UI Design Help?

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Comments

  • daid said:

    Any rules that you'd like followed?

    Uh.... no pink unicorns on the landing page?
    Pull request is pending.

    image

    It's a start :)
  • You guys are making an incredible job !

    We played this evening and realized there was a new logo. Great job ! It looks amazing on our desktops.

    The Hype train is on !

    I would also be glad to help on the IU and graphic design assets of the game. If I may in anyway.

    I'm also a professional in design. I could help with game icons or anything needed !
    Keep the great work !
  • edited March 2016
    I got a windows test version up at:
    http://software.ultimaker.com/EmptyEpsilon/testing/EmptyEpsilon-2016.03.24-win32.zip

    This includes parts of the new design. The artwork needs work, as you will notice. But it gives everyone a better base to work from I think. This also includes the new skybox code.

    (The android version failed to build. Should be an easy fix, but takes a loooong time to build)
  • I know that I'm probably dreaming, but is there any possibility of converting the UI to HTML/CSS at some point?

    I'd love to actually get more hands on with my UI help.

    Alternately, I'd probably be willing to try and learn how it's all being coded right now and play around with it more.
  • HTML and CSS? No. Reasons. Browser differences, performance, and (very important) javascript is an abomination of a language.

    The basic code isn't that hard to understand, but also limited in functionality. Especially on layout options. So I'm thinking about what I should add to improve that.
  • Fair enough :)

    I guess my desire is less to be able to code in HTML and CSS, and more to be able to render certain elements more dynamically, for instance, the thin white lines on the UI elements, ideally those would always be 1px in size, regardless of scaling or screen size, in CSS I would accomplish this by declaring the borders to be 1px and then just changing the size of the element and the text inside of it to scale.

    If the thin lines prove to be too much of an issue, I could maybe try and come up with a modified design language that doesn't rely on something like that.

    Ultimately, I think I need to have a better grasp of what's possible with the UI rendering as it currently stands.
  • Well, there are things that you could do with web / javascript. Anything that you can acces with the API is something you could use for additional screens.

    Especially if we have more complex features, this could be a thing (I'm still dreaming of a multi screen setup per station!)
  • Which Android version will work with this test version, if any? Is the UI the only change?
  • No android version will work with that test version. The UI is the only major change, next to a few changes in the hardware controller (DMX512) code to provide more options.
  • image
    I've made the left/right selector controls work so that you can click on them to show and select all options.

    However:
    image
    The frequency selection goes beyond the screen height.
  • Would it really hurt gameplay that much to just have fewer frequency options?
  • How about nesting them in a scroll box like the Scenarios?
  • I've yet to give Engineering a pass, but I'll keep this in mind when I'm conceptualizing.
  • I did a pass on the station icons, mostly because I felt that the helm and engineering icons weren't quite fitting with the others, so I revamped those two and I think they fit better with the overall design scheme now. Thoughts?

    image
  • edited March 2016
    @Interesting John new icons look good to me.

    Are we going to see icons for Tactical, Operations, Engineering+, Single Pilot, etc?
  • I've yet to give Engineering a pass, but I'll keep this in mind when I'm conceptualizing.

    yes please do it

    the icons are nice but keep it simple not overedit it

  • kwadroke said:

    @Interesting John new icons look good to me.

    Are we going to see icons for Tactical, Operations, Engineering+, Single Pilot, etc?

    I'm not super-familiar with all of the "combo" stations yet, but yes, I definitely plan to tackle those too.

    (I'm looking forward to turning these into embroidered shoulder patches for my crew :P )
  • Would it really hurt gameplay that much to just have fewer frequency options?

    Good point. Don't think it will hurt much.

    @Interesting John I think the helms is the biggest change I see. It's an improvement. But it does look a bit more "fancy" then the rest now. Maybe it only needs 1 "wing" at the top instead of 2?
  • daid said:

    Would it really hurt gameplay that much to just have fewer frequency options?

    Good point. Don't think it will hurt much.

    @Interesting John I think the helms is the biggest change I see. It's an improvement. But it does look a bit more "fancy" then the rest now. Maybe it only needs 1 "wing" at the top instead of 2?
    I was actually thinking that myself, so I'll probably give that a shot and see how it looks.
  • edited March 2016
    I'm honestly not sure if I like it better or not.

    image
  • I do like all the frequency options,, not fond of a list, I prefer being able to scroll through the list.
  • Interesting John, next pass on Science, could you see if you could make it more clear what frequency is the ship's weakness? Every new person I put on science has a hard time discerning if the bar height indicates resistance of their shields or effectiveness of your ship's beam weapons.
  • That I can agree on a couple new people couldn't discern well at first, after a while it was understandable.
    John Bono said:

    Interesting John, next pass on Science, could you see if you could make it more clear what frequency is the ship's weakness? Every new person I put on science has a hard time discerning if the bar height indicates resistance of their shields or effectiveness of your ship's beam weapons.

  • John Bono said:

    Interesting John, next pass on Science, could you see if you could make it more clear what frequency is the ship's weakness? Every new person I put on science has a hard time discerning if the bar height indicates resistance of their shields or effectiveness of your ship's beam weapons.

    So noted.
  • I wanted to add a small arrow to the currently active frequency.
    Bit like this:
    image
  • I've been thinking more about the strokes in the design, I think I'm going to try upping them from 1px to 2px and seeing if that helps with the scaling issues.

    Is there a specific resolution at which the UI elements start scaling down?
  • Ok, here's yet another pass on Helm, I bumped up the lines from 1px to 2px as I suggested, and I actually like the result, surprisingly.

    I also added some white points to each end of the buttons for a little flavor. I'm still wrestling with the button states. @daid do you have a list of the various states that are currently used? Disabled, Usable, Active, etc?

    Now that I'm more familiar with github, I'll probably start committing some UI elements once I'm happy with how they look.

    image
  • The buttons can be whatever status you want them to be ;-)

    Right now they have:
    * Disabled
    * Normal
    * Hover (mouse over it)
    * Focused (latest clicked)
    * Active (For toggle buttons and lists)

    Still have a few "problems", like what to do on an active button while hovering over it?
  • Here's an updated spread of icons, I've included a first pass at Operations, Engineering+ and Tactical, they're mostly a combination of the existing stations that they combine (which makes sense :P)

    I also added one for Captain, not sure it'll really be needed, but now there is one, just in case.

    image
  • I just ran through the tutorial with a few of my updated graphics, and I'm loving what I'm seeing (I've also discovered some pretty awesome aspects of the game that I was previously unaware of).

    I really want to tackle the button states pretty soon here, because I'm sure I can come up with a decent solution.
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