Oh thanks guys, Nadim, for such a well written, informative overview of the UI design process and thinking behind the changes! And hey!
Seems like you must have to very carefully argue design choices (and deal with a lot of nit-picking over every little change from end users
). And you had a whole lot of legacy UI and features to deal with here, for sure, a tough task!
Obviously (in retrospect) it would have been great to have had
this blog post at the time of the first (1.3.3.1) unstable, but obviously you will have been working very hard finishing up implementation and bug fixes.
Some of the things it makes clear (from my reading):
â–º New UI was designed with growth into new markets very much in mind. Particularly supporting console players (and switch, etc).
â–º That means a universal design for all resolutions and platforms, with more icons in place of button text (I like a lot) and language localisations more securely accommodated.
â–º Dark themes were already ruled out: "
...we weren't going to have multiple variants of the UI (ie. dark themes, grey themes, old themes or anything in-between themes) ".
â–º "
The new UI is a first iteration." ... but it sounds like the overall style and layout isn't up for debate. More a process of ongoing refinements and untouched areas being converted over.
So that's the newly increased background transparency? It's a pretty subtle change; I don't feel that will address the main thrust of the issues raised in
the previous thread.
I guess one might be just about able to see if an enemy is sneaking up on you, while mid-screen pop-ups are open. But it doesn't look like it will decrease the apparent brightness noticeably.
I wonder if you devs haven't fully anticipated/appreciated the brightness issue due to your context: you're all in the same harshly/well lit, busy open plan office, during the day time. While us players are in cosily lit bedrooms, living rooms, etc, more often in the evening (where brightness is far more noticible, due to pupil dilation). And in quickly testing UI changes, you'll always be seeing full brightness game-world illumination, rarely night.
Anyway. With my initial feedback, I was also unsure if significant transparency of the inventory/tech-loader backdrops would be a good idea (without adding background blur, too); it looks like even that little extra transparency might make it more visually confusing, with high-contrast background details more visible. Sorry if this sounds contradictory.
I mean, obviously the old inventory was almost totally transparent... So maybe I'm talking rubbish on this one. And I've only got that one still to go on. But perhaps being *only just* able to make out background features is more visually confusing than fully seeing them (or being totally opaque).
I guess the bottom line is that the white is just too... white.
I think everyone will be relieved to go back to a softer looking mini-map. But of course this is still going to suffer from bright world backgrounds making white icons very hard to see. And players like to hang out on the salt flats a lot. I struggled a lot to get a dark, uncluttered background when making the above image (2 years back).
Also, would I be right in guessing that the new non-linear concentric ring scaling is purely stylistic? Or are the radar markers going to scale in line with that too? They were previously quite handy in correlating fairly closely with 100m intervals. (E.g. for easily seeing where enemies will come to life, at 200m.)
