Suggestion megathread to improve the UI in STF

[Klokinator]

Hey devs, this is my thread I was going to post in the Discord but decided to move to a forum post.

 The crux of ship combat's annoyingness comes from an issue this game has everywhere, which is that the UI is laggy and unresponsive
. What I mean by that is that this is a menu-based game
, you're constantly flitting around through menus
, but everything has a slow fadein and fade out
.
Buttons don't light up when you hover over them
. Ex: looking at ship combat's bottom bar...

There are three options: Move Orders, Weapons, and Talents. Despite this, on the left, there is a second box for previewing your choices for Move Orders and talents, yet nothing for weapons. It's inconsistent and needs a change. I played Halcyon 6 last year. It's a terrible game that's wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle, but it has a fantastic UI and tutorial, something Frontiers can learn from. Unfortunately, I refunded it, so I can't post images of it. Devs, if you haven't played Halcyon 6, give your competition a try and learn what you can from them.

Let's start with easily fixable things.



Why does escape and advance get its own tab? Change this. Put escape and advance on the left side, replacing Move and Talent. This eliminates an entire tab.

Next, create a two-tiered tab system for weapons and talents, and shrink their icons by about 25%. Weapons on top, Talents below. The player should be able to see all their options immediately without flipping through tabs.

This is basically my proposal.



You should note that on the right side you can also include up and down arrows to scroll through extra talents and weapons that scroll offscreen.

A secondary issue that is less important but still noteworthy:





The UI here has a lot of fancy stuff that does look good but also increases player confusion regarding what is a button or not. For example, while making this post, I realized I hadn't even noticed the info, log, and options buttons at the bottom right. They don't stand out at all. You should probably cut down the complexity in that area as well.

Sidenote: ESC doesn't bring up a game options menu allowing me to exit the game, I had to alt-tab out. That should be fixed.

For now, I'm only tackling ship combat. The rest of the game is a lot more complex to fix, though I'll probably tackle on-foot combat next.

Thanks for reading.

[daveal]

I do agree that some improvements could be made here, but I think there are good reasons for most of the UI design decisions here.

Is H6 available on tablets? ST:F is a primarily PC game but also available on tablets. This is a strong constraint on how small you can make buttons and how much UI you can put on the screen at once.

I think it's important to have the move order and talent box on the left because that is a summary of what you are going to do. I want to double check by looking here before submitting my orders. Later in the game, you may have 15-20 talents to choose from, so we can't reduce the space for that very much.

Personally, I would like to have the ship combat talent icons with more consistent colors and sorting, so I can see all my attack talents, all my move talents, etc more easily. the current icons are very colorful but they require memorization. I feel the crew combat icons are much better in this area.

It's true that you can't use the escape key to get out of combat, but that's because the game can't save right there.  Everywhere else (except crew combat :-)) the escape key does exactly what you expect.

[Klokinator]

You might have a point if the game didn't already use teeny-tiny buttons. Good UI design is good across most platforms.





These three buttons are already tiny. If tablet players can tap these, they can tap my button size suggestions as well.

More importantly, my suggestion puts every piece of information onscreen at once. No needless clicking around. Yes, you can have buttons that scroll off, but they will be just as easy to scroll down to as they are now. Easier, even, since you don't have to navigate tabs.

[fallen]

Thanks for the feedback! We have been holding off on a large package of changes to the UI on that screen because the introduction of carriers/fighters is going to change the types of orders you can give. We decided not to tear it up until we roll out the next set of major revisions.

[MintDragon]

and thanks for using the forum, the discord scrolls up and goes away SO quickly... this is the best way to share ideas for improvements, bugs etc..

:-)