06NOV18 - New User Interface (UIv4) Alpha Test

Some feedback on the new UI.

Edited by Ruarc - 17 Nov 2018 at 18:52

Hi Folks,

Starry wrote: Can you leave an option for those who want to continue using the old UI, please?

Initial comments:


-There are obviously a lot of submenus in overview and city map that don't exist yet. Search, friends, mail, etc. also seem to not work yet. The more I look, tons of menus don't work or exist yet so I won't comment more on those. I do hope every menu we currently have gets shoved in somewhere--over the years a lot of handy things have been added.

-Random center drift by zooming out and in again is weird/bad.

-Hard to Tell NAP/confed/etc. I believe the colors are messed up. I see my town green-ish, confed green, some NAPs green but some are yellow for some reason? My alliance towns are now.. pink? FYI, my color vision is normal. Colors need to be distinct and consistent.

-Please add the standard options in a reachable place to remove/add terrain/encampments/towns etc. The new map is pretty but even the normal simple map is too crowded for many purposes so it is handy to turn things off when you don't want them.

-Because menus can now be left all over the screen, super useful would be a button in the upper corner to shrink/close all menus. This way if you want to see the whole screen you could do so without having to close/shrink 3 different menus. We are used to being able to go to map with 1 button press so this would be similar. Also, is there any reason you can't open a city view and a trade view at once? In the current UI there is no room, but in the new UI there is clearly room if you have a big monitor. It would be also nice if we could resize the non-chat menus, though the multiple windows open at once would be handy even without that.

-As others have said, it is slow/kind of hard to switch between cities right now.

-When the city view window pops up, it is a bit jarring visually and retro looking even though it is what we are used to seeing. The other menus which currently exist (such as the training menu) meld reasonably well with the new art/UI. The city view though really just looks like older art in a square in a bigger square in an even bigger square of a different style. For some reason you suddenly expect to be able to move around the city view or zoom in etc. I don't really have a suggestion here, just a comment that it is aesthetically jarring.

-Overall, it looks pretty. The animation when you are automatically sweeping along the map to a location is gorgeous. And the long npc arrows are nice. Once it is finalized I think it will take awhile to get used to and many people will complain because it is different, but I bet most people will like it when they get used to it.

I do not agree with "wait until it is done to provide feedback" as the whole point of an alpha is to get reactions and comments from us, the players.

For the good:
Full size screen is clearly awesome. The speed of load and scroll is great. Stained glass UI elements are cool and interesting. Using popups for all menus makes sense considering the UI is full screen.

Now the comments. I wont mention obvious things that are missing like screens & choices and focus instead on what is currently implemented.

1) Left click on map opening an "action menu" popup is annoying. I just want to move the map around and randomly clicking on it is habit since it is the entire screen. Windows UI paradigm is to open that menu with a right click instead and left click is just distracting.

2) The "action menu" showing the terrain type is redundant to the upper right "current square" information area so it can be removed without losing anything. I would just keep it as the right click action menu to send diplo, troop, etc.

3) The "action menu" should remove "send resources" unless it is on something it is possible to send resources to. Same applies to other relevant actions.

4) With the map being so large and easily scrolled, a "center in map" choice is not useful enough to dedicate an entry in the menu.

5) When you hover over a sov square it gives information about it in the "map info" area, specifically the city name. However when you hover over the city itself, the info area does not show the city name.

6) Moving units and camps are not clickable. Even if you dont have any details about them my impulse is to click them and the fact I cannot feels annoying.






Edited by Whakomatic - 11 Nov 2018 at 19:11