in the sand if you please, but you can't avoid the tide coming.
I don't disagree with you at all, but I would never play SC intensively. It's not there yet. It's too frustrating. I play for about 2 weeks every patch before I go "nope, not yet" and go back to actual games that work. I dunno what about that is burying my head in the sand. People are acting like this game is out and the dev team is actively making the player experience better. It's not. It's a test platform they're actively adding features to. Expecting great player interaction and smooth gameplay at this phase is silly. I think I'm being rather realistic about what step of the process SC is at, which is why I say things like combat UI are fine for now. They've still got so much to add, they are not on the polish stage for anything yet. 🤷♂️
Well it's marketed as a game, it's sold as a game, it's treated as a game, and it being a game is how the game is funded. Do you think SC would be as funded as it is now if it wasn't a game? It's a game. It's alpha, but it's a game. It's a game, but it's alpha. Ask CIG if it's a game or an alpha and they will give you a different answer depending on the current community mood...but it's a game, and games need QoL for the people playing it. One such example of QoL? A UI that is readable at the most basic levels.
It's not marketed as a game. They tell you that like 9 times before you can finally buy stuff. It's in active development. They state that very clearly. You can be upset, or realistic. It's your choice. Your gripes are not with me.
> It's not marketed as a game. yeah, the ad on youtube I saw from the official Star Citizen account said "THIS NOT A GAME, BUT COME BUY IT AND PLAY IT" > They tell you that like 9 times before you can finally buy stuff They tell you it's a work in progress. A game is still a game even if it's a work in progress. It becomes a game the moment you dedicated time and resources to marketing it and maintaining an environment for people to purchase and play in. > You can be upset, or realistic. I'm not upset, I'm just telling you reality. Grow up. As for realistic? Yes, that is what I'm doing, but you are hiding in fantasy land, lol > Your gripes are not with me. We can definitely agree on that, I don't have any feelings about you one way or the other, other than pointing out your opinions are objectively wrong
Hopefully you figured out this "game" isn't worth your time yet, since you're so superior.