Hello Illyrians!

http://www.illyriad.co.uk/blog/index.php/2012/06/preview-illyriad-uiv3/" rel="nofollow - http://www.illyriad.co.uk/blog/index.php/2012/06/preview-illyriad-uiv3/

GM Luna

The radial menus are still there, as is in game now. So yes you could still navigate that way.

Luna

Other than that, I'm very happy about this.

I was curious if there is a friend limit?

Also I wonder if there will be added a delete button on the opened mail window instead of only being able to delete from menu screen list?

I want pink cows!

Looking good though, I like the part where the chat boxes will remember where you put them.  I probably spend 2-3 minutes arranging them to my satisfaction every time I open Illy or refresh the page.

Also, will the search box allow for searching through the faction page's text as well as alliance text and profile text?  <---(If so, then AWESOME!!!!)

Thanks for clearing this up!  (^_^)

I have only a suggestion, keep in mind smartphones and tables when you think about UI!

Keep up the good work

Luna

Will this new UI finally allow for Factions to be introduced?  That was the promise of the current UI from a year ago.

How is the "Friends List" different from Alliance Chat?

How is this different from what Facebook does?

When will more game content be released instead of redesigning the artwork and packaging?

All players in your alliance might be your friends, but all your friends need not be in your alliance. It is going to be quite useful for confederate alliances, it is going to be game changing. 

I'm looking forward to the player run chat channels too. We few dozen ex college mates are going to form a secret spy club! (just kidding)

I'd say the biggest difference from facebook is that, the people you avoided like plague in highschool will not come looking for you :P

If really or apparently nothing goes I try the old "clear cache" approach, and an Illy city map reloaded from scratch will take the better part of an hour to load with what my ISP considers as "reduced bandwidth", after the reload page orgies here burnt the 5 GB monthly at an acceptable speed.

  

@Cerex, initially there won't be a limit to the number of players you can add to your friends list.

Also, we added a delete button to the bottom of opened mails. Thanks for the suggestion/reminder. :)

@Sunstorm, searching at this time finds pages, not the content within the pages. 

@The_Dude, we had a small fix today that hopefully helps with some lag. Factions are still being worked on, separately from the UI at this time. Friends lists are for people that may or may not be in your alliance, so you can see if they are online. Then (once we have private chat) you could open a chat with them from this menu. 

@dunnoob, this new UI should be no more bandwidth heavy to use than the current UI. I don't think we would do an alternate/text only UI along side this one, no. We try to only maintain one version of the game that is usable in as many places as possible so that we aren't repeating any work for different versions. 

To all, as a general note, things such as these UI updates do not mean that other features (factions, water sov, etc) are not being worked on diligently. Different people on different parts of the team work on different (let's see how many times I can say different) projects all at the same time. More news about those features will come in time, as we have more concrete info to share about them. Thanks for hanging in there.

Luna

I very very much sympathize with your situation and the sentiment I've heard from players about these sorts of things. I really do. The problem is not a lack of understanding of how important these things are to our players, or a lack of priority. To put it really simply it is more of an "hours in the day" and "number of hands on keyboards doing the programming" type of thing. Illy still has a very small dev team, despite how much the game has grown. We've got lots of really big projects in the works behind the scenes, some of which we haven't talked about much or at all. 

We have full intentions of delivering on the things that we know you all feel you are waiting for, and I have no doubt that the team can pull it off. We just have to make sure we get it right, and sometimes these things take more time than any of us would prefer. 

Again, I (and the rest of the dev team) understand your frustrations and respect them. All we can do is beg patience and thank you so much for those who do hang in there with us. We appreciate you all, truly.

Luna

From a playing perspective, while I personally won't be getting excited about new artwork content and prettifying, nor anything that makes accessing information more difficult, I understand that this is vital to make the game look attractive to prospective new players who see screenshots in the game blogs and magazines. Illyriad is competing in an aggressive market.

Besides, Illy is a game for fast paced people. 

...I got that wrong somewhere didn't I? 

Yep. You can un-dock them, same as you can now. 

Luna

 My pet peeve, gone...

If I understood it correctly it is not limited to players in the same alliance, and at the start it will only show who's online (playing or afk).  I'd love a golden monkey club for issues relevant in Djebeli/Elijal, but when I'm on or offline is nobody's business outside of my alliance.

nice! love it! 

and as far as knowing when im on and off, that is kinda scary, but then it makes sure you are friends...with well... friends 

@Dev team, sometimes we forget that a lot of things talked about or "promised" was probably suggested by the players and are very game changing and needs to be worked in properly.

A new UI can be helpful in making those changes. 

I say get the 'little' changes out of the way and move on to the heavy stuff.

illy started on a great foundation of open world sandbox rts with some great key elements, and I see nothing wrong with improving the foundation before adding a second story or third in this case lol

keep it up! 

I can see it now:

"Hi welcome to illy! /me snuggles:you ... click this link ... add me."

idk, in all the mmo's i played...you couldn't see if the friend was online, only if they was also in your guild/alliance/clan 

and with the private chat, don't have it be a pop up, or a message to the player, have it be a room we create then we have to send a message with the link to the room or something along those lines

this game has a way big emphasis on not doing nice things with diplo's and knowing people's on/offline status at any given moment is a big thing, as people are pointing out

another thing this really brings up is the whole chat system and notifications, i say combine and let me have the option to display what i want in the tabs...

like have the tabs be a default setup, then have a button on each tab that opens a window with checklist on what i want displayed on that tab, whether it be a...

Notification (and be specific on which ones; Magic, Diplo, trade)

Player message received (mail notification display)

Whisper's (a friend or person who is only talking to you) 

Alliance chat 

Global chat

Have a check to make it so i know which tab i picked will talk to global or alliance

or something like that...maybe?

Whoop! there it is!

Good question. At this time it will be such that you appear online to all friends. 

Luna

And if the new chat system is based on an empty friends list... let's talk about water sov.

How about sitters? Can they see your friends list and does the account appear online to the friends when somebody is sitting? Technically, the real friend is not online, but the account is.

i just wanted a friend list to message people quickly and send things and to be able to mass mail my friends, i really don't know if we should do the whole "see if im online or not thing", but i guess i will have to wait and see how it works...

like i said before, just make sure real friends are on that list or....could have acquaintance list and friends list...

and a great Q by badmuts

Luna

 When sending a caravan to another town it says "You has dispatched caravans to" which is strange grammar.

so im going to fall back on my theory of indicating which player is sending vans

The values do not necessarily match the player number, I have lots of fun with updating the alliance info (or even the name) for player  http://elgea.illyriad.co.uk/#/Player/Profile/395" rel="nofollow - 395  in my profile.  The variant [@ps=dunnoob|121554|SKR|484|3|0] ... is expanded into dunnoob's ... for everybody, or your ... for player 121554.  The script expanding these constructs could automatically replace has by have as a special case, but frankly I hope the devs don't add minor grammar kludges before they run out of serious bugs or missing trade v2 features starting with water sov.   

Kludges?

I know the reason for this saying "has", and it still bugs me. While it is minor, I thought perhaps it could be added to the UI update. /me shrugs.

I do not know what Kludges is. Ahem.

As I said, I thought it could be added to the next UI update. Which was why I mentioned it in here and not a separate thread. How they edit it, if they do, I leave for the devs to decide.

Thanks to the both of you. I've learned a new word that I'll likely forget the meaning of later. lol

Are you wanting an option to turn off all system mails? Only certain system mails? What is it about system mail that you are finding troublesome? 

And with the "5 separate times" I assume you mean not having the ability to send mail to more than one player at once, correct? 

Luna

It would be really nice to be able to "opt out" of certain types of system notifications.  The ones that come to mind most are reports of harvesting caravans (caravans begin harvesting, caravans returning) as well as quest mails.  Would be nice to be able to CHOOSE whether to receive these mails as well as notifications of trade acceptances and caravan arrivals or deliveries.

If these mails could be made optional, I have to believe it would save a bit of server space and would DEFINITELY free up my inbox.

Being able to sort mail into folders would also be wonderful -- for example, if I send out a mail asking everyone for input on X and it appears over a period of 3 days to a week, I then have to sort through that amount of saved mail in order to find all the responses.  Would be much nicer if I could stick them into a folder.  Even if there were just one folder for "important mail" as opposed to "all that other stuff" it would be nice.

I try to keep a clean mailbox; I normally only save player mail and battle reports, but even so there can get to be quite a lot of them after a while.

Thanks for asking, hope I haven't overwhelmed you.  I think there are several threads in the suggestions portion of the forum about this as well.

This is something that is already in on the test server. :)

Luna

This could be a pop-out window...

My beef is that if I am selling multiple things at a time,  I have to go for the marketplace, then trade movements, and back to the market place.  

Apparently all system mails are automatically deleted after some time.  Generally that's fine, but an option to keep (archive) interesting mails, e.g., diplomatic excursions to the Rift or the Misted Lands, would be nice.  Forward to self is a clumsy workaround for a missing archive.   

Forward is also a clumsy emulation of BCC (blind carbon copy) in lieu of the missing CC feature.   Mail from A to B forwarded to player C often requires manual annotations for C to see that the original mail was from A to B.  

Apparently all mails have a unique ID (number), and in petitions I trust that you can still see a mail identified by its number even after it was manually or automatically deleted.  If that's the case you could replace the existing forward  feature by a new attachment feature (of the original mail), where the forwarder has no chance to modify the content.  

Interrupts should still result in system messages:  Sometimes I want to know how much they got before I bumped them.  The "interrupted at" notification does not say who interrupted me, IFF I'd know that I would not need the system message.  The "begin returning" system messages are pointless, let those caravans return and bring whatever they harvested without system message; only their arrival at home could be milldly interesting (in a notification, not in a system message.)

LadyLuvs wrote: The mail is overwhelming when sieging.

Indeed, one system message for the first bombardment telling me where I find the siege page, and later hourly reports when raze or capture are possible, would be good enough.

LadyLuvs wrote: Also as an Alliance Leader I would like to know when one of my players is hit by Diplos or Armies.

IBTD, an alliance leader is no ersatz-sitter.

Why is the mail screen two display heights tall with buttons at the top and bottom?  Put all buttons together at the top OR make the screen one display height tall.

@salarius, in chrome you can duplicate the open browser tab, and use the new tab to check something needed in the old tab.  Firefox has an extension doing almost the same.  There are also favlets (a.k.a. bookmarklets) doing this, but the forum here won't let me post javascript:void(window.open(location)) as a clickable link.

dunnoob wrote: Rill wrote: yes, saving drafts would be awesome! Send the draft to yourself, then you can forward + edit it from sent mail as some kind of draft or template.    @salarius, in chrome you can duplicate the open browser tab, and use the new tab to check something needed in the old tab.  Firefox has an extension doing almost the same.  There are also favlets (a.k.a. bookmarklets) doing this, but the forum here won't let me post javascript:void(window.open(location)) as a clickable link.

Change It Back Please!